You can think of it as analogous to booking a flight. Do you want the cheapest flight with a 16 hour flight and 2 transfers with Ryanair? A lot of people don't mind paying a bit more for a direct flight and a complimentary chocolate (lot, swiss air), even if all are legal.

Some websites even included an option to check as "worry-free" or similar to filter out these cheap options.

Book equivalents could be quality of paper, status of the book, or having good customer support if there is a problem with the order.

>quality of paper

you are extremely unlikely to find this as book metadata

Online booksellers often denote "mass market" vs "trade" paperback which does potentially give you info on the quality of the paper.

"The paper quality is better as well, as most often they are printed on acid-free paper like a hardback book." - https://biblio.co.uk/book_collecting_terminology/trade-paper...

(I've found this to be relevant when sourcing physical copies of out of print books.)

I ordered books under the public domain on Amazon. At least 50% were printed on the cheapest paper and on Demand. Some were printed from scans were part of the text is missing and looked like photocopies.

Just because the book is in the public domain does not mean I want a book that looks like a fanzine.

Maybe it does not scale, I agree. This is why a curator is IMO important.

I agree the quality of Amazon self-published books can be terrible, notably recipe books. just as youtube can make anyone a tv star, or spotify a musician, Amazon self-publishing means anyone can be an author now

as for the metadata, that would be retrospectively impossible. your best chance would be to filter out Amazon as a publisher

You do get "Condition of book" which isn't quite the same thing but helpful along the same thread

I would take a coffee-stained, dust-clad, sepia-ridden second edition from a proper publisher over the 20gsm, toxic-inked, loosely-bound crap churned out by Amazon any day

But surely this website is comparing the same book. There should be no difference in quality of paper or condition of the book?

There shouldn't be, but sometimes there is and this is where a vendor's customer service comes into play.

I buy 10-15 books every year and almost all of them I order from the same place because they are reliable and provide great customer service when something does go wrong. Books are cheap enough and I don't buy that many so I'm not really very price sensitive.

It's comparing the same title (roughly, with some errors, but that's expected I think), and returning many editions. Some of those editions might be trade paperbacks, some might be mass-market on newsprint, depending on the book.

(One book I searched returned among other things an audiobook on cassette.)

Not for expensive books (like textbooks) where it is economical to print pirate copies, and where there are cheap international-market prints.

International market prints have a different ISBN so those shouldn't get mixed up. Pirate copies could be an issue, I have only heard about this issue on Amazon. I'm not sure about other stores? Skipping Amazon is likely sufficient.

I recently discovered that my local shop can sometimes order books at prices that are much better than Amazon ($80 vs. $110) and often not much slower (under a week, which is competitive with Amazon’s free shipping).

That's great, do you mind if I grab the name of one of these shops so I can look into including similar shops in the tool?

I actually found it via the publisher. Penguin Random House has a service that does it, at least in Canada.

Try here https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/656337/neural-contro...

Hit "Shop Local" on a webpage and enter a post code. I don't want to give mine (they sometimes resolve to individual buildings) but H1A1A1 works.

Thanks, I'll check it out

Perhaps you could hook into a service that already finds pricing and stock from local indie bookstores, like bookshop.org[0]?

0: https://bookshop.org/

Good idea, I'll look into it