overstimulate

Update: checkout bookburro.org!

Ever look at a product on a website and wonder if you could find it cheaper elsewhere? Ever read books? If you answered yes to both of those questions you are in luck my friend!

This script adds links & prices from other sites (Amazon, Buy, BN, Powell, Half) to the current book site you are at!

When Book Burro senses you are viewing a book, it will add a small panel to the upper right corner.

While that is pretty, it is what happens when you kick (click) the burro that makes it exciting:

As you see in the images, you are now one click away from the book at another online shoppe!

This process does cause a little harm to come to the donkey, so don't kick him unless you need to (as this is causing web-pages to be downloaded in the background, and if millions of people do it, the feds may come after me for mistreating defenseless animals.)

How much does it cost you ask?

You have to obtain a recent (1.0 or above) copy of FireFox, and the wonderful Greasemonkey extension (I recommend version 0.2.6). When you click Install, it FireFox will block it since it isn't coming from Mozilla's main site, but you can click "allow this site to install", then it reclick the install link. You will need to restart your browser after installing the GreaseMonkey extension.

Now that you have the prerequisites, you need to install the burro. It sounds complicated, but it isn't. Install the userscript (the javascript that does the work) by opening it in your webbrowser, which fills you screen with a bunch of gobble-gook (javascript). Then in your menu bar, choosing Tool->Install User Script. Then you are done! Ready to go play with your burro. (perhaps after a stop by the contribute button?)

Important: For your sanity only handle one Burro at a time, thus before you install a new burro, please take the time to properly destroy your old one (uninstall the previous version first using Tools->Manage Userscripts then select the old and choose uninstall)

Complete Version History & Todo

Advanced Version (Powered by AJAX):

• Current Version: Book Burro Advanced v0.11 - improved skin & add link to message if no results

LITE Version (non-AJAX):

If you need a version is available that does not use XMLHttprequest to go to the versions page and install version 0.02.

Who did this?

• Jesse Andrews - Me - hacker extraordinaire ( which means I learned javascript )
• Britt Selvitelle - showed up for Mac&Cheese, I made him hack until 6am! haha!
• Johannes la Poutre - he was unknowingly involved, as we based our interface off snippets of his RSS Reader for GreaseMonkey

What? It Doesn't Work?

- the Greasemonkeyed

ps. Licensed under open source, so additional code/sites are welcome!

pps. We were careful to minimize the number of AJAX requests performed. It only does a request when you click on bar, and it only requests once on this page. We didn't impliment Powell's books, since we didn't know if they would want the queries. . .

Responses to "Greasemonkey - Book Burro - find cheap books"

1. Sun, 24 Apr 2005 emjanov says:
   You guys rock...this is the coolest tool and even a dummy like me can follow the instructions and get it to work!
2. Sun, 24 Apr 2005 hoovernj says:
   Nice!
3. Sun, 24 Apr 2005 frogger says:
   I hope for your sake this doesn't make slashdot!
4. Mon, 25 Apr 2005 boing says:
   it's broken for everyone but buy.com here - anyone else confirm/deny? i'll bet this gets blocked quick smart. keep on, it's *brilliant*!!!
5. Mon, 25 Apr 2005 Jesse says:
   Boing, It still works for me... Can you give more info about what doesn't work? I tried all the site... What is broken? the links or the querying for price or?
6. Mon, 25 Apr 2005 Nick Gray says:
   Cool! Overstock.com has really good prices this season, too. Would it be hard to add them?
7. Mon, 25 Apr 2005 Jesse says:
   Nick, We'll look at it! I hope they expose an API... We are working on converting to a full blown extension which will allow users to change things easily.
8. Tue, 26 Apr 2005 boing says:
   except for buy.com, all prices come up (after the "fetching" phase) as "none" ('either there are no books available, or there is a parsing error' etc.) i tried it on several bestsellers, so it's not just some obscure ISBN...
9. Tue, 26 Apr 2005 Jeed says:
   Hey guys,why not make it work for magazines by ISSN?????
10. Tue, 26 Apr 2005 Jesse says:
    Jeed, I had no idea what a ISSN was. . . Now I do, we will try to add that, although are there many places selling magazines?
11. Wed, 27 Apr 2005 Jeed says:
    Dude,i just want a REALLY fast way to get Neopet magazines.i need a few to have them all.I know i few sites i just thought that would be cool. thanx
12. Fri, 29 Apr 2005 Jeed says:
    And all i know is mom hooked me up with Ebay,and that what i use to get my magazines.Well..if i don't buy them at limeted too!!!
13. Sat, 30 Apr 2005 Nathan says:
    Any chance of adding Bookpool.com to the list. It'd be handy to be able to compare tech books without having to have both sites open :) Thanks!
14. Thu, 05 May 2005 Joe says:
    I'd love to get Bookpool.com prices as well!
15. Fri, 06 May 2005 Jesse says:
    I've contacted Bookpool.com ... I recommend emailing anyone you want added and tell them why they should give us access to their api ... Half for instance wants $250 to get access... for an open source project that is a lot. I've gotten $20 in donations so far to go towards purchase of the api.
16. Fri, 06 May 2005 Scott Elkin says:
    You guys should sign up as affiliates at each of the sites mentioned above. That should generate enough money to sustain more API's and further development. I know amazon has one, not sure on the others.
17. Mon, 09 May 2005 Stuart Moffatt says:
    Scott, It seems that Jesse already has affiliate links in book burro (not sure what rev they went in, but they are there). Nifty. So, Jesse, are your affiliates links cooking for you?
18. Tue, 10 May 2005 Jesse says:
    So far, $9 from affiliate links. Adding the $25 in donations so far, we are 1/9 of the way to the half api! Right now half.com has affialiate links as well, but I don't think that one is worth the trouble. (it adds a layer of extra hosts you have to visit and only pays if you are a new customer to half. maybe good years ago, but most people probably have half/ebay accounts by now.)
19. Tue, 10 May 2005 Jacob says:
    Current version doesn't seem towork for me. It installs, and the little book burro box appears in the top left-hand corner when I'm viewing an Amazon.com page, but clicking on the box doesn't cause it to expand. Clicking on the "?" does take me to overstimulate.com, but clicking anywhere else in the box seems to have no effect. I'm using Firefox 1.03, optimized for the Mac G4. -jacobw at yankeefog dot com
20. Tue, 10 May 2005 Jacob says:
    Oops--ignore the previous message. It's working fine now. I had the brilliant idea of quitting and then re-launching Firefox. You can't blame me for not thinking of such a sublte and complex idea right off the bat...
21. Tue, 10 May 2005 Roland says:
    Good job Jesse. However, I use a proxy to connect and the fetching process never ends. Is it possible to make the script work with some http proxy?
22. Tue, 10 May 2005 Jesse says:
    Roland, Do you know of a proxy I can use to test? I was using it today with the google web accelerator without a problem.
23. Wed, 11 May 2005 bob says:
    Firefox 1.0.3 on XP, when I try to click on the book burro to expand, I am getting this error: Error: GM_xmlhttpRequest is not defined Source File: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0743226712/ref=amb_cob_bh_209807/104-2269319-9219957 Line: 202
24. Wed, 11 May 2005 Dan Greening says:
    Jesse, contact me if you need access to overstock.com api. dan/at\greening\dot/name
25. Wed, 11 May 2005 Jesse says:
    Bob, That means you have an old version of Greasemonkey, you need to get 0.2.6. Jesse
26. Fri, 13 May 2005 matt says:
    I love this Bookburro! Can you put in www.bol.com as well? That ' ll be great! Thanks.
27. Fri, 13 May 2005 Kevin Bridges says:
    Would you guys be open to creating a book-seller version of this utility? I would love to see used price, number of used copies available, and sales rank in a tool like this. I wrote a php utility to do this, but the AJAX utility has a much better interface.
28. Fri, 13 May 2005 Jesse says:
    Matt, We are working on making it search many different sites (using a preferences panel), including libraries!
29. Fri, 13 May 2005 Jesse says:
    Kevin, Sure, give me an email and we can talk about it. My email is on the right column.
30. Sat, 14 May 2005 Thomas says:
    how about www.bookcloseouts.com they dont have it most of the time, but on some books you can save $20 bucks. (hardcovers go for ~$4-5) great stuff though. my wife will love it more than i do.
31. Sat, 14 May 2005 Clay Smith says:
    I'm having the same problem Jacob was having farther up the comments. The book burro box shows up complete and the question mark works; but when i click the box, nothing happens. When I click the X, the box becomes more transparent but does not disappear. I'm using Firefox V1.04 and my greasemonkey extension is up to date, I think. I better go check that.
32. Sat, 14 May 2005 Clay Smith says:
    Oops. No, it wasn't. I was using v0.2.3 and not v0.2.6. I guess clicking the little "Update" button in the Extensions panel doesn't always work. Anyway, thanks for a great tool!
33. Sat, 14 May 2005 Jesse says:
    Clay, Is it working for you now? Also, thanks for the info on XBM & IE. Jesse
34. Sat, 14 May 2005 BrentN says:
    Jesse, Thanks for the comment. I'm looking forward to the next version, because I'm an ABEBooks junkie. :) One thing that would also help out is if you could find a way to compute shipping prices as well. Shipping is always a huge fraction of the total cost for me, because I tend to by one or two books at a time.
35. Sat, 14 May 2005 Jesse says:
    BrentN, I know that some APIs give shipping costs. As we are moving to an extenion, having an option to include shipping/handling when possible will be on the list of things to do.
36. Mon, 16 May 2005 J. Hazelip says:
    May I suggest that ABEbooks.com also be added to the list of alternative booksellers? Thank you very much for this wonderful script.
37. Mon, 16 May 2005 Bill Rawlinson says:
    The only improvement I can't instantly think of is ebay support. i buy most of my books on ebay or amazon so it would be super handy to have ebay support. but either way - thanks for the great plugin.
38. Mon, 16 May 2005 chuck says:
    Wow ... finally, that stuff they raved about the web being able to do to enable comparison shopping, it's right there. One thing is, however, the page for bookburro suggests that it's in the upper-right corner, when it's actually in the upper-left. I'd sort of prefer it in the upper-right, as would the merchants whose logo you're blocking :) (also, you really should give emule a mention as the source for the icon)
39. Mon, 16 May 2005 Bill Rawlinson says:
    just wanted to point out the ebay developers program (and hence API) are free! http://developer.ebay.com/index_html
40. Tue, 17 May 2005 Zyrill says:
    doesn't work for me, neither :( i get following error trying to install Book Burro on WinXP_SP2 Gecko/20050516 Firefox/1.0+ with Greasemonkey 0.3.3: Could not download user script [Exception... "Cannot modify properties of a WrappedNative" nsresult: "0x8057034 (NS_ERROR_XPC_CANT_MODIFY_PROP_ON_WIN)" location: "JS frame :: chrome://greasemonkey/content/greasemonkey.js :: anonymous :: line 251" data: no] I really don't know what I could be doing wrong!
41. Tue, 17 May 2005 Jesse says:
    Zyrill. I haven't tested with GM 0.3.3 yet. I see it got called stable on Sunday, so that is cool! Jesse
42. Tue, 17 May 2005 Zyrill says:
    well, shame on me - for not trying uninstalling everything and reinstalling first... obviously something was broken inside my profile/installation. now it works like a charm - and i'll be hacking it up a bitt to make it more suitable for german users (when i find the time, that is) thanks a million for this useful piece of code!
43. Tue, 17 May 2005 Jesse says:
    Zyrill, Give me an email and I'll make sure to get the german sites in the new version which hasn't been released yet.
44. Thu, 19 May 2005 Mark says:
    Is there anyway to port this to UK sites? e.g. amazon.co.uk etc, so it compares prices in gbp?
45. Thu, 19 May 2005 funkyHat says:
    I would also be interested in a UK port of book burro, how easy would this be and would new APIs or anything be needed to get it working properly?
46. Fri, 20 May 2005 Zyrill says:
    check the code - it's rather easy to do... that is, if the sites have some sort of ISBN-based search and you're familiar with regular expressions. :)
47. Tue, 24 May 2005 Thomas A. says:
    Hi, take a look at http://isbn.nu. This website consolidates (example: http://isbn.nu/1591391857) just by having the ISBN of the book you are searching for. I don't know about its effect on your affiliate relationships... Peace!
48. Tue, 24 May 2005 Xial says:
    Sweet merciful monkey, this is quite nice, indeed! I wish I had learned about Greasemonkey before today! It might've saved me a few bucks on my Perl book. :)
49. Thu, 26 May 2005 Ottawa says:
    You can also search Froogle by ISBN (i am not sure about other numbers). http://froogle.google.com/froogle?q=ISBN
50. Sun, 29 May 2005 Double says:
    Man this is cool if you can get overstock.com in the listing that would be awsome.
51. Thu, 02 Jun 2005 Clark Nova says:
    Love this service...I use fetchbook.info etc all the time. How about adding ABE, Alibris, Biblio and all of the others listed here: http://www.nationalfinder.com/bfs/
52. Fri, 03 Jun 2005 samus says:
    doesnt work for me . been trying for about an hour. I installed the script but when i go there nothing happens.
53. Sun, 05 Jun 2005 Mark Nelson says:
    Jesse, This is fantastic. You may use our api. WE have over 1 million cached prices for all major booksellers at any given time.
54. Sun, 05 Jun 2005 Mark Nelson says:
    mbnelson@europa.com
55. Sun, 05 Jun 2005 Mark Nelson says:
    mbnelsonATeuropa.com
56. Mon, 06 Jun 2005 Slayer_X says:
    Works like a charm, I love it :-D
57. Mon, 06 Jun 2005 rich says:
    Have you seen www.addall.com? Maybe you could use a simliar idea to get prices or even read them straight out of that? A UK version is definatly needed as well......
58. Wed, 08 Jun 2005 Matt McCarthy says:
    As I mentioned to Jesse, I ported Book Burro to work in Internet Explorer with Turnabout. All my family and most of my friends use IE, and I just thought it was too bad they couldn't use Book Burro. Cross-browser Book Burro: http://www.reifysoft.com/projects/turnabout/scripts/bookburro.user.js IE users need to get Turnabout: http://www.reifysoft.com/turnabout.php
59. Fri, 10 Jun 2005 tm19 says:
    I love this script. It works fine but for some reason I can't see the icons. Any ideas?
60. Sun, 12 Jun 2005 Doug says:
    Great work. Any chance of adding bamm.com? Thanks.
61. Sun, 12 Jun 2005 Doug says:
    Great work. Any chance of adding bamm.com? Thanks.
62. Thu, 16 Jun 2005 VanHuizen says:
    GREAT idea!!! Please at QBP.com to your list too!
63. Thu, 16 Jun 2005 VanHuizen says:
    GREAT idea!!! Please at QBP.com to your list too!
64. Sat, 18 Jun 2005 soulever says:
    Great script! It comes in very handy. Would it be possible to make it work for CDs and movies as well as books?
65. Sun, 19 Jun 2005 Tim says:
    Please don't capitalize the second F in Firefox. It's really lame. Kthx.
66. Fri, 24 Jun 2005 tm19 says:
    Figured out the no graphics problem -- needed to turn on "Change images" in the Advanced part of Firefox's JavaScript settings (overzealous now that I have the NoScript extension)
67. Fri, 24 Jun 2005 alldirect fan says:
    I'm not affiliated with alldirect.com, but I've found their prices to be very competitive. I have simply modified the Book Burro script (v 0.11) to include an alldirect.com search. You can get it from http://majorfamily.netfirms.com/gmscripts/bookburroad.user.js
68. Sat, 25 Jun 2005 MrT says:
    Book Burro is an awesome tool... Too bad the affiliate links don't work most of the time... It's really lame that I have to spend my time copy-pasting the affiliate gunk of of this otherwise outstanding piece of engineering.
69. Thu, 07 Jul 2005 GleepGlop says:
    amazon.ca marketplace is separate from amazon.com
70. Sat, 16 Jul 2005 Jesse Andrews says:
    bookburro.org has the latest version and more info.
71. Mon, 19 Sep 2005 BookSeller says:
    Can you add Alibris.com, Biblio.com, and Abebooks.com to the list of booksites to compare prices on Book Burro? Thanks.
72. Mon, 19 Sep 2005 Johan says:
    You need to update this version ever so slightly to have it work in modern GreaseMonkeys; replace all occurrences of .onclick = function(){...}; with .addEventListener( 'click', function(){...}, true); and it works as a charm again. (This also is backwards compatible, fortunately, besides makes this excellent tool work in Mozilla Firefox 1.5 without needing whatever other fixes are needed to have the extension work there.) Or pick up my already patched version at http://www.lysator.liu.se/~jhs/userscript/bookstores/bookburro.user.js (it also includes the alldirect patch above, and, figuring Powell's Books want customers, I took the liberty of adding ajax fetching and parsing to them, too)
73. Thu, 26 Oct 2006 WSKTB says:
    Hey: First of all, book burro is a great and awesome script, probably the better one I've seen. I've repaired some broken bookstores, added some more, and added flags images to the bookstore. I've also integrated the script with WebSwissKnifeToolBar, in order to improve both. You could find both versions on http://blog.wsktoolbar.com
74. Mon, 06 Nov 2006 Doug says:
    Hey, do you guys have www.thriftbooks.com on the list? I recently found them and tons of their books sell for one cent. They might be a good site to add for price comparing (if they let you)
75. Thu, 22 Nov 2007 Rachel says:
    Yeah, textbook prices are out of control lately! In college I dropped over $500 in one semester. To combat this I smartened up and started using book price comparison search engines. The one I personally think is the best is SmartBookFinder.com for finding discount books. They search the major on-line bookstores like Amazon, Half, AbeBooks, Barnes & Noble, etc. to return me the lowest price on the Internet Worldwide. I am all about time savers and money savers, and this is definitely one of those. Also, buy your books used if you can and make sure the bookseller is reputable. Cheers!
76. Wed, 30 Jan 2008 Bobby says:
    Very good blog. tks
77. Thu, 31 Jan 2008 Layout says:
    Cool! its really good prices this season, too.
78. Thu, 13 Mar 2008 superking says:
    Good Article. Visit www.popvoucher.co.uk if you have time.
79. Wed, 14 May 2008 ananstasiya says:
80. Wed, 14 May 2008 says:
81. Sat, 14 Jun 2008 Belinda says:
    Dealoz searches hundreds of book sites for author, title, isbn, or keyword. The best price will be returned, which includes Amazon and ebay in the searches. It works great.

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