We recently added a new feature to Inkmesh: ETextbooks. Along with other vendors like Amazon, Oreilly etc. who already sell textbooks, we added 2 new retailers: CourseSmart and ECampus who specialize in selling e-textbooks.

We also added a new filter on our left-side-bar for easily filtering out textbooks from other books on the topic. So for the query ‘computer programming’ if you are only interested in e-textbooks, then simply click on the ETextbooks link on the left rail as shown below:

All Content
Ebooks
» ETextbooks
Audiobooks
Newspapers
Magazines
Blogs

Clicking on the ETextbooks will lead you to this link below and give you all textbooks for {computer programming} in our index.

We hope this feature helps not only college and school students, but is useful to anyone who wants to become an expert in the topic without buying the more expensive and bulky physical textbook.

You can now filter all results on Inkmesh by average user rating – here are some examples:

Free Science Fiction Books for the Kindle rated 3 stars and above

All Promotional Free Ebooks from Barnes & Noble rated 4 stars and above

Books by (and about) the Bronte Sisters rated 4 stars and above

Sometimes you know exactly what you want to read, but for the times when you don’t, this should help you find your next ebook even more quickly.

Ebook retailers and self-published authors often offer free in-copyright ebooks for a limited time. These offers can disappear within days, sometimes even hours, but now you can stay on top of these deals with a new Inkmesh feature: Limited Time Free Ebooks.

Inkmesh bots now monitor the free ebook inventory at Amazon, Sony and Barnes & Noble every hour and keep the free ebook list at http://inkmesh.com/free-ebooks/ up-to-date. Some of these ebooks might not be free outside the United States, but they will still be the cheapest books you can find at these sites.

The results are sorted by ‘deal freshness’ – more recent free ebook offers are listed first along with the date when they were found. Expired deals are removed instantly, so the list on the free ebooks page is always current, at least on an hourly basis.

We will be adding more stores to this list soon; we also plan to allow email signups for free ebook alerts so you don’t have to keep checking the list every day (or every hour if you are so inclined). If there are other things you would like to see on the free ebooks page, let us know. Otherwise, go find your next free-read!

At Inkmesh we constantly ask ourselves how we can make ebook search better, and we’re always trying to improve by listening to our users and by studying how they interact with the site. Based on this feedback, we have made some changes over the last few days:

• Language Filters: A third of our visitors are from outside the United States, and the ability to filter results by language has been one of our most-requested features for a very long time. Not any more – you can now filter results by the most common languages in our index. English is still the predominant language, but we have thousands of ebooks in French, German, Spanish and Italian. We will introduce filtering on more languages as part of the planned advanced search feature.
• Improved Subject Browsing: We have completely overhauled the way we rank ebooks when you browse by subject. Subject searches are now even faster, and our new ranking algorithm gives much more importance to ebook popularity instead of focusing heavily on price as in the previous version. Users have already begun clicking through to many more ebooks as a result of this change, and we’re going to continue to improve it so you can find the right ebook even more quickly.
• UK Sites: We recently added UK ebook retailers Waterstone’s and WHSmith to our list – this should help our UK users with ebook price comparisons. Both these retailers display ebook prices in GBP on their sites, but to make comparisons easier we display their prices in USD using the latest exchange rate from Google. We plan to add more UK retailers and display book prices in other currencies soon.
• Where available, we now display the average rating and user review count for search results and on individual book pages. For most ebooks we have rating and review information from multiple sites; we select the site with the highest number of reviews for that book.

We hope you like these changes – feel free to leave feedback on our forum here, on Twitter, Facebook or over email. We look forward to hearing from you!