BBC: “Science has discovered a fifth moon circling the dwarf planet Pluto.”
A moon is defined as “a natural satellite of a planet”. If Pluto is no longer a planet, then its satellites are not moons. You don’t get to have it both ways, science.
Tag: link
Book Search Aggregators
This entry has been parked in draft for almost four years. It was going to be part of a bookseller debriefing series that I was going to write. I’ve updated it a bit.
Here are some book search aggregators that I used when I was a bookseller. These sites bring book search results from many sources in together.
BookFinder was typically my first stop when shopping for a book or getting a sense for the market price of a title. Though the site was acquired by Amazon (first acquired by ABEBooks, who was then acquired by Amazon) and its founder has left, they still operate under the same model.
I favor BookFinder over Addall and vialibri, though there’s a lot of overlap among the sites that each one searches. BookFinder has some standout features. It include shipping costs in its results. It also filters some clutter by attempting to organize identical listings together when a bookseller has posted the same book on multiple sites.
Google Product Search usually returns fewer results than BookFinder, Addall, or viaLibri. It’s useful though because there’s less overlap between the sellers who list there and those who list on BookFinder. If an obscure title doesn’t turn up on BookFinder, Google Product Search is the next place to look.
More recently, I’ve gotten a lot of use out of Google Product Search’s local results feature. Books Inc., a Bay Area indy book chain, puts their inventory on Google Product Search. When I’m looking for a new book, I check Google Product Search to see whether it’s in stock at either the location near my office or near my home. Google Shopper, the iPhone app frontend for Google Product Search, almost serves as a Books Inc app for me.
WorldCat returns books from most of the US’s public library systems’ catalogs. As a bookseller, I used it to get a sense of how common a book is. These days, I use it to see how long the hold queues are for a given book at the different local library systems, to help me decide where to place a hold.