I’m very happy to announce the availability of a simple beta version of the BookScouter Mobile Application. It is available now at http://bookscouter.com. This initial release is a very simple price lookup system with minimal formatting and ‘fancy stuff’ to make it perform well on a mobile device. Please give it a try as you are out and about, and leave feedback in the comments below, or via the contact form. I have been working for the past couple months on rewriting much of the code for the site, and the new mobile application is the first part that will be running on the new code. The new code base will enable development of some new features that I have been planning but were difficult to implement previously. In addition, the new code should perform faster and reduce some of the server load that has been stretching some limits this buyback season.

In the next week or two I’ll also be redoing the main website to be based on this new code. It won’t have many visible changes initially, but I’m excited to get it out there as well.

I’ve noticed that a common complaint is that some people have shipped new books to a buyer only to have them graded as used. I believe that some of this is due to people packing books poorly and having them damaged in transit. Can anybody share some hints for properly packing books for shipment? I’ve pointed people to this link on ebay before, but it seems like overkill. I’m hoping to compile some simple, practical steps that people can use to ensure that their books aren’t damaged in transit.

I imagine their might be some different things to consider when mailing individual books versus sending a box of books at a time.

Please post comments here, or email me your tips. I’m hoping to add a new page or two to the site with your input.

I should have taken a hint when I noticed that I wasn’t getting some other emails, but something was broken on the server that prevented me from receiving emails generated from the site.
That has been fixed now, but I don’t have any way of retrieving those messages that have been submitted during the past month or so. My apologies to anybody whose message was lost.

Several people have notified me that Barnes and Noble’s pricing was not showing up on the site. It looks like they had changed the design of the site which broke the program that checked on their prices.
That has been corrected now, and Barnes and Noble’s pricing should be showing up correctly now.

I had somebody email me the other day about a cell phone recommendation, and I’m not sure how to reply. If anybody has a recommendation for which cell phone might work best for use while buying books, please comment.

“I am in the market for a new cell phone and would like one that would allow me to scan book isbn #’s. I shop at a lot of thrift stores and garage sales and believe some type of bar code scanner would be very helpful. Could you tell me what I need to look for in a phone?”

I had a user ask me if I had any statistics that showed which of the merchants had offers on books the most frequently. This site records enough data to provide some interesting reports like that, so I took a little while to come up with it.
This graph shows the relative number of times that a vendor had a price for a title. The data goes back to the first of the year, so some of the vendors that were added since then show up lower than they normally would.

If you have some other type of report or graph that you might like to see, please comment with some details about what you are looking for! Send me an email, and I’ll see if it is something that I can do.