We have a NEW WEBSITE! We hope you will be as impressed as we are with the great new features and functionality available. We invite you to take some time to browse through the new site and discover what's on offer. A few highlights are listed below.
- BROWSING IS EASY - Browse our stock by departments - New, Secondhand, Antiquarian or Bargain books or Artwork. As well as browse by Region, Subject or Artist within each department.
- INTUITIVE SEARCHING with the ability to refine your search results.
- IMPROVED LAYOUT OF BOOK RECORDS with images, related keywords and "You may also like" suggestions.
- CUSTOMER LOG IN offering quicker ordering, ability to view past orders, easily update details, create and send wishlists and request out of stock books.
- Customised SHOPPING CART - storing multiple addresses, more streamlined and user-friendly, more secure transmission and storage of credit card details.
You will also notice that our Yellow-talied Black Cockatoo logo has been redrawn with landscape banner on the home page. Many thanks to Peter Trussler for his artwork.
For more information on any of the features of our new website please visit the FAQ section of our website. If we can be of further assistance please contact us.
Friday, February 19, 2010
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
Adrian's Reptile World
Adrian's reptile world is a 13 part television series that road tests Australian reptiles as pets.
Now showing on Channel 31 in all capital cities, more information is available
at: www.reptiles.com.au
Many of the episodes include segments shot in the field to show natural habitats as well as some behaviours filmed for the first time. Interviews with many home grown experts across Australia, showing their collections and also with a licensed reptile collector in WA.
Now showing on Channel 31 in all capital cities, more information is available
at: www.reptiles.com.au
Many of the episodes include segments shot in the field to show natural habitats as well as some behaviours filmed for the first time. Interviews with many home grown experts across Australia, showing their collections and also with a licensed reptile collector in WA.
Friday, February 27, 2009
Natural Adaptations
Melbourne artist Sally White blends the beauty of Chinese brush painting techniques with the distinctive character of Australia’s native animals and plants in her latest exhibition which runs from 25 February to 15 March at the Chapel off Chapel Gallery in Prahran.
The 36 works in the show range from traditional Chinese subjects such as orchids and gold fish to Australian favorites like the echidna and the gracious dancing brolga.
Sally White says: “In this show I try to capture the spirit and energy of Australian nature as well as pay homage to the great traditions of Chinese art.”
“Language is acknowledged as the window into another culture. But I have discovered in learning Chinese brush painting, or shui mo, that art is equally powerful. For me, the brush is a bridge to a deeper understanding of Chinese culture.”
Sally White, who has been studying with master artist Anthony Sum for five years, recently won Best Exhibit in the annual Angair Art Show in rural Victoria for the second year running.
Chapel off Chapel Gallery Gallery hours
12 Little Chapel Street Monday to Sunday
Prahran 10 am to 5 pm
25 February - 15 March 2009
Thursday, January 29, 2009
Spiders - something to enjoy all day, every day
My obsession with spiders continues - and there are plenty of them around the house right now. They are still the same species I describe in "Spiders: learning to love them" - the house spiders, wolf spiders, daddy long-legs, trapdoors and those incredible garden orb weavers - but I constantly get to see new behaviour within metres of where I sit to write this. I become inordinately fond of each one of them.
28 grey house spiders (Badumna longinqua) made their webs on the glass pane doors this year. I have only got two left. One moulted today. Of the other 26, one died when moulting - always a risky business. One went to a white-tailed spider, which, despite a widely believed myth to the contrary, are harmless to us. But they feed on the house spiders. And the other 24 went to the birds. The superb blue wrens and the white-browed scrub wrens sit on the veranda rail and survey the smorgasbord. As each spider grows to the size of a decent meal, a bird attacks - with deadly accuracy - taking my wiggling friends mid-flight back to their nests. I even watched a white-throated tree-creeper climb the brickwork around the door feeding on my spiders. The birds bred well this year. But my two survivors stay hidden behind thick silk mesh, so I have high hopes they will make it to breeding.
There is one of the bigger black house spiders (Badumna insignis) who has made a web against the window in the kitchen - inside. I am much more used to them outside, but she is out on her web a lot of the time in the heat - she built her retreat against the metal window frame! I called her Fenestra (strangling the French for window). She's had male company in the web for a fortnight now.
And I haven't even started on the daddy long-legs with their egg sacs held in their jaws above my head, or the wolf spiders in their burrows just outside the back door. And to think - I used to be an arachnophobe. Never again!
28 grey house spiders (Badumna longinqua) made their webs on the glass pane doors this year. I have only got two left. One moulted today. Of the other 26, one died when moulting - always a risky business. One went to a white-tailed spider, which, despite a widely believed myth to the contrary, are harmless to us. But they feed on the house spiders. And the other 24 went to the birds. The superb blue wrens and the white-browed scrub wrens sit on the veranda rail and survey the smorgasbord. As each spider grows to the size of a decent meal, a bird attacks - with deadly accuracy - taking my wiggling friends mid-flight back to their nests. I even watched a white-throated tree-creeper climb the brickwork around the door feeding on my spiders. The birds bred well this year. But my two survivors stay hidden behind thick silk mesh, so I have high hopes they will make it to breeding.
There is one of the bigger black house spiders (Badumna insignis) who has made a web against the window in the kitchen - inside. I am much more used to them outside, but she is out on her web a lot of the time in the heat - she built her retreat against the metal window frame! I called her Fenestra (strangling the French for window). She's had male company in the web for a fortnight now.
And I haven't even started on the daddy long-legs with their egg sacs held in their jaws above my head, or the wolf spiders in their burrows just outside the back door. And to think - I used to be an arachnophobe. Never again!
Tuesday, September 16, 2008
Magpie Alert Excitement
We recently included a short booklist in the September issue of Wingspan, Birds Australia's full-colour, quarterly membership magazine. As part of this promotion we are offering a free copy of Magpie alert: learning to live with a wild neighbour by Darryl Jones with every order from this insert. This book offers a comprehensive guide to the Australian magpie and has been very well received by customers, as can be seen from the following email received from Helen. For more information on Magpie Alert click here. To view the insert included in the September issue of Wingspan click here.
Hi there, Jane and others at AINHB,
I was thrilled to get my free and totally unexpected copy of 'Magpie Alert'!
Although I had seen it in your list, and LOVE to watch magpies, I didn't think the book would interest me. Well, how wrong can you be? No book ever answers all your questions I suppose, but it was fascinating to learn that females whose partners had been translocated were joined so quickly by a new male, and to find out about the specialist cyclist/postie/pedestrian magpies, the safe distances from the nesting tree and, and, and .
Thanks again, it was a lovely gift. I'm now devouring my equally exciting pigeon book. Helen
I was thrilled to get my free and totally unexpected copy of 'Magpie Alert'!
Although I had seen it in your list, and LOVE to watch magpies, I didn't think the book would interest me. Well, how wrong can you be? No book ever answers all your questions I suppose, but it was fascinating to learn that females whose partners had been translocated were joined so quickly by a new male, and to find out about the specialist cyclist/postie/pedestrian magpies, the safe distances from the nesting tree and, and, and .
Thanks again, it was a lovely gift. I'm now devouring my equally exciting pigeon book. Helen
Thursday, August 21, 2008
WINNERS OF OUR KEYWORD SEARCH FEEDBACK COMPETITION
In response to our recent offer of a gift voucher for useful feedback on our new Keyword Search we received some excellent feedback and suggestions. We would like to thank everyone who responded and congratulate Robert Henzell and Carlos Ramirez Cruz, the winners of our competition. Each has been awarded a $100 gift voucher. Their feedback was particularly useful and relevant, some of which has already been acted upon, and can be read below.
Hello Andrew Isles
After trailing your new keyword search tool, I have two suggestions for improvement:
1) alphabetize keywords beginning with the same letter (eg, "R") vertically rather than horizontally. It is easier for the human eye (at least my eye!) to scan for the second and third letters of the keywords vertically down the column to find the ones sought than it is to stop briefly at each keyword and assimilate it to see if is the one being looked for before moving on horizontally (or in a zig zag fashion) to the next one.
2) in a search with multiple keywords, provide a facility to selectively remove one or more of them and add another one instead without having to clear them all and start the search again. For example, in a search with two keywords, after a search with Evolution + China I tried to go back to the screen that displayed the first one only (Evolution) and then to add a different second term (eg, Japan), but the search facility insisted on adding China as well as Japan. It seems all previously used words are included until you start a new keyword search.
Cheers
Robert
Hi,
A half price sale is definitely a good way to catch my attention. I clicked on the link and read the explanation of how your new keywordsystem works.
It wasn't immediately intuitive but I figured it out within a minute. For a second or two, while I was reading the e-mail, I thought that I was supposed to enter the letter "H" into the search text box (on the left), and then the letter "A", and so on.
When I saw that there were actual letters to click on I clicked on them and it took a second or two to realize that when I clicked on a keyword it was then displayed above the letters.
After I selected "Half-price" and then "Australia" I planned to enter"orchid" into the search box (on the left) and then hit the "Go" button. Then I thought I'd check to see if you listed "orchid" as a keyword, which you did. So I added "orchid" and did the search. If I had entered "orchid" into the search box on the left it would have started a new search for orchids.
Now that I know how the system works, which wasn't that difficult to figure out, it will be fairly easy and efficient to utilize in the future. Clicking on tags is less work than typing in search terms.
That being said, based on current trends in keyword tagging, it's probably more intuitive if keywords are displayed with each item and if each keyword is hyperlinked to return all the search results for that keyword. An inherent problem with any kind of search is that often times people don't know which keyword is the best to use when looking for something.
Displaying all associated keywords directly underneath an item is a good way to offer hints that will possibly "hook" users into clicking on keywords that 1. more aptly describes what they are looking for and 2. they hadn't thought of but are interested in, thus increasing the chances they will explore more and hence, purchase more items, in this case, books.
The trick is to allow the user to narrow their results by clicking on the keywords displayed underneath the book. This isn't the easiest thing to do but can be accomplished by including a "Search within results" checkbox. On the user side it's fairly straightforward...when they check that box any keyword they click on is added to their search, when they uncheck that box any keyword they click starts an entire new search.
So let's say I did a search for "orchids" and there were many results. I could check the "Search within results" checkbox and scroll downlooking at the results and associated keywords. If a term like"Australia" caught my eye then I could click on it and the results would be filtered to only include books with the keywords "orchids" and"Australia".
On the programming side, it can be accomplished using Javascript, AJAX and session variables. It's not the easiest programming but it shouldn't be much of a challenge to a seasoned programmer. Although, hyperlinking keywords is pretty easy. For the book table you just add a field called "Keywords" and separate the keywords by commas. When you display the page you just use a function that splits the string on the commas, places them in an array and adds the appropriate URL and hyperlink html to each keyword.
Another benefit of this system is that it's conducive to google indexing and capturing google search terms. Google finds new pages to index based on links. When you add keywords (hyperlinked) to a book, Google immediately adds all the content and links on that page that is being linked to. Up until recently Google wasn't able to discover pages that were only available via search forms and is only just now starting to explore that possibility....http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9918022-7.html
Based on your website, even with your new keyword search function (which is still just a glorified search form) it seems most of your pages (books) are only available by using a search form, so by adding keyword links that display all the results for that keyword you are making sure that Google is easily able to find all those pages to add to its database. The keywords that are on those pages are like "hooks" that capture Google indexing robots as well as search terms that people use when conducting a search on Google.
Oh, seems like you have links to your book categories somewhere as I just did a Google search for site:andrewisles.com and found 14,800results which sounds about right.
Well, there's my feedback, hope it's helpful.
Cheers,
Carlos
Hello Andrew Isles
After trailing your new keyword search tool, I have two suggestions for improvement:
1) alphabetize keywords beginning with the same letter (eg, "R") vertically rather than horizontally. It is easier for the human eye (at least my eye!) to scan for the second and third letters of the keywords vertically down the column to find the ones sought than it is to stop briefly at each keyword and assimilate it to see if is the one being looked for before moving on horizontally (or in a zig zag fashion) to the next one.
2) in a search with multiple keywords, provide a facility to selectively remove one or more of them and add another one instead without having to clear them all and start the search again. For example, in a search with two keywords, after a search with Evolution + China I tried to go back to the screen that displayed the first one only (Evolution) and then to add a different second term (eg, Japan), but the search facility insisted on adding China as well as Japan. It seems all previously used words are included until you start a new keyword search.
Cheers
Robert
Hi,
A half price sale is definitely a good way to catch my attention. I clicked on the link and read the explanation of how your new keywordsystem works.
It wasn't immediately intuitive but I figured it out within a minute. For a second or two, while I was reading the e-mail, I thought that I was supposed to enter the letter "H" into the search text box (on the left), and then the letter "A", and so on.
When I saw that there were actual letters to click on I clicked on them and it took a second or two to realize that when I clicked on a keyword it was then displayed above the letters.
After I selected "Half-price" and then "Australia" I planned to enter"orchid" into the search box (on the left) and then hit the "Go" button. Then I thought I'd check to see if you listed "orchid" as a keyword, which you did. So I added "orchid" and did the search. If I had entered "orchid" into the search box on the left it would have started a new search for orchids.
Now that I know how the system works, which wasn't that difficult to figure out, it will be fairly easy and efficient to utilize in the future. Clicking on tags is less work than typing in search terms.
That being said, based on current trends in keyword tagging, it's probably more intuitive if keywords are displayed with each item and if each keyword is hyperlinked to return all the search results for that keyword. An inherent problem with any kind of search is that often times people don't know which keyword is the best to use when looking for something.
Displaying all associated keywords directly underneath an item is a good way to offer hints that will possibly "hook" users into clicking on keywords that 1. more aptly describes what they are looking for and 2. they hadn't thought of but are interested in, thus increasing the chances they will explore more and hence, purchase more items, in this case, books.
The trick is to allow the user to narrow their results by clicking on the keywords displayed underneath the book. This isn't the easiest thing to do but can be accomplished by including a "Search within results" checkbox. On the user side it's fairly straightforward...when they check that box any keyword they click on is added to their search, when they uncheck that box any keyword they click starts an entire new search.
So let's say I did a search for "orchids" and there were many results. I could check the "Search within results" checkbox and scroll downlooking at the results and associated keywords. If a term like"Australia" caught my eye then I could click on it and the results would be filtered to only include books with the keywords "orchids" and"Australia".
On the programming side, it can be accomplished using Javascript, AJAX and session variables. It's not the easiest programming but it shouldn't be much of a challenge to a seasoned programmer. Although, hyperlinking keywords is pretty easy. For the book table you just add a field called "Keywords" and separate the keywords by commas. When you display the page you just use a function that splits the string on the commas, places them in an array and adds the appropriate URL and hyperlink html to each keyword.
Another benefit of this system is that it's conducive to google indexing and capturing google search terms. Google finds new pages to index based on links. When you add keywords (hyperlinked) to a book, Google immediately adds all the content and links on that page that is being linked to. Up until recently Google wasn't able to discover pages that were only available via search forms and is only just now starting to explore that possibility....http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9918022-7.html
Based on your website, even with your new keyword search function (which is still just a glorified search form) it seems most of your pages (books) are only available by using a search form, so by adding keyword links that display all the results for that keyword you are making sure that Google is easily able to find all those pages to add to its database. The keywords that are on those pages are like "hooks" that capture Google indexing robots as well as search terms that people use when conducting a search on Google.
Oh, seems like you have links to your book categories somewhere as I just did a Google search for site:andrewisles.com and found 14,800results which sounds about right.
Well, there's my feedback, hope it's helpful.
Cheers,
Carlos
Friday, June 6, 2008
Fossil fish with embryo
Last night (5th June) I watched Catalyst on the ABC. There was an excellent piece on John Long's wonderful discovery of embryonic development of Devonian Placoderms. These are a fossil fish group, long extinct, that have been shown to have embryos complete with umbilical cords. The fossil is Materpiscis (‘mother-fish’ in Latin) attenboroughi and Sir David is understandably very pleased with this honour. This fabulous discovery is part of the Gogo deposit in the Kimberly and was recently published in Nature. If you want to read more I highly recommend John's book Swimming in stone: the amazing Gogo fossils of the Kimberley. Fremantle: 2006.
Andrew Isles
Andrew Isles
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