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BookChaser: an Ajax Book Search Engine

A very long time ago (about five years) I had the bright idea of starting a new search engine like IMDB but for books. Eventually I purchased the BookChaser.com domain name and have held on to it ever since. At some point a bunch of people like me got together and formed the Internet Book Database Project. Unfortunatly, interest and other time constraints eventually disbanded out little group and nothing ever came of it.

Looking at the same idea after five years I suddenly see new hope. Two of the main problems all along have been is (1) getting all the book data and (2) getting enough money to run servers to store that data. Now looking at what’s out there including AJAX and Webservices for sites like Amazon, I suddenly see those problems solved. So here is a short summary of what I think BookChaser should look like (but unfortunatly I haven’t got the time to code it):

1. Full-AJAX application in HTML requireing no other servers.
2. Primary search is done against Amazon’s database via AWS and XmlHttpRequest with results displayed directly in the browser (I have done something similar for UPS’s XML API with AJAX).
3. Search against other book stores to retreive prices just like Book Burro does in FireFox.
4. Gets information from libraries based on LibraryLookup from John Udell.
5. Maybe even add Z39.50 support via some toolkit that calls Z39.50 gateways directly.
6. Add support for reviews via AllConsuming, IBList, and others.

The only downsides that I see with this approach is that all of this would run very slow in a browser and put a large load on all of the services involved. A better approach might be to provide some generic web services caching for these server side in some instances (but that would kill all of the fun).

UPDATE: I took some time and coded up a prototype. BookChaser v0.1 is available here and here. Leaves comments on this post OR send email to code \at\ shaftek {dot} org.

Tags: ajax, amazon, bookchaser, books —

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