Quote:
Originally Posted by Alexander Turcic
A question for you: When you consider buying a book today, does your mind work in the "bookshelf mode", guided by serendipity where you grab for a book whose title or cover you find most intriguing? Or do you work in the newer "Amazon mode", where you think in categories and browse by ranking and recommendations?
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It's a very good question. Most books I buy are from authors I know. I have about 40-50 maybe more that I at least consider their books with maybe 20-30 on the buy on publication list - the list is of course changeable with authors getting in and sometimes though rarer out. Then I have the forum/blogs recommendations and I discovered a lot of authors/books that way. I rarely use Amazon recommendations or any kind of rankings because they are not useful for me since author's style is the determining factor once I found a book even remotely interesting, and no recommendations system I saw is able to take that into account meaningfully.
I saw lots of books blurbing "like Dickens" (I dislike Dickens immensely) that I loved, "like GRRM" (love ASOIAF) and could not go beyond page 1 to avoid wasting time on any ranking based on what you bought or ranked recommendations.
But there is the serendipity factor, walking in Borders or B&N and browsing the new releases, finding several remotely interesting based on cover/blurb and once in a while discovering an extraordinary book I would have not found about otherwise.
The problem with Borders.com is just that Amazon is so much cheaper that I do not think they stand a chance competing unless they match Amazon prices.