Welcome. This site, Pretty Nice Web, will grow into a premier site for book reviews. This will be a place where you can get the news on good books that come into my hands. I have a couple of hundred to start with and I'm looking out for more.
Of course if you're interested in purchasing books there's always Amazon:
You can search here for information on books that I have offered for sale on Ebay. At the moment the author names are not separated into first name / surname. I need to fix that problem. So, when you search for a name you may get many more than you bargained for, or you may get titles and authors you didn't expect.
Over the last year I have been selling good quality used books on Ebay as a way to add some income to my diminishing savings. I have put a lot of effort into providing good service. To date I have 240 customers, I have made 250 transactions and sold about 280 books. Most of the books cost about $2.00, but some have got embroiled in a bidding war and the record went for nearly $30.
As part of my sales strategy I copy the blurb from the book's cover and insert it into the product description, with other information about the particular book I'm offering. Most of the time this is done by scanning the text and then using an OCR (Optical Character Recognition) to convert the scan into editable text. Sometimes this doesn't work and I have to type the blurb. I then style the blurb using HTML and CSS. The result is always neat, tidy. I confess there's an occasional error in the OCR that I fail to pick up when I proofread. Nobody's perfect!
I also scan the front cover of the book so potential buyers get a close view of the book's condition. This is not always possible either. For example scanning a hardback which has no dust jacket would be pointless. Then I take a photo of the book against a plain background.
By the way, one of the best tips I gleaned from a book on digital photography was to use the time release setting to avoid picture shake. Obvious when you think about it.
The upshot of all this is that I had a vast quantity of text and pictures that was rather disorganised. So, over the last three weeks I have converted the system to a database. All the relevant information is now stored in a MySQL system on my home computer. And I have now written several scripts that let me add and edit and review the information very quickly. I can even print my receipts from the HTML generated from the data. It's way cool and at the moment it suits me down to the ground.