my mind on books

These are a couple of “cool tools” I have installed in my browser:

Book Burro – a Firefox extension that will show prices at the major online bookstores as well as some library availability (through WorldCat). When I’m browsing at Amazon, for example, I can click on the Book Burro panel to see if there’s a lower price elsewhere.

The LibraryLookup bookmarklet sits up on my bookmark toolbar. I can click it anytime I’m at a book page on Amazon to see whether my local library has it (since that library doesn’t show up on WorldCat).

This seems like a good context to say something about the Amazon links on this site. Amazon links are provided mainly for informational purposes; however I do have an “affiliate account,” so I receive a small referral fee for books purchased by clicking through the links. There is no extra charge to the customer for purchasing through this or other affiliate sites. (To anybody who has done that – thanks for the support!)

The Google Custom Search Engine in the sidebar will now automatically search all the sites linked to from this site, which should make it a useful tool for finding book information and resources for “mind topics.” Once I added that setting I was happy with the results and it should keep getting better as more links are added.

I’ve been experimenting with a Google Custom Search Engine and have just added it to the sidebar (below the pale box that is the original site search box). Currently the Custom Search Engine searches LibraryThing, worldcat, and a few other sites. I took out Amazon because it was dominating the results too much. Also for some reason I couldn’t get results from Google Book Search to show up. More sites will be added and some further tweaking will occur whenever I figure it out. Comments and suggestions are always welcome!

[At some point the search bar wasn’t behaving well in the sidebar so I removed it, but the Custom Search Engine is available here.]

With the recent addition of ‘analog’ records to Google Book Search (discussed in my last post), the Advanced Book Search can be used as a rough way to find new books on your favorite topic, although the lack of any subject search limits its functionality.

Searching by publication date between 2007 and 2008 for books with ‘consciousness’ in the title, for example, returned 99 titles (results will vary). If the title search doesn’t give the right focus, a broader search can be performed for words or phrases in the title plus description, as in this example.

Google recently announced that Google Book Search has added “records for millions of other books that still just exist in the analog world,” a development that makes it a much more comprehensive book search site. Alongside the scanned books and those with limited previews there are now records for books that have not yet been digitized.

Here is an example of the kind of information Google has made available for ‘Metaphors We Live By,’ an influential 1980 cognitive science book by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. A search on the exact title phrase brings up over 700 book results, showing other books that discuss or cite ‘Metaphors We Live By.’ The book page has reviews, references from web pages, references from books, references from scholarly work, description from the book cover, other editions, links to buy the book or to find it in a library.

For comparison, here is the Amazon page for the same book; among the features are the ability to “look inside the book” at about 10 pages, including the table of contents. Amazon also displays 1599 books that cite “Metaphors We Live By” (with some duplicates); and, in the section “Customers who bought this item also bought” there is a link to “Explore similar items,” which seems to do a good job of pulling out related works.

LibraryThing is another good source of book information; its page for Lakoff & Johnson includes a tag cloud, recommendations (another good source of related items), reviews, member ratings, links to Wikipedia, plus a separate “book information” page that has the traditional card catalog data – LC and Dewey call numbers, subject headings, isbns.

Until the ultimate mashup appears, I’ll want to look at all three sites.