BigBookSearch, an excellent little tool I just found on Reddit is pretty limited and obviously Amazon-powered, but it works very well. As you can see above, it basically just retrieves your query results from everything Amazon’s got, including, to my delight, stuff from third-party sellers like used book stores. I found an edition of Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles I’ve been looking for for ages. Yeah, it doesn’t do much more than parrot results, but honestly do you really want to wade through all the junk Amazon displays every time you want to price-check a DVD? There’s like five screens of dynamically generated content! Use this thing instead.
Plus, can’t you see this thing working perfectly on your iPhone or G1 or whatever? Text is minimal, the interface is straightforward and touch-friendly, and it’s got all the assets it needs in the form of Amazon’s hi-res cover art. Could be awesome, although I’d like to see one that services multiple sites.
it’s fast, it’s clear, it’s light…
This is just a really basic front-end to AWS (Amazon Web Services). At most 15mins of work. It is not a search engine, at least beyond the one already provided by Amazon. The creator is being dishonest by trying to label it as such.
How about you go make it and post a link to it here within 15 mins then? Hell, I will give you an hour… if you can make it as fast and slick as that then fair enough. The site is damn fast, even with all this traffic it is getting… and for a v1 it is looking good.
// I am not a programmer
// I don’t read many books
// I just found your comment dismissive seeing as this could / is / will be very useful to lots of people. If it was such a basic idea then would someone not have already done it?