ResearchBuzz

Thanks to TeleRead for the pointer to AddAll’s new e-book search engine, available at http://ebooks.addall.com/. The pointer from the front page says that it’s “available for testing,” so perhaps it’s in beta, but it worked fine for me. It searches over 30 ebook sites to find stuff for you to read.

You can search for ebooks by author, title, or keyword/ISBN. I did a search for winter in the title field. After a short wait I got a list of 1370 books. They were presented in a table that showed title, author, price, site, format, and description. You can sort all of those fields except description, so if you’re looking for cheap reads it’s easy to sort results so the no-cost books come first (as a matter of fact, that’s the default sorting method!)

If you click on the title in the search result you’ll go straight to the site that has the book — on the front page of my search I found books from Smashwords, Feedbooks, Project Gutenberg, and Manybooks. As I moved further into the site and got money results, I found books from Powells, Sony eBooks, CyberRead, and Fictionwise.

Of course, 1370 books is a bit many, so I was glad at the bottom of my page of search results I also got an advanced search form that let me narrow my search down by book format (Kindle, HTML, PDF, etc) as well as exclude keywords. I narrowed down my search to PDF and Kindle titles that weren’t authored by Shakespeare and … still got 503 results. I tried.

While I can think of other ways I’d like to search for books, like genre, this is a nice start. How about some RSS feeds so I can keep up with digital releases from my favorite authors? There’s not enough Rex Stout available in e-book format….

Hey! It’s 2010! And what better way to spend 2010 than to look back all the way to 1995, when dinosaurs roamed the earth and Amazon was on the Internet with a scary-looking interface. Relive the nostalgia with Amazon’s new bestsellers archive, available at http://www.amazon.com/bestsellers/2009/books/.

Actually that link will take you to Amazon’s bestselling books for 2009. (Dan Brown was #1 in that category. I didn’t read any books on this list! I feel culturally stunted.) If you look at the top of the list you’ll see that there are dropdown menus that allow you to get other lists of bestsellers by year, month, and week. (You can also get bestsellers for the entire year.) The dropdown list goes back to 1995.

Nor is it limited to paper books. You can also get archived bestseller lists for Kindle books (going back to 2007), MP3 songs (also 2007), and “Movies & TV” (I don’t know why Amazon didn’t just call this DVDs, I guess leaving room for the other formats. It goes back to 1998 and even the first list of the 1998 list is all DVDs.) You can browse lists for music (back to 1998), video (this is VHS, and it goes back to 1998. What’s interesting is that there’s also a list for 2009 — and every item on the first page is used!), video games (back to 1999) and video on demand (back to 2006).

The listings as you might imagine look like Amazon listings, with the price, used availability, and information on customer reviews and discussions. I found the video listings particularly fascinating because it’s basically a bestseller list for used items, but all of the lists were interesting. If ever I needed evidence that I am completely out of touch with popular culture, it’s all right here…

WorldCat announced last week the availability of a basic API. The new API isn’t as fancy as the WorldCat Search API, but does provide information on authors, titles, ISBNs, and OCLC numbers. You’ll have to have a WorldCat account to use the API (it’s free) because you’ll need to have an API key (also free.) The API is limited to non-commercial use and 1,000 queries a day.

The instructions for using the API are at http://worldcat.org/devnet/wiki/BasicAPIDetails along with some instructions for how to use it. The API defaults to an ATOM format for its results though you can also specify RSS, and there are citation formats available as well. In other respects the Basic API is indeed basic. You have a q value for query (you request title, subject, author, etc, with the same q parameter), where you want to start the result (your search result will return no more than the first 100 records in any case) and the maximum number of records to return. So if you want to do a search for Seth Godin and you don’t mind the results in ATOM format, your search query would look like this:

http://www.worldcat.org/webservices/catalog/search/opensearch?q=Seth%20Godin&wskey=[key]

Note this returns results of books both in English and other languages (The Chinese version of “Small is the New Big” is Xiao jiu shi da.) I guess I had forgotten this, but the book listings available through OCLC make for very good review aggregations; the listing for Tribes links to over 450 reviews from three different sources.

In the course of doing this writeup I actually did several different queries, and I’m going to save a couple for my RSS reader: subject searches for econophysics and augmented reality. (Look at this Google Trends chart for the query “augmented reality”. Lots of interesting news!) Not only am I getting book listings this way, I’m also getting conference proceedings and dissertations. And THAT’S how I got an abridged version of Matt Scheinerman’s Exploring Augmented Reality thesis. Thanks Matt!