Searching The Old Book Sites:<br>Just Who Is The Best?

Here is an oddity of these sites that leads us to the last reviewed site, Froogle. The ABAA (and ILAB) search boxes don’t take too many characters (I did not count exact numbers). The result is that it has trouble finding titles like History of the Expedition Under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clarks. Somewhere in the “captains” it shut down. I could select out just the more important keywords in the title which helped, but wasn’t perfect. It never could find the copy of the Expedition to the Great Salt Lake where the seller added a few extra words to call it Expedition and Survey of the Great Salt Lake. Here’s the oddity. Froogle searches many sites for its books, including the ABAA. However, its search box accepts more words, and its formula can deal with less than perfectly matched titles, such as those with an extra word or two. Since it searches the ABAA listings through its own search engine, not the ABAA’s, it was able to find books on the ABAA site I was not able to find on that site itself! I found a copy of the Lewis and Clark book and one of the Salt Lake offered on the ABAA site through Froogle I could not find on that site itself.

The first item I attempted to track down was the Stansbury Salt Lake title. I found that most offered for sale were either the 1852 original or a 1966 reprint. Here’s what I found:

Book Site	1852 original	Price Range	1966 reprint	Price Range
Abebooks	5	$135-$623	14	$9.50-$35
Alibris	0	--	8	$9.90-$24.95
ABAA	1	$350	1	$25
ILAB	2	$350-$613	1	$25
Froogle	2	$350-$1600*	2	$15-$25
Barnes and Noble	0	--	10	$10.05-$26.47
Amazon	0	--	5	$12-$107

*The $1,600 copy was the one offered on the ABAA site that I could only find through Froogle. It is priced so high because it includes the original, loose maps.

I hope I found everything from Amazon. I first attempted searching "used books" for the title, only to get 21,895 "matches." None of the first ten were actual matches, and not having the time to wade through 21,885 more listings, I went to "collectible books," where I found five.