Quote:
Originally Posted by Fluribus
Take out "vampire" and that sentence would describe me. I wish Amazon would provide more customization. I could tell the site that I don't like romance, thenceforth all romance books would disappear from my searches and browsing. I was once able to scour the SF and Fantasy offerings without having to wade through the romance, I'd like those halcyon days back.
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You seek more
granularity, the ability to filter search results with ever-increasing refinement. I'd like that too, and I believe moonshot would also agree.
The problem with this, to my mind, is at least two-fold:
1. At present, Amazon has no need to spend time and money implementing this when its potential return on investment is questionable.
2. More problematic is how books are classified in the first place. I'm speculating here, but I strongly suspect that books sold at Amazon (and probably other sites) are classified by very general tags or fields: fantasy, romance, mystery, etc. with few available subcategories (urban, Regency, procedural, and so on). This much is pretty obvious.
I don't know who assigns these categories, but books often end up in more than one category, whether through ignorance or design. Take a vampire romance: it's obviously a romance but maybe it's a fantasy too. And vampires? Gotta be a horror book. Is it a young adult book? Could be--it won't hurt to put it in that category too! Now that single book has fallen into at least four categories.
Take subgenres like urban fantasy: what indeed is an urban fantasy? Contemporary titles seem to have a lot of romance but I don't know if it is truly an essential element. This ambiguity further complicates this issue. At what point does a book cease to be one genre and belong to another? Must a book fall into a single category?
Amazon's current system lets you narrow categories but it doesn't let you exclude specific qualities. What if you want fantasy but no dragons, or fiction without profanity?
It's probably safe to say that Amazon and other retailers would have a very hard time implementing such refined search results.