So I just read all nine pages of this thread
and come back to the same opinion I have had since getting into the ebook world...
Many years ago when you bought books in stores (Kids, those are buildings where you could trade green paper for items... ask your parents about them...) you needed a way to SORT the books. Say I wanted to read about world with elves, dragons, and trolls. For the most part I knew to look for the sign that said "Fantasy" on it. If I wanted spaceships, aliens and a futuristic setting, I knew to look for "science fiction" signs. There has always been those books that straddle those to categories, and many others but there was a general understanding that "Star Wars" had spaceships and aliens so could be found in Sci Fi, and "Lord of the Rings" had dragons and elves so could be found in Fantasy.
This worked well when you had only a few hundred books to sort in your store, maybe a thousand... but today we live in a different world. Hit up a store like Amazon and there are a gazillion squared books that cover and corss every "genre" you could think of. The idea of hard categories is what must die. Today "labels" or "tags" work better. Using the Star Wars example we could tag it with ...
Space Opera, Magic, Sorcery, Wizards, Sci Fi, Action, Adventure, Fantasy
Then a reader could search for "A space opera with wizards" and find it. We "search" for books more then we browse anymore. Browsing fits better with hard categories, search works better with tags.
That is how I see it at least...
