Courselect received a “small” refresh tonight with textbook purchase and selling feature! I’ve already went ahead and added a few books to the system so that you can see how it works. Technical stuff aside for now, I find this feature incredibly useful!

In the screenshot below, it shows prices from Amazon.com and Amazon.ca. The book is listed at $89.50 at the university book store; Amazon.com shows a price of $46.54. That’s almost half off! If you have an old book that you want to sell, it is as easy as entering the ISBN or UPC or SKU of the book and selecting the checkbox to sell your book if you have an account.

I’ll admit that this UI isn’t exactly the best right now, but I’m just trying to get the core features out the door before I do some insane UI improvements.

If the course doesn’t show any textbooks right now, all you need to do is enter the SKU or ISBN of the book to let the website do the searching work!

Now, the geeky stuff.

This is done over the course of 5 hours using Amazon E-commerce Service (ECS) as part of their Amazon Web Services offerings. There was a lot of tweaking that I had to do before I was able to retrieve any useful information from the website. I honestly have no idea what the CPU consumption is going to be like on the retrieval of information from AWS, but I’ll be finding out soon!

Currently my CPU consumption on the shared server is still quite low. A lot of the database queries are made for high-availability and/or cached so everything is fast fast fast (well, I can’t really help if any of the users are on dial-up… or equivalently, uw-wireless, jk haha).

More updates to come!