[Andrew H.]

Originally Posted by Prestidigitweeze

Increasingly, we rely on huge booksellers for independent content, telling ourselves that unwanted books are weeded out by customers' purchasing decisions rather than perfectly good books being excluded by theirs. The problem seems twofold: their monopolization of content distribution and exposure and our laziness in seeking out more obscure content.

Customer laziness (for lack of a better word) is a given. It's also one of the attractions of e-books - we can go shopping whenever we want without leaving the house.

One issue might be that we're too comfortable with stores and search engines being one and the same. We want to find, purchase and download ebooks as easily as possible, but we still don't have an inclusive, well-organized and efficient shopping search engine just for ebooks. Yes, there are small-scale sites that attempt sprawling metasearches, but they tend to become unwieldy and obscure. There's nothing on the level of, say, a Google shopping engine tailored specifically to books (since, unfortunately, Google opted to become yet another vendor and even their ebook store is terribly organized: search for an obscure author with a common name and you'll see what I mean).

For customers not to become dependent on specific vendors for content, they need a comparison-shopping engine that can be set by format and which doesn't simply apply to a few sites of like description, and which can separate groups of results under title and author names. I'd love it if a less-common search engine unburdened by ads and tracking (like ixquick) were the first to provide that service with an ease that rivaled Amazon's.

The problem with a neutral, ad-free, non-tracking search engine is that you can't really monetize it. Meaning that - no matter how it starts out - it will end up less and less useful as it fails to keep up with search engines that have revenue.

Since ebooks have become popular enough to deserve their own (non-exclusive) pages on major search engines, it might be time to stop seeing Amazon as more attractive than other booksellers simply because their searches and purchasing process are easier. Then monopolies might monopolize less and diverse content become more available to everyone -- even us at our laziest.

The problem with this is that Amazon *is* more attractive because its searching and purchasing processes are easier. You might as well say that we should stop seeing Walmart as cheaper than other retailers simply because they charge less money for their products.

All of which is to say that the only way to beat Amazon will be to outcompete Amazon in some way. Which won't be easy - Amazon would be even further ahead of the major US e-book sites if they weren't being propped up by the agency model (so that Amazon wouldn't be superior in search, purchasing, *and* cost).

But as you touched on in your post, there are gaps that need to be filled in the e-book realm. When Google beat out Yahoo and Altavista for search, its primary weapon was the fact that its search results were much better. I remember being really surprised that whatever I was searching for tended to be in the first 2 or 3 links on Google; on Yahoo it would be on like the the 3d page. What I think the e-book realm really needs is a good recommendation engine. I'm not sure that something like that is really possible - but a really smart recommendation engine that succeeded in reliably introducing me to authors I hadn't considered before but would really like is something that would be extremely valuable to me.

"Because you like 'The Golden Ass' and 'The Killing Floor,' we think you'll like 'Appointment in Samarra'".

Of course, the recommendation has to be right...