book stores : Java Glossary

Introduction

The main advantages of online books are the wide selection, 24 hour service without leaving your home and the low warehouse and staff overhead for the vendor. The main disadvantages are you cannot browse the books and you have to wait for them to be delivered.

Internet Bookstores

List of online bookstores

Internet Sellers of Java Books
Vendor	Country	URL (Uniform Resource Locator)
Accept credit cards, cheque or money order.	Canada	aaronbooks.com
	USA	alibris.com
Originally started in Victoria BC Canada as group of four bookstores. Especially good for rare and used books. Now owned by Amazon. Form of payment varies by which associated bookseller actually has the book in stock. ABE (Advanced Book Exchange)	USA	AbeBooks.com
Mostly textbooks.	Norway	akademika.no
Accept only Visa, MasterCard, Amex.	Canada	amazon.ca
No PayPal Accept only Visa, MasterCard, Amex	USA	amazon.com
Accept PayPal, Visa, MasterCard, Amex, Capitel, JCB, bank transfer…	China	amazon.cn
No PayPal. Accept credit cards: Delta, Visa Electron, MasterCard, Eurocard and American Express credit cards. Debit cards: Visa, Delta, Visa Electron, MasterCard, Eurocard and American Express debit cards. UK-based Maestro and Solo cards. Pre-paid payment cards: Visa, MasterCard and American Express pre-paid cards.	UK	amazon.co.uk
	Germany	amazon.de
	France	amazon.fr
Accept PayPal, MasterCard, American Express, Discover, Visa, Diners Club, JCB. Ship internationally.	USA	barnesandnoble.com
	Indonesia	Belanja
	Norway	BokKilden
Very low cost.	USA	bookbyte.com
	USA	bookfinder.com
Very inexpensive, even cheaper with $5 discount card. Free shipping with large orders.	USA	booksamillion.com aka BAMM.com
Accept only Visa, MasterCard, Amex and sometimes Interac. No PayPal	Canada	chapters.indigo.ca
Rent university textbooks and sell university eBooks. Accept PayPal and probably others.	USA	chegg.com
read books online	USA	Google Books In the process of dying.
eBooks, magazines, movies android apps. Take Visa, MasterCard, Amex, Discover. Rudely refuse to divulge the ISBN (International Standard Book Number) . No PayPal.	USA	Google Play
Amazon in India	India	junglee.com No PayPal
high school and university eBooks. Accept American Express, MasterCard, Visa, and Discover Card. No PayPal. All credit cards used for purchases must be linked to a U.S. billing address as they do not currently sell books internationally.	USA	kno.com
ebooks for Kobo or Nook reader. Take PayPal.	USA	Kobo eBooks
Accept PayPal, American Express, Discover, JCB, Master Card and Visa.	USA	powells.com
O’Reilly’s online store. You pay a monthly fee for electronic access to the entire catalog.	USA	Safari
Cheap books, but shipping extra. Accept PayPal, Discover, Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Walmart credit card.	USA	walmart.com

Predation

Barnes & Noble bought out Fatbrain and Books.com and just discarded them. Chapters.ca and Indigo.ca merged to form Chapters.Indigo.ca. Amazon.com bought out borders.com and Abebooks. ChaptersGlobe, Bookpricer, Kingbooks, Itknowledge, BottomDollar and even MacMillan are gone.

Rankings

Futures

schema.org invented a scheme for tagging information on a website in a standard way. Powells uses it, but other bookstores have yet to follow suit. For example, to indicate that a book is in stock you embed:

<!-- InStock marker -->
<link itemprop="availability" href="http://schema.org/InStock" />

on your webpage. To indicate it is out of stock embed:

<!-- OutOfStock marker -->
<link itemprop="availability" href="http://schema.org/OutOfStock" />

You also should put:

<!-- meta header -->
<link rel="schema.dcterms" href="http://purl.org/dc/terms/">

in the meta header to formally indicate you are using the system. Without a system like this, screenscraping requires looking for dozens of everchanging clues, none of which are definitive.

None of these are visible to the user, but they are visible to a computer program screenscraping to analyse the page. There should be an instock and outofstock icon in the top right corner to make the stock status instantly clear to the end user. The icons might look like this:

If would that all bookstores would embed these markers and icons. Kudos to Powells for being the pioneer. Now NewEgg.ca and BestBuy.com, online sellers of electronics are also using it.

It would be nice if every bookstore offered a high-efficiency API (Application Programming Interface) to let affiliates know whether given books are instock, out-of-stock or not-carried. The affiliate would send in a \n-delimited numerically-sorted list of ISBNs (International Standard Book Numbers). The server would send back a laundry ticket — namely the url of where the results could be picked up in perhaps an hour. The server could then prepare the results at lowest priority so there is almost no overhead or slowing down of the website. The results would just be a series of letters, one per ISBN from the set of the letters ION (Instock OutOfStock NotCarried) to report the status. There would be no need to include the ISBNs. This would not only have low impact on the server, it would be invulnerable to DOS (Denial of Service attack) attacks.

A similar scheme using UPCs (Universal Product Codes) instead of ISBNs could handle DVDs (Digital Video Discs).