Book Burro: Save Money on Books the Easy Way

Digging through the used book market to find the best price on the latest Harry Potter novel, or that 'recommended reading' title for next Semester's Psych class can be a pain. A truly determined bargain hunter will have to get the ISBN number for the text in question, then open up half a dozen websites and start searching.

That is to say the bargain hunter who is unaware of a nifty little Firefox extension. With Book Burro, getting the best price, or even checking availability at the local library, is now onestop shopping.

In this article we will look at the process of getting, configuring and using Book Burro. We'll also put Book Burro under the microscope and look for cracks.

In order to take advantage of Book Burro, you will need to be using either Firefox, or Flock. At the time of this writing, there is no comparable tool for Internet Explorer.

Assuming that you have Firefox installed, the next step is to grab the Book Burro plug-in from the developer's site. It's free to download and simple to install. Just click the Install button on the main page.

Once you have the extension installed, you can customize it to search only those book sellers (or libraries) you are interested in.

Once you have Book Burro installed and Firefox restarted, you might think you've done something wrong. Unless you happen to have the review page for your favorite book as your homepage, you probably will not see Book Burro. That's because unlike search toolbars and add ons that are always there, Book Burro only shows up when you need it.

It will 'sense' when you are looking at a book on a major retailer's site, and show a small unobtrusive graphic. Just click the down arrow and Book Burro will show you who among your provider has the book and at what cost.

New User Tip: If you are at the site of a major book retailer and you don't see the Burro, go deeper. You need to be on the book's individual page - not just a list of all books. Book Burro will show up on many major book sites, but I've had the best results when using it with either Amazon.comor Half.com?.

Book Burro supports a very impressive number of retailers that includes both new and used books stores. The extension also supports searching many libraries and the WorldCat catalog.

Many Universities participate in the WorldCat catalog and getting the Burro to search participating libraries in your area is as easy as putting in your zip code.

Book Burro's website also mentions that that the list of libraries supported is easy to extend; however, at the time of this writing, details on exactly how to do this were not available.

Book Burro is an amazing time saver, but it does have its limits. When searching the used book market, it does not take into account the merchant or seller rating. Book Burro only looks at the bottom line.

Another issue I've found is Book Burro will sometimes fail to 'sense' when I'm looking at a book on retailers other than Amazon or Half.com. Once it knows I'm looking at a book, it has no trouble searching all the supported sites, but I have to start my search at one of these stores.

Another issue for the deal savvy is that shipping costs are also not included. This isn't as much of a problem as it sounds, since most major retailers (both new and used) have similar shipping costs.

As Book Burro is unobtrusive, free and very simple to use, it makes sense for just about any Firefox user -- from the dedicated bibliophile to the occasional reader. Avid bibliophiles using other browsers might do well to use Firefox and Book Burro as their 'book store browser.'