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Old 10-07-2012, 11:21 AM   #49
BillSmithBooks
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Posts: 243
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Join Date: May 2009
Location: www.OutlawGalaxy.com, Foothills of NY's Adirondack mountains
Device: My PC...using Puppy Linux (FBReader, Calibre, Kindle Cloud Reader,
While the question is raised in a trollish way, I think the OP has a pretty legitimate point: Discoverability is still a huge issue with ebooks.

IMHO, online bookstore browsing tends to be vastly inferior for browsing than physical stores...the simple reason is that you can take in dozens of titles in a gaze at a physical bookstore while online bookstores typically can only show perhaps a dozen titles.

Amazon, et al are wonderful if you know exactly what you want or if you want something very similar to what you've already stated a preference for.

But the biggest joy of browsing (for me) is discovery, the serendipity of stumbling across something that elicits the "That looks cool, I had no idea this existed!" response.

Online bookstores generally don't do that for me. Lagging load times, limited ability to see more than a handful of titles, limited utility of recommendation engines all make the process less fun than being in a physical store.

Amazon is best-in-breed online, but still woefully inferior to in person browsing. Smashwords' search feature is really quirky and unreliable. Kobo, meh. B&N, blech.

I find the boutique/collectives/small press sites like BookViewCafe, Baen, Angry Robot, etc to be cool because the crud is already pre-filtered away just by being limited to a niche site.

I think a good part of online discovery will be played by sites like MobileRead, Kindleboards, Goodreads, book bloggers and blog posts, etc...I've found a lot of cool stuff online this way and things will continue to improve, but right now, physical bookstores are still the best place for me to find new and cool stuff.
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