Brugge Blog

I learned about BookBurro last month at a GreaseMonkey session at the Great Lakes Software Symposium, and if anything can make the value of GreaseMonkey real, this is it. GreaseMonkey’s idea is fiendishly simple, to let you attach some of your own JavaScript to a web page. There are tons of useful GreaseMonkey scripts out there for doing small things (for example, turn any web address on a page into a clickable link), but BookBurro is the one that everyone can understand. The one that gets the reaction of “ah, so that’s what it means to add your own behavior to someone else’s web page. Wow, does Amazon know about this?” BookBurro is now a full-fledged Firefox plugin instead of a GreaseMonkey script, making install and settings much easier, but what it does is a testament to GreaseMonkey more than anything else.

BookBurro’s simple idea: any page that has book information on it (say Amazon.com or Powells.com), BookBurro shows itself as a small floating panel at the top of the page. When you click it, it goes out and finds what that book would cost at other book sites.

That is cool enough, but while comparison shopping is a great tool to have right on the page for you, the piece that clinched it for me is that they added WorldCat support for searching libraries as well. Say you’re on an Amazon book page and you’d rather to get it from your local library instead of buying it. Click the BookBurro floater and it will find libraries that have it in their catalog. And if you tell BookBurro your zip code, it will rank the libraries by distance from you. Bing bang boom, book on hold, ready for you to pick it up. Now that is cool.

Even though BookBurro doesn’t add any time to the day to let me actually read any of these books that I can so conveniently get, the fact that it reduces the distance between a desire and a result in part of my web world makes it a beauty to me.