BookAdder: OverviewWhat BookAdder DoesBookAdder is a simple way to add a freestanding bookshop onto any existing web site. Adding such a bookshop has two chief attractions: first, it has some SEO ("Search-Engine Optimization") value; second, it can make you a little money. As to SEO value: BookAdder adds a large number of pages to your site. The exact number will vary--as you will see--but typically it's in the range of forty-five to fifty thousand pages. Moreover, those pages are not spammy junk: they are real, content-rich, and frequently changing pages, most or all fairly relevant to your site's main theme. The exact value of large numbers of web-site pages to search engines is, like everything about search engines, unknowable; but there seems general agreement that the more, the better, provided the pages are valid and relevant. As to income: presumably neither of us reckons bookselling to be a major line for you (if it were, you would doubtless have long since established your own bookshop). But, though BookAdder has a large SEO element to it, it should bring you in some modest little income stream, and any income at all sure beats a poke in the eye with a sharp stick. As stated in the little introductory file READ_ME.NOW, the way money is handled here is on a 50-50 share basis: there is a randomizer--essentially an electronic coin tosser--built into these scripts that assigns any particular visitor inquiry to either your Amazon/Abebooks account or to mine, with an average 50% probability between us. You get many thousands of nice pages added to your site and, we both hope, a little money, and I get a little money that might even some day add up, with enough users, to sufficient to have made my extensive expenditure of time on this toy worth having incurred. Note, by the way, that you can have as many separate BookAdder bookshops as you like--so if you have one or more "sub-sites" under one domain, each can have its own BookAdder bookshop oriented to that sub-site's distinct theme. Selling BooksObviously, to take advantage of the income opportunities, you need to be an "affiliate" of Amazon or Abebooks (or, ideally, both); in fact, you can be affiliated with any or, ideally, all six of Amazon's national divisions--U.S., U.K., Canada, Germany, France, and Japan--because you'll have what amounts to a separate shop for each. If you're not now an Amazon affiliate or an Abebooks affiliate, you can look into signing up at these pages: Each Amazon division requires a separate signup, and issues its own distinct ID data. While the three Amazon non-English-language divisions' pages are in their native tongues, the signup process is so parallel from division to division that you can fill out one from looking at a screen of another (one that is in English). BookAdder does not yet make use of the any of new Abebooks international services, but so far as I can see, the old, standard Abebooks includes sellers around the world anyway. How BookAdder Sets UpBookAdder installs entirely in its own directory (and some subdirectories off that): none of its files--supplied or made--go anywhere outside that directory. Once installed, BookAdder effectively looks like six separate bookshops, one for each Amazon division, even though it uses one set of scripts for all; but you get what amounts to six separate pages for each title (though not all titles appear in all divisions). The titles listed are refreshed at regular intervals--you control that, but I strenuously recommend nightly--for each division (for the foreign-language divisions, only books in English are listed, something each carries a good lot of) based on a search phrase that you supply, so that the titles located are relevant to your site. To help you tune your search, BookAdder includes a tool that will tell you how many titles a given phrase will locate at each division, and which allows you to change your phrase in real time as you experiment. (The BookAdder docfiles include a whole separate doc on tuning your search, which we will get to in its place.) BookAdder manifests to your visitors as a "front-door" page explaining your bookshops (including a way for them to set the division of their preference, which means that there are in effect really six front-door pages). From any divisional entry page they can go on to any of several other places (each differing by division):
About those 27 title list pages (the workhorses of your bookshop): each of those pages lists some number of books whose titles begin with the corresponding letter, with some minimal information beyond just the title--the author, the publisher and publication date, the form of binding, the estimated availability, and of course the price. Each of those title listings is a clickable link that will bring up a full detail page on the selected title, with a large image of the cover (when Amazon has one), more detailed buying information, and all "editorial" and reader reviews available from Amazon for the book. (For obscure books, there may be no reviews; for popular ones, there may be hundreds--BookAdder always lists them in the order in which other readers have found those reviews to be helpful.) From that detail page, your visitors can one-click "buy" the book at the corresponding Amazon division. ("Buy" is in quotation marks because the click doesn't instantly buy the book, but rather puts it in the visitor's Shopping Cart at that Amazon, from which the purchase can be made at once or later, as the visitor prefers, as is usual with carts.) That per-title page will also list some "related items" (other books), increasing the chances that your visitor will buy something. More important, it will show how many used copies of that exact edition are avaiable through Abebooks and starting from what lowest price; that Abebooks datum is a clickable link that will take your visitor to a new page showing all the used copies available (or, if there are many, which is often the case, will be the first of several pages). The visitor can set many options there to further refine the initial search, and can put any particular used-book offering into an Abebooks Shopping Cart for purchase. It is those per-title pages, and the associated used-editions pages, that make up the great bulk of pages being added to your site. How BookAdder WorksBookAdder makes use of Amazon's web data interface. When started up (which can, and should, be done automatically, ideally once a day), it uses your search phrase and searches, in turn, each of the six Amazon divisions for titles using that phrase as a "keywords" search. Amazon imposes two restrictions: not over one inquiry a second, and a maximum of 4,000 returned titles per search phrase. Since it delivers 10 titles to a page, and you always want to be at the maximum (which is much too low, but that's Amazon), it will take roughly 400 seconds per division, which is about forty minutes for all 6 divisions--and that's the minimum time, because Amazon's servers do not by any means always reply within one second when queried. In the real world, times double that minimum are not uncommon (figure an hour and a half as typical). Another Amazon quirk is that not all returned titles are truly available. BookAdder is smart enough to filter out the "ringers" (books sold only by non-Amazon third parties; books "available" only with weeks of delay, meaning probably never; "books" that aren't books but are what the trade calls "nonbooks"; and other suchlike trash), but the consequence is that the 4,000 titles you get typically boil down to about two-fifths (average seems around 38%) as many real books really available for purchase. (If you're wondering, yes, Amazon associates have been screaming for years now for fixes for these matters, so far to no avail: as Lily Tomlin's Ernestine the Telephone-Company rep used to say, "We don't care; we don't have to.") BookAdder always requests the titles in "sales-order" rank, so the most popular sellers come first. Having gotten its six lists (one per division), BookAdder filters out the "ringers", alphabetizes the remaining items, and formats them for display on the list 27 pages (per division). It then generates new sitemaps of the "pages" those listings represent on your site ("pages" in quotations because there are not distinct physical files for each page, but rather PHP scripts with differing parameters that generate correspondingly different apparent pages). To give you some feel for the numbers, assume a particular edition is available in all six divisions; there are then, for that one item, six Amazon per-book pages and, for each of those six, four corresponding Abebooks pages (the Abebooks ISBN-based availables page and corresponding Abe "parameters-change" page, and the Abebooks title/author-based page and its associated parameters-change page)--so there are 30 pages in all (6 divisions x 5 pages per division). If you get 4,000 listings that boil down to 1,520 real availables, that would be 45,600 pages added to your site! Actual figures will vary depending on, 1) whether your search phrase really maxes out (minimum of 4,000 titles in each division), and 2) the actual percentage really available for that lot at each division. But it should be quite a few no matter what, which was the idea. (More Amazonia: at present, sales-order search is listed by Amazon as a "Known Problem", shorthand for "it don't work"; titles are probably being delivered right now in random order, whereas we want the best-selling ones first. Perhaps some day . . . .) BookAdder Requirements and Set-UpThe package runs on PHP, which virtually all hosts make available. For various technical reasons, it requires a minimum PHP version of 4.1.0, which is pretty antique by now; if your server has PHP at a level below that, it's long due for an upgrade anyway. The next requirement is that your server's PHP be configured as either PHP's "Safe Mode" OFF or your PHP "cgi-wrapped" (meaning that an ancillary program called a wrapper is supplied to run PHP). If "Safe Mode" is ON and there is no wrapping, these scripts (and a very great number of other PHP-based packages) cannot run properly. These matters are more completely discussed in the BookAdder Security docfile, but suffice it to say that if conditions on your server conspire to make this package unusable, it won't be the only one and you have a right to be peeved with your hosting service. One other requirement is that your hosting service have not turned off remote-fopen capability in PHP ("remote fopen" means that PHP can read files via the internet--some hosts disable that facility owing to security fears, as some inept users have written weak PHP scripts that invite malicious misuse by remote files). Don't worry about how to figure out whether any of those conditions apply. When you begin installation, the first thing you will be doing is running a preliminary script that checks them all for you and reports back. In most cases, you will find that you are ok right off the bat. When you are not, it will usually be something that your host can quickly and easily adjust for you (and that should have been so adjusted anyway). After the preliminary check (if all is ok), you will need to do some modest customizing. There is an extensive and highly detailed procedure detailed in the next docfile along, but really all you need to set--in one small file you edit with any text editor--are a half-dozen simple data: the name by which you want your site referred to (such as The Friends of Red Cats Society Website); the search phrase you want to use, and--in case it's a "complex" expression (something explained in the next docfile)--a shorthand form for it (such as evolution not "intelligent design" for the phrase and Evolution Science as the shorthand), of which visitors will see only the shorthand form; the filename you want to give your bookshop's "front page", preferably one chosen for its SEO value (such as red-cats-book-shop.php), instead of the generic default book-shop.php; the URL of your "favicon" file if you use one for your site (If you don't, no problem, just leave it blank, and if you do, you'll know what it is); and finally your Amazon and Abebooks ID affiliate ID codes (how to see what your Abebooks code is explained in the next doc if you are an affiliate and never bothered to find it out because you use their pre-made HTML for links). As you see, nothing complicated or trying anywhere. The customizing should take seconds, except for tuning your exact search phrase, for which there is a special tool. There is, in fact, a separate BookAdder docfile on search-phrase tuning, so you get a better idea of what you're doing and why. It and the special-purpose script supplied will make the job simple. After you have determined that things are properly set up and running, there are some other customization files that allows you to change some aspects of the "look and feel" of the BookAdder pages in various ways, including changing some background and text colors (and even text sizes). There is a separate BookAdder docfile on "look-and-feel" tuning for that, and a special tool to easily show you what effect any changed options would have. Those who might want to go further in customizing the look of pages, perhaps so that they exactly match the rest of your site (something I myself do not consider necessary or important, as your bookshop is a quasi-independent part of your site, and can have its own look), and who are not afraid of HTML or PHP, can freely edit the appropriate file packages, in which the form of the HTML is not hard to see. Moving OnBookAdder Documentation Files AvailableThey are:
What to Read NextIf you are upgrading from any earlier version of this software, previously distributed under the name "Freebie", you must next read the docfile Upgrading. That applies even if you once used such a version and no longer do (there might be some stuff still hanging around in your robots.txt file, or even--Heaven forfend--your .htaccess file). Otherwise, you are ready to install and initialize BookAdder. Click on to proceed to the Installing BookAdder docfile. |