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Collectorz.com Book Collector 6
TucknDar:
By the way, I was thinking of a suggestion to Collectorz. Since they're more or less abandoning v5.x of BoC and MoC, it would be interesting challenging them with this: Sell these "dead" pieces of software at 50% or even better $10 with ONE YEAR LIMITED SUPPORT and see how sales compare to the current version, 6.x.
40hz:
Given the thousands of books that are released each year alone it means that the (I presume) relatively small user base of Book Collector 6 will never be able to keep up
-Carol Haynes (December 11, 2008, 02:22 PM)
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R.R. Bowker's Books In Print® tracks 200,000 new titles annually. There are something like 3+ million titles in their databases.
so users will be left with useless bar code readers
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May be less of a problem than anticipated. Many of these cataloging apps use the same barcode readers.
and a lot of typing.
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But only if they're using a proprietary or locked database format.
One of the biggest selling points for me about BookCAT was that it uses MS Access datafiles. And the tables are fully documented in the user manual. If the company ever goes under, or if I want to repurpose my data, I can get at everything.
(BTW: I would have preferred they used MySQL; but you can't have everything. ;D)
Darwin:
By the way, I was thinking of a suggestion to Collectorz. Since they're more or less abandoning v5.x of BoC and MoC, it would be interesting challenging them with this: Sell these "dead" pieces of software at 50% or even better $10 with ONE YEAR LIMITED SUPPORT and see how sales compare to the current version, 6.x.
-TucknDar (December 11, 2008, 02:40 PM)
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Good luck with that, Tuckndar ;D Alwin has been... "prickly" about any suggested re-direction of his business model. From what I have seen, always level-headed, but prickly... I don't think he is the slightest bit interested in user input WRT the direction Collectorz is taking. See the link Josh directed us to, above.
TucknDar:
Trust me, Darwin, I know. This was just a kind of thought experiment ;)
40hz:
They do this, actually. If I'm understanding it right, when a user searches ISBN through BoC, if it isn't found in Collectorz database it'll look for it in other sources. I found a book in the Norwegian national library this way. Also, when a user has searched this way (like I have), the result will be available in the database when the next user searches for the same ISBN. So, I suppose that's some user input that is used after all...
-TucknDar (December 11, 2008, 02:36 PM)
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Just out of curiosity - is there any good technical reasons why anybody would want to do it that way? What is the advantage to shoehorning all that data, and all those queries, through a keyhole. I'm not challenging their right to do it, since I'm not a customer, but I just don't get what the advantage would be.
If you're just writing webscripts for queries from individual users, it would be one thing. Amazon et al. might not like it, but it's doubtful they'd go after (or even notice) a lot of individual hits from different IP addresses. But if you're using your customer's queries to add to your own database, and all the hits come from one place, it starts to look a lot more like you're scraping content.
If Collectorz is worried that somebody like Amazon or Borders might come down on Collectorz for accessing their databases, doing it this way seems to have a lot more potential for legal action.
Just a thought. ;)
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