I've come across a company with an interesting service for those who are now reading e-books, whether with Kindles, Sonys, Nooks (well, soon), Astaks, or other flexible e-readers.
Inkmesh.com is a new search engine for hunting ebooks across the web, a process which includes searches of
1. retailers like Amazon.com,
2. self-publishing sites like Smashword
3. free sites like Project Gutenberg and many others
listed at the Inkmesh site.
They are looking for feedback on how Inkmesh can improve its offering, so this is not only useful to owners of e-readers but also gives a chance to help improve a service during its development phase.
My feedback not long ago was that there were too many results and that I wanted the ability to search for only words that are part of a title or for a specific author. At the time I tried this, they were, they said, working on the Advanced Search capability.
It turns out they already have the capability I wanted, and outside of the special easy-to-use interface, a search could be done using the following link, which is for a query to search for 'Jane Austen' in the title:
http://inkmesh.com/search/?qs=title%3A%22Jane+Austen%22&btnE=Find+Ebooks
To avoid our having to figure out how to put that together, Inkmesh is integrating this into the regular user interface as a look-up option.
E-Book Pricing Comparison
Also, tireless researcher/podcaster Len Edgerly, at The Kindle Chronicles points us to Inkmesh's very interesting Amazon, B&N and Sony Price Comparison posted November 30 to their site.
They focused on 11,604 top-selling titles available at all three vendors and ran their numbers on that set. They also included prices for these ebooks from the other sites they index, including Lulu, Fictionwise and HarperCollins. Here's what they found, for prices during this one week:
' Amazon had the best prices on 8,592 (or 74%) of the top-selling ebooks in circulation today. And the price difference wasn’t insignificant either – for ebooks that were cheapest at Amazon, Kindle prices were lower than the next best price by 15% on average.The article has a lot of detail and you can read where B&N's strengths were and how Sony fared, at the Inkmesh site.
Barnes and Noble was a clear (and distant) number two ... '
Let them know how they're doing with the search engine and give them some feedback on what you read in their analysis, from whatever angle.
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