WHY EBOOK SEARCH ENGINES ARE STILL TYROS?

THERE’S enough room for a vertical search engine for eBooks. The few out there are mostly amateur efforts by individuals. As of now, no big corporation has poured good money into developing one. And for a variety of reasons, including the litigation and uncertainties over Google’s book scanning project, the search engine giant has not gone all out into eBook search and incorporated it as a vertical, just like it has done for flights and hotels, after acquiring or cutting deals with sites offering vertical searches. As of now, Google Books is primarily a source for copyright-free eBooks, and Google Play books are restricted to the Android and iOS platforms.

But that could change in the foreseeable future. In the meanwhile, Amazon’s Kindle Store remains the most powerful eBook store for the simple reason that it stocks almost every eBook available. Not to forget its global reach. Though there are more eBook stores on the industry standard ePub platform, by its sheer heft in the market, Amazon with its Kindle eBooks packs a punch.
All ePub bookstores are search constrained
Barnes and Noble’s eBook store which stocks ePub books with DRM comes next. Kobo, eBookmall, diesel-eBooks, and ebooks.com are the other biggie eBook stores out there. From my experience, all of them have limitations in search. Discovering even eBooks which are available are often a problem. The stores reveal them only after repeated searches, enough to deter all but the most determined. Diesel and eBooks.com have particularly bad in-house search engines.

But by vertical search engine for eBooks, we are primarily referring to search engines specialized in retrieving information about eBooks from all major eBook stores. Basically, here customers are looking out for price comparison, details about formats and devices on which they’re available, etc. There are a handful, and as mentioned before, most of them are amateur efforts.

This post will restrict itself to listing them out. A fuller review of their strengths and weaknesses has to wait for a later post.

These are the eBook search engines which I have come across:

• ·         Inkmesh  http://inkmesh.com
  
• ·         AddAll Ebooks  http://ebooks.addall.com
  
• ·         Luzme: http://luzme.com
  
• ·         Leatherbound: http://leatherbound.me/
  

In the next post, I will analyze their pluses and minuses.