bookaboo.org - Questions & Answers
Is bookaboo Spyware, Malware or Scumware?
Absolutely not. No information about you is collected or stored at any time.
What's your Privacy Policy?
The bookaboo privacy policy is simple: bookaboo doesn't track data, except where technically necessary. Please see the fine print - which is, to quote Douglas Adams, "Mostly Harmless" - at the end of this page.
How does bookaboo know about the books I'm viewing?
bookaboo analyzes the web page your are viewing and tries to find information about the book. If it does, the bookaboo window appears in the upper left corner of the web page.
How do I remove bookaboo from my computer?
bookaboo comes with an uninstaller. If you can't find the uninstaller in your Start menu, please download and install bookaboo again; this will add the uninstaller to your Start menu, which you can then use to remove it from your computer.
Which online stores does bookaboo search?
Here's a partial list of the merchant sites that bookaboo checks:
How do I get my favourite bookstore listed in bookaboo?
We are always looking to add new book stores to bookaboo! If you want to see your favourite books store in bookaboo, please drop us a note in the Feedback Forum and we will look into it!
Who did this wonderful thing?
The bookaboo software and web site were created by Andreas Pizsa, but both wouldn't exist without the help and support from a few more people whom I'd link to thank: Alma Sonnleitner for her feedback, Wolfgang Ante for his inspiration and for bringing the Mac spirit back into my life (yes, there's going to be a Mac version ;) ), Andreas Paumann - thanks for sharing your office and everything, Dean Edwards for his wonderful JavaScript work, Douglas Crockford for reminding me that XML is a bloated, unelegant data format, Guy Kawasaki for writing the right books at the right time, Harald Kapper for taking me the the Fanta4 concert, Markus Gruber for finding a bug 1 hour before the 1.0 release :) Tim "You're a machine!" Quinton for finding a typo, also one hour before release :) and last - but certainly not least - Jesse Andrews for the BookBurro Greasemonkey add-on.
My question is not answered here - whom do I contact
Please visit the Feedback Forum, powered by Google Groups.
The "Mostly Harmless" Privacy Policy
- We don't track or store any personal information such as your name, e-mail address, your street address, phone number, whatever.
- We don't track the web sites you visit.
- We don't track your shopping or surfing behavior.
- We do store your preferences in a cookie on your computer. Your browser sends these preferences to our servers with each price lookup.
- "Preferences" are your country and your currency. We do this
- to find the merchants that ship to your country (so that you don't get a list of Chinese merchants that wouldn't ship to your country, anyway)
- to convert currencies, if necessary
- and to calculate shipping cost (this feature is currently not implemented, though).
- Merchants do store cookies on your computer so that they know you're coming from bookaboo.
- Merchants may (and are very likely to) store other cookies on your computer. These cookies are harmless and work in your favor; for example, amazon.com uses cookies to enable their systems to recognize your browser and to provide features such as 1-Click purchasing, New for You, personalized Amazon Honor System greetings, and storage of items in your Shopping Cart between visits.
- Merchants don't share personal information with us.
- Merchants may give us an overview of what was bought through bookaboo, but will never disclose who bought it. E.g., they will tell us that in May 2005, "Harry Potter 6" was purchased 3 times. This is done to calculate our sales commission.
- Google may store a cookie on your PC if you use the bookaboo Feedback Forum, which is powered by Google Groups.
- "What's a cookie, anyway?" you might wonder. A cookie is a way for a web site to remember information. It's a harmless electronic text-"tag" that the web site sends to your web browser. The web browser stores this information on your PC and sends it back to the web site whenever you visit that site again. That's quite convenient if you don't want to re-type your e-mail address each time you log in to your Yahoo or Google account, or if you want Amazon to remember your name. At some point in recent history though, someone discovered that FUD tactics (fear, uncertainty, doubt) can make you a real lot of money, and decided that cookies are evil because advertisers also use them to track how often you've seen an ad. Since then, more and more Anti-Spyware products identify cookies as a "security risk". Which is good for them, because almost every web site uses cookies in some way. Anti-Spyware products can now save you from hundreds of "security risks". You should really feel lucky and buy their newest software upgrade! Either way, it's still a good idea to install an Anti Spware product :)