A brilliant new resource for readers

BookFinder.com have launched their shopping search engine specifically for the UK market, www.justbooks.co.uk (currently in beta). I spent a while testing out the site today and, like the usual service offered by BookFinder, it shows promise of being an incredibly useful tool for readers who want live retail information. By increasing the number of European catalogues scanned, JustBooks dramatically improves the chance of the searcher finding a book to buy in the language, currency and location of their choice. I’ve added it to our list of resources you see on the right of the screen at fifthestate.co.uk.

It’s my personal view that we should celebrate the the birth of sites like JustBooks. They are not just good news for readers, they are mostly welcome news for our authors and the bookselling industry at large, encouraging a diversity, precision and breadth that, three years ago, looked endangered by the big guys.

Justbooks aren’t charging a mark up, either, so they look like they’ll be an extremely competitive way of finding out of print books, no matter how rare, as well as a good source of bibliographic information. (Though if you’re looking to compile a bibliography, The British Library’s catalogues search site is the daddy of information).

For the same reason that I’m the camp of those who enthusiastically welcome Google’s book search (with a few provisos I’ll go into another day), I love sites that keep author’s work available for as long as possible.

Of course it’s worth pointing out that most searches I did on JustBooks produced a far longer list of used books (which don’t pay dividends to authors) than new ones (which do). It’s one of the most interesting and serious challenges of this decade for publishers to develop ways to continue to distribute a healthy range of work in the current market conditions and also to encourage the long tail of the work that we have published in the past – thus ensuring a fair return for our authors.