Take that, Amazon!

I got tired of having to redirect links of books on websites from Amazon to independent bookstores, or copy/pasting them from the NYT book reviews, so I made this simple bookmarklet that lets me select a title and/or author and search Goodreads with one click.

To install: drag the link below to the bookmark bar in your browser.

Search Goodreads

To use:

Select the text for the book title and/or author on a web page, then click the "Search Goodreads" bookmark.

It should pass the selected text to Goodreads in a search that it opens in a new window. If you're a member of Goodreads and signed on, you will be able to add the book to your books and find an independent bookseller to buy it from.

You can try it out here with this title by one of my favorite authors:

What Are People For? by Wendell Berry

(If you're unfamiliar with bookmarklets, ask Google.)

PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE SUPPORT your independent booksellers through local or online book purchases. Right now B&N, Amazon, Wal-mart, and Apple are poised to create a monopoly on books and eBooks and frankly I want to support small businesses with ties to my community. They are some of the few remaining "Great, Good Places" we have left in this country.

Disclaimer: I take no responsibility for the use of this bookmarklet, so the risk you take in using it is your own.

It works for me in Firefox and Chrome but I haven't tried it in Internet Exploder.

This is a really a boneheaded bit of Javascript (I don't even bother to encode the query string and just let the browser do it because some characters like apostrophes might not get handled properly by the JS).

Also you might have to tweak the size of the window for smaller computers. It's currently set to:

width=1000,height=600

If you run into any problems, just post them here and I'll take a look when I can.