Book lovers, students, and others can find books both online and off at a discount.  One of the foundations of the Internet, amazingly, is books–which are decided non-Netish.  Amazon.com, however, has risen to become the world’s largest bookseller.  Thanks to the Internet.

Finding the lowest price for something is one of the cornerstones of online business, search engines, and has been the concept behind many a startup in the Web’s past.  So what makes this one different?

Well, to be honest, not much.  Booklookr.com is basically a low-price hunter site like any other.  It focuses on books, however, which is something that hasn’t been done (at least not very well) in the past.  It’s actually pretty good at that too, so it’s not “just another cheap price app.”

Originally aimed at college students looking for lower-cost books, which is nothing new online, really, it’s expanded to include most other booksellers too.  That is a good thing, since up until now, most of us just have to go to Amazon or eBay and hope we’re getting the best price.

Doing some searches through Booklookr, I found a lot of bargains (most of which were, admittedly, at Amazon).  A few online booksellers I’d never heard of came up occasionally and other venues that I knew about, but rarely visited like Barnes & Noble’s site also appeared once in a while.

So there’s definitely some use here.

It works pretty simply.  You can search by book title, ISBN, author, etc.  Matches will come up, usually with cover art, and you choose the one you’re after.  The five lowest-priced purchase options for the book appear with links to the vendor.  Some of these links are affiliates, so it’s obvious how Booklookr monetizes itself.

It’s a simple, useful, and free site.  Whether it comes up with the absolute lowest price I can’t say, but it does show some great bargains and does well enough for me to feel I’d have saved money trying it.  Definitely worth using and just in time for the Holidays!