Book Burro

Book Burro – Stop searching after you find a book – let your browser do [locate] it for you:

Book Burro is an extension for the Firefox and Flock web browsers that tries to save you time and money when you find a book you want.

When Book Burro senses you are viewing a book, it will add a small panel to the upper right corner.

Clicking the panel will trigger the agent to go query for prices at other book sites and check your local libraries for availability.

Found a book on Amazon and want to see if a local library has it or another book seller has it at a better price?  Book Burro is the extension to use.  Configure Book Burro with your postal or zip code, check the appropriate libraries, and check/uncheck the relevant book vendors you want to search by default.  Book Burro often senses when you’re on a page viewing a book, but if it doesn’t, just highlighting and right clicking on an ISBN (ISBN-10 or ISBN-13) and selecting “Book Burro Search…” will bring up the Book Burro search box as it searches libraries and book vendors.  There’s a fair selection of public libraries in North America (it had Winnipeg Public, at least), but there’s obviously many more libraries that could be added.  Thankfully, there are many libraries that are searched by configuring your postal/zip code since Book Burro uses OCLC’s Open WorldCat and xISBN functionality to facilitate locating books.  In 2006, Jesse Andrews was runner-up with Book Burro in OCLC’s annual Research Software Contest.

Of course there are a couple pitfalls that we should be reminded of with ISBN searches.  First, ISBN’s were only assigned to books starting in 1972 (so there’s still a great deal of literature prior to 1972 one may want to search).  Second, with ISBN searches there is typically a different ISBN for a particular title for different versions such as hardcover versus paperback (let alone different ISBN for different editions such as a 2nd or 3rd edition of a particular title).  While hardcover may be more desirable than a paperback version, it will require some thoroughness in making sure that nothing is missed or overlooked with an ISBN search.  Finally, one other obvious pitfall is that not all libraries add ISBN’s to their cataloguing records (though it’s much more common now to add ISBN’s than years ago) and those that do add ISBN’s often do not run validation checks (since there is a standard coding that can be checked) to make sure ISBN’s haven’t been entered wrong.  ISBN validation detects any single-digit error and any two-digit error resulting from transposing two digits, but many catalogues to not provide such error reports by default and building such checks are often not huge priority for many libraries.

Overall, however, Book Burro, is a good tool to add to your research tool box and another way the Firefox browser beats Micro$oft Internet Explorer.