Type of site | Comparison shopping website |
---|---|
Owner | AbeBooks ( Amazon) |
URL |
www |
Commercial | Yes |
Launched | January 30, 1997 |
Current status | Active |
Written in | Perl [1] |
BookFinder.com is a vertical search website that helps readers buy books online. The site's meta-search engine scans the inventories of over 100,000 booksellers located around the world. Among the books from sellers whose inventories are indexed, users can find the lowest price for a book of their choice from over 150 million volumes available for sale, and purchase titles directly from the bookseller, without a markup. [2] [3] The search engine is focused primarily on Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish language titles.
BookFinder.com was founded in 1997 by Anirvan Chatterjee, then a student at the University of California, Berkeley; it was one of the earliest vertical search engines for books online. [4] Originally known as MX BookFinder, [4] it was relaunched as BookFinder.com in 1998 and established as a standalone company based in Berkeley, California in 1999.
In 2005, BookFinder.com was acquired by AbeBooks, [5] which itself was purchased by Amazon.com on August 1, 2008. [6] [7]
BookFinder.com started operating in Europe under the JustBooks brand in 2006. There are currently JustBooks/BookFinder.com portals for France, Germany, the Netherlands, and the UK. [3]