Tweet the title and ISBN with the hashtag #icanhazpdf. Include a throwaway e-mail address if you have one. If anyone has access to the file you're looking for, they should get back to you shortly. Delete the tweet afterwards to avoid cluttering the hashtag.
I made the mistake of helping out someone else using the hashtag and my account was instantly locked out. Now I'm going through the wankery of using a disposable phone number to reverify the account.
Thank you for the shout, though, I'll remember this in the future.
The search engine bookfinder.com is often pretty good, though a lot of the sites it searches are those whose pricing system is absolutely fucking absurd, probably one of those incrementally increasing ones which don't do anything at all. I've seen the same books going for a penny or £999.
>>4864 I have honestly bought books through bookfinder's witchery on one site its mechanism scans on more than one occasion and noticed prices jump to the £100+ or be 50p. Seriously, buying books is stupid.
Companies like betterworldbooks and medimops.de are worth looking at, their listings for the same book as sold on different platforms can, again, vary wildly in price. German amazon is worth a shout, as their books are subsidised.
>>4865 >their listings for the same book as sold on different platforms can, again, vary wildly in price
I have direct experience of building pricing algorithms for book selling platforms. Very very few booksellers keep stock anymore1 - when they show you an "in-stock" price, they are actually reflecting the best price that their wholesalers will give them at the time - all booksellers use multiple wholesalers (and many of them share those same suppliers, but will have different deals on margin). When you order the book, they order the book from their suppliers, and "cross-dock" the book the next day when it arrives at their warehouse, or in some cases, their supplier will send it direct to you, with that retailers packaging. An additional quirk of pricing is whether the retailer includes postage in the cost of the book, as many do now.2
Price-comparison / book-searching sites will scrape or download those prices from retailers, regularly during the day - the prices will be cached for a while, depending on the site. Those retail prices will then change during the day, as stock changes at their back-end suppliers. Because a retailer has multiple suppliers, selling to them at different prices, the price of a book on any retail site could change multiple times throughout the day.
1 - Amazon obviously have the largest retail warehouses, but they'll only stock perhaps the top 100,000 titles, by sales volume, out of a universe of perhaps 20 million books in print.
2 - Because of the inclusion of the postage costs, many book-sellers will geolocate their users, figure out which country you're coming from, and modify the price accordingly depending on the postage cost. This also confuses the price comparison sites.
>>4866 Interesting. There must've been some alignment of the stars when I bought a lot of ex-libris academic works on the Warsaw Pact about 5 years ago, as plenty of them are now routinely selling for £20 a go, rather than the pennies I spent. The algorithms back then did seem pretty strange though, often with upper-end prices on amazon marketplace, there would be two or more vendors somehow increasing their prices on a daily basis to dizzying heights, to the point you'd expect the books to be printed on Martian vellum, I take it not every vendor employs the same sort of algorithm then?
>>4867 >with upper-end prices on amazon marketplace, there would be two or more vendors somehow increasing their prices on a daily basis to dizzying heights
That's a slightly different thing I think - most tech savvy sellers on Marketplace revise their prices multiple times per day, to snipe at their competitors and drive prices down, ie to be the cheapest by a couple of pennies - when you see prices rising to stupid heights, it's nearly always an algorithm going wrong in some way. As an example, I once knew of/detected a competing seller scraping the prices of the company I worked for, so I made the system detect and show them slightly higher prices to break their algorithm - that kind of thing goes on a lot.
