Used Books Blog

Dave Rosenthal and the team at Read Street have put together a great Google Map of favorite bookstores away from home as compiled by Read Street readers and contributors, including yours truly of the Used Books Blog.

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It got me thinking about what other bookstore maps were out there. I immediately thought of the Abebooks Frappr. I won’t embed that map because it’s ugly (think MySpace of maps) and doesn’t seem to be working that well. (Frappr itself has seen traffic drop by over half in the last year.) Still, it holds an impressive 646 listings from around the world.

It was the international aspect that intrigued me and after a few searches I stumbled upon Bookstore Guide, “an amateur guide to book shopping throughout Europe..” (Yes, two periods for some reason.) This is a neat site (minus the black background) and their city coverage is impressive. Sure enough, they recently added a new mapping feature!

Thanks to Nomao and Google Maps, we have the pleasure to introduce a new feature to our guide. Namely, it’s a map where we’ve marked all the bookstores in our guide. This should help you locate the bookstores more easily. Unfortunately, not all the cities have a detailed map of the streets but should at least give you some sense to where the place with the bookstore is. We have just started adding the bookstores to the map, so stick around to see the whole map of Europe become filled out with your favorite bookstores.

Of course you can use Google Maps and just type in ‘bookstore’ without any geographic parameters. But there’s no easy way to sort the nearly 200,000 results or remove chain stores like Borders. There’s a good deal of search and scroll involved. A tagged taxonomy might go a long way to making it easier to find the right bookstore.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 22nd, 2008 at 2:12 pm and is filed under Book News, Used Books. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.