Website Review: Books.co.uk
With a premium domain name like Books.co.uk, I was expecting interesting things from this website. Amazon.com is over a decade old now - buying books on the internet has come a long way and become increasingly sophisticated too. What could Books.co.uk bring to the party to makes things even better for online book buyers? The answer is, unfortunately, “not much”.
Where book sites like The Book Depository have recently launched and immediately established their niche by carrying more titles and offering a more personal shopping experience with editorial choices and content, Books.co.uk offers a fairly mediocre books price comparison engine between various online booksellers. It works for both UK and USA shoppers.
This is a nice idea, but it’s hardly original - one of the original book comparison engines, bookbrain.co.uk, is still online although it seems half dead, while kelkoo.co.uk offers comparison shopping for virtually every product but its reach for books is quite limited. As a random example, I tried searching Books.co.uk for the book I’m currently reading, James Traub’s The Best Intentions: Kofi Annan and the UN in the Era of American World Power. I typed in “the best intentions” and hit search. The book didn’t turn up in Books.co.uk search, despite being published only 4 months ago, in November 2006. By comparison, it’s the first result on Amazon.co.uk for the same search terms.
I tried searching for the book’s author, James Traub, thinking it’s a fairly unusual name and would come up easily - books.co.uk returned no matches. Finally, I tried searching for “Kofi Annan” - and The Best Intentions finally appeared on the books.co.uk search.
It’s a schoolboy error to not have a comparison search engine able to successfully locate books by the authors and titles. If books.co.uk were aiming solely at the pile-em-high-sell-em-low bestsellers to give customers the absolute rock bottom best price then I could forgive them not being able to find a current affairs book - but the fact the search will find The Best Intentions on a search for a secondary term but not its title or author makes it difficult to have any trust in getting quick, useful results from books.co.uk
The design of the site looks quite sloppy as well, but the cosmetics wouldn’t matter if there was a ripsnorter of a comparison engine under the bonnet that could find any title quickly and the best price on it, taking into account shipping costs and delivery times too. Unfortunately this is not the case with books.co.uk and while their domain name will probably get them a fair amount of traffic I can’t see many people returning to the site in its present incarnation unless they make some rapid improvements to the underlying technology. For anyone trying to enter the extremely competitive online bookselling market this late in the game, your website needs to have at least the same functionality and quality of search as Amazon, and also do something remarkable on top of that. At the moment, Books.co.uk isn’t managing either. I sincerely hope they can rethink their strategy and produce a comparison engine which produces much better results - then they will be on their way to providing a genuinely useful service.
Disclaimer: this is a paid review bought through ReviewMe.com. As you can hopefully tell, I did actually look at and use the site reviewed above and give my honest opinion rather than cut and paste some suitably glowing copy. You can request a review of your website from me here on Spike at ReviewMe.com as well.
Other Splinters posts of interest:
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- The Man from Uncle TV
- Book Heaven Most book clubs are a total waste of …
- Google Goes Gutenberg
