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Your books on euro-book.co.uk

A comparison of sites that purchase books www.gebrauchtebuecher.info can be helpful when choosing the right buyer for your old books. This free online comparison platform is based on practical data to generate an accurate profile of buyers and also references current special deals.

Information for private sellers

If you want to sell books privately we would recommend the platforms eBay, Amazon as well as www.booklooker.de. For the latter you pay no upfront fee but only 8% commission once your book has been sold.

Information for antiquarians

As a professional Antiquarian we would recommend that you join at least one of the bigger marketplaces >www.zvab.com, >www.abebooks.de und >www.amazon.de as well as listing your books at >www.buchfreund.de.

Information for platforms: Euro-Book.co.uk Meta-search-interface

For whom is this description?
This description is for platforms, that want to participate with the meta-search-engine euro-book.co.uk,so that there books are searched by and results displayed on euro-book.co.uk. An acceptable platform should offer a complete catalog of new books and/or at least 30 third party antiquarians/used book sellers and/or 300.000 titles.

The check-out and order processing will always remain on your server(s) and will be executed by the platform from which the results come from.

To have your results shown on euro-book.co.uk there are basically two options:

  1. you provide a search interface (API), that is called with every search and delivers the corresponding results.
  2. you provide a data feed with all your bookdata, then the search will be performed exclusively on euro-book.co.uk servers. euro-book.co.uk would do this up to a maximum of 500.000 books, after that an API must be available.

What data do I provide and/or give access to euro-book.co.uk?
The data must be in separate fields in an easy to read format, i.e. CSV or XML. Please provide as many fields as possible.

  • Author
  • Title
  • Price
  • Order link to your website
  • Publisher
  • Publishing year
  • Shipping cost
  • Delivery time
  • Description text: number of pages, etc.
    Please provide as much description as possible. Our experience shows that the more information available for the customer the higher likelihood he/she will order.
  • ISBN-number EAN-number
  • Your unique book number: If from this number the order-link can be inferred, then you do not need to provide an additional order link.
  • Currency: If the currency is not always the same, then you have to indicate the currency with the book price, (book price without shipping costs!)
  • Country: country where the book is stored physically (usually it is the country of the seller), if it is always the same this information does not need to be provided
  • Name of the actual seller that is offering the book
  • URL to a preview picture that should be aprox. 80 Pixel wide and will be (if provided) displayed on the results page.
  • Shipping costs: Please indicate at least the shipping costs for Germany, if you can indicate costs per individual book.
  • Additional fields: If you have more information for a book, please don't hesitate to provide it, whenever possible we will try to display it as well and it is always positive to make it easier for a customer to take a decision based on complete information.
Search interface

With the search interface - API (we prefer this option) an URL (which you indicate) will be addressed/called at your server, i.e.
"https://www.ihrserver.com/ebsearch.cgi?author=Holl&title=Jesus&isbn=123456789X&keyword=gesellschaft".
Thereby the search parameters entered by the user will be transmitted (in this example the user entered Author "Holl", "Jesus" as title, etc.). How the parameters are called (in this case "author", "title" etc.) can be defined by you. You must at least support the parameter "keyword", that will search all fields (also author, title and ISBN-number). Any parameter can also be blank, all parameters will be "and-linked". If in a parameter more than one word is entered (separated by a blank space), then it is also interpreted as "and-linked". The search interface must then find the corresponding books for this search on your database and send the response back to euro-book.co.uk (HTTP-Response). This response should be easy to parse, either in CSV-Format (one row per book) you can choose the separation signs, or in XML-Format (for which you can freely choose field and attribute names).

Usual problems with the search interface:
Please note that we execute many searches per day, currently about 20.000, that is about 2000 searches per hour. You have to consider that during peak times you might receive a search request every second. Please also consider that even if in all likelihood search results will be delivered in less than a second, if some searches run in parallel (which can easily happen), these can thwart each other. Check your system based on these performance requirements (performance test) before we connect your platform online (see below). Please also note, that depending on the amount of books in your catalog, there can be many searches without result. Usually these type of searches are the ones that cause the highest performance requirements.

Tips for the usage of mySQL:
If you mySQL 4.x or higher, we recommend the use of full text indices. From the transmitted parameters generate strings, for example "SELECT ... WHERE MATCH(title) AGAINST('+"Holl" +"Adolf"' IN BOOLEAN MODE)". Place full text indices over author, title (that is two full text indices) and the combination from author, title, description and ISBN-number. Place a separate index for the ISBN-number (normal Index) as "SELECT ... WHERE isbn='123456789X'".

Shipping costs:
You have to at least indicate shipping costs for Germany, this is a legal requirement. Thus please provide the possibility to transmit the shipping costs separate from the book price (in a specified field). We can also provide you with the information regarding the destination country (ISO-Code) for the shipping costs to be calculated.

Transmission of the complete book data

The complete book data must be ready to be called for at your server (in the same format as for the search interface, CSV or XML) per FTP, HTTP, SCP or similar, through an automated call at a specified time (i.e. once a week). The file(s) must always be named the same, so that we can import the data without any manual input via a fully automated process.

Sales commission

euro-book.co.uk only integrates platforms, that pays a commission for every book that is sold to customers coming from euro-book.co.uk. Therefore you should either have an existing affiliate program or be in a position to determine if an order was consummated or not. All forwarded users through an order link must be added each month (sum of all orders) and ideally each individual order with date, time, book title and price must be listed individually. This settlement/calculation, with at least monthly data should be ready to be retrieved by us or send by you.

Process flow of the integration

Usually the integration is executed as follows:

  • First a commercial/legal contract between euro-book.co.uk and your platform is agreed upon. At this point you must already have decided if you want to use the search interface or provide us with a data feed. In case you chose the data feed additional costs might be charged since we need to take care of hard- and software to process your data. To contact us please use the following link Contact form.
  • If you have questions regarding this description please also use our contact form.
  • You implement either the search interface (API) or the data feed and inform our programmers about the details.
  • Subsequently we check your implementation and if all is correct we make all necessary adaptations on our site.
  • In case you decided for the API we will coordinate an appointment with your technical people on which date euro-book.co.uk will activate your platform. This is usually during the week (Mo-Fr) at around 9:00 am (CET). This day a euro-book.co.uk programmer and someone from your technical department is readily available, to intervene in case this is necessary (usually to deactivate your platform from euro-book.co.uk). If everything works our until the next morning, your platform will remain active and online. We have chosen this approach since in the past mostly smaller platform have experienced performance problems. This way we can react almost immediately.
  • In case you decide to go with a data feed we will activate it immediately (on euro-book.co.uk).
  • If you want to provide us with your platform logo to have it displayed on our homepage, please do so in the size 54x22 Pixel.