Find the best book buyback prices with BookScouter.com

A few weeks ago I posted about a quick service I put together that compared textbook buyback prices from a few of the top websites.  I’ve been working on expanding that the past few weeks, and am now unveiling a site dedicated to it.

BookScouter.com is the most comprehensive comparison site for quickly searching for textbook sale prices.   It currently scrapes prices from 21 other sites – which is all of them that I could find.  The website is written in PHP using a custom framework that I’ve developed and use exclusively now.   I found an excellent website called opensourcetemplates.org that has website templates available for free.  Their ‘Nautilius’ theme is the one I chose for this site.

The backend of the site is written in Perl.  It uses a pretty straightforward LWP to fetch the page, and some regular expressions to pull the price from the pages it obtains.  Each site was custom coded, but I got it down to a pretty re-usable script where I just customize a few of the things, like the input variable name for the ISBN and the regex that contains the price.    A few of the sites were more complicated than the others and required fetching a couple pages to obtain a session ID.

I’m pretty happy with the end result.   Please try to look up a few books and see if you have anything of value sitting around.   No registration or any personal information is ever required and it is completely free to use.

2 thoughts on “Find the best book buyback prices with BookScouter.com”

  1. Nice work! I have been looking for a site that would do a buyback comparison Bookscouter.com works great!

    Thank you,
    Joe

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