Quote:
Originally Posted by murg
Say our hypothetical unethical person (or HUP) wants to get an idea of what to read next, but there are just soooooo many books on Amazon.
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Ah, the old "online bookstores have too many books to find anything" myth.
Thing is, good online stores have filtering. By book type, genre, sub-genre, and even review ratings. They even let you filter all but the new releases or sort by popularity or price.
No need to waste time randomly browsing.
Back in the day when there actually was a chain bookstore near me, I would go past the magazine's and CDs and the coffee shop and most of the 50,000 books at Borders to go straight to the SF shelves. As a regular, I knew where they were. They usually carried about 1-2000 SF books. The other 48,000 were of no interest to me so all I had to do was scan by eyeball for any title that sounded interesting.
Online, I can do the same thing with two clicks: "fiction" and "science fiction" and suddenly 37.5 million titles becomes just 320,000. Click on, say, "Kindle edition" and it's cut down some more. I pick "Space Opera" and "New" and I'm looking at all the new ebooks I might actually be interested in, not a politician's ghost-written memoir/screed or the latest book mill product or tough guy shoot-em up.
The same would happen if I were looking for historical fiction, paranormal romance, epic fantasy, tough guy shoot-em ups, or even litfic. I only see what I want to see, not what the bookseller can afford go carry or is paid to promote.
So 30 million deep book catalogs are not a problem to people who shop at good online stores.(HC.com so far, is not, though. Filtering doesn't work well there. It is bad enough to drive would be buyers away. But not to B&M.)
These I don't waste time and gasoline driving to a bookstore that may or not have something that might interest me. Which, back in the day, only happened about one in four times I went to Borders. And I used to go about twice a month.
After Borders ran themselves into bankruptcy and I was only left with online, I started saving a lot of gasoline.
B&M bookstores have bigger problems than the mythical "showrooms" non-buyer.
Like getting people to bother going to the store in the first place.
Just look at B&N' s annual post-holiday season financials and the usual talk of low traffic.