Thursday, January 7, 2010

Metasearch eBooks With Addall

Metasearch eBooks With Addall: From Research Buzz

"Thanks to TeleRead for the pointer to AddAll’s new e-book search engine, available at http://ebooks.addall.com/. The pointer from the front page says that it’s “available for testing,” so perhaps it’s in beta, but it worked fine for me. It searches over 30 ebook sites to find stuff for you to read.


You can search for ebooks by author, title, or keyword/ISBN. I did a search for winter in the title field. After a short wait I got a list of 1370 books. They were presented in a table that showed title, author, price, site, format, and description. You can sort all of those fields except description, so if you’re looking for cheap reads it’s easy to sort results so the no-cost books come first (as a matter of fact, that’s the default sorting method!)


If you click on the title in the search result you’ll go straight to the site that has the book — on the front page of my search I found books from Smashwords, Feedbooks, Project Gutenberg, and Manybooks. As I moved further into the site and got money results, I found books from Powells, Sony eBooks, CyberRead, and Fictionwise.


Of course, 1370 books is a bit many, so I was glad at the bottom of my page of search results I also got an advanced search form that let me narrow my search down by book format (Kindle, HTML, PDF, etc) as well as exclude keywords. I narrowed down my search to PDF and Kindle titles that weren’t authored by Shakespeare and … still got 503 results. I tried.


While I can think of other ways I’d like to search for books, like genre, this is a nice start. How about some RSS feeds so I can keep up with digital releases from my favorite authors? There’s not enough Rex Stout available in e-book format….



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