Booksearch

Booksearch is an approachable piece of software that facilitates a user-friendly solution for looking up books. It provides you with a desktop client and several book searching services, including Amazon, BAM!, BookFinder and Powell's. The app comes loaded with intuitive options that can be handled even by inexperienced users.

Installing this tool is a fast and easy job that shouldn't impose any difficulties, thanks to the fact that it integrates only familiar options. As for the interface, Booksearch adopts a small window that shows all options available.

You can search books by keywords, title or author, choose the online services to look into, and specify the display mode. By default, the application opens an Internet Explorer instance for each service, which means that it can open up to 10 instances at a time.

However, you can ask it to display search results in a single IE instance by creating rows, columns or a grid, provided that you are scanning up to four online services. These websites are AbeBooks, OnlineBooks, Books-A-Million, Powell's, Amazon, BookFinder, Barnes & Noble, and ZVAB.com. The other ones are no longer available (Borders.com, Collins Books).

The tool has buttons for selecting or deselecting all websites, as well as for inverting the selection. Plus, you can make this frame stay on top of other windows, and open an offline HTML page to consult a glossary with the book condition and sizes, together with common abbreviations.

Search jobs were conducted quickly in our tests while the app remained light on system resources consumption, so it didn't hamper the PC's performance. It delivered book matches without hanging, crashing or displaying error messages.

On the other hand, it doesn't let you pick the preferred web browser to perform scans in, and it doesn't take into account the default one (only Internet Explorer). On top of that, two of the supported online services are no longer available, and the interface could use some improvements. However, we must take into account that Booksearch hasn't been updated for a long time.