I have just discovered (actually, via this comment on OzBargain, thanks to kevst) this Australian book price search engine — Booko.com.au. This site was built with Ruby on Rails by Dan Milne in Melbourne to “scratch his itches”, according to the about page:

This site was built to scratch an itch of mine. Where to find the cheapest place to buy a book in Australia? Sure, it’s normally Amazon except when it’s not. And what if I want to buy 3 or 4 or 5 books? Which shops have the best shipping options? Or maybe I’d just like to pop into some bricks and mortar and pick one up the old fashioned way?

While it’s “user interface” is not flashy like many of today’s “web 2.0″ applications, I have to say that it’s probably one of the most useful thing I found online this month! It has a no-frills entry page with descriptions on what this site is about, and a search box to let you search by book title or ISBN. Search result returns you a list of books that match your criteria, and then you can click into the book for price comparison.

In my case I am looking for the cheapest place with Real World Haskell. And this is the result I get:

It lists out the common attributes — book title, author, ISBN, book format, etc. Then it searches through all its providers in parallel for the best price. It not only includes delivery cost (very important for online shopping), it also calculates the exchange rate for overseas merchants so everything is presented in AUD. In my case, Fishpond wins the price comp by a big margin. In fact I am about to buy this book…

Update: It ended up that Fishpond’s pricing was wrong so I bought the book from TheBookDepository.co.uk. Thanks Booko!