Quote:
Originally Posted by fjtorres
That's the only filtering you do?
No sub-genre? Like, "Let's see what hard SF is new?" Or "what alternate histories are new?"
There are 21 categories under SF at the Kindle store.
Alternate history lists 6000 or so. Filter for the last 30 days and it comes down to 145.
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=sr_st_re...rt=review-rank
That is about a five minute scan for me.
Or, even in the bigger list: sort by release date and glance at the top few pages in the listing. If you are a regular to the site and not a first timer you'll soon see older titles. Or sort by average reader reviews. Then let your judgment take over. When Sturgeon said 90% of everything is crap he wasn't thinking indie titles. Just tradpub.
It is only as hard as you want it to be.
Back in the day, the local Borders--one of the bigger ones--carried over 50,000 titles. I could do a fly-by in ten-fifteen minutes to see if there was anything interesting because I did it every week or two. And because I wasn't wasting time looking at every book in the store or every book in the SF&F section.
6000 titles, for me, is at most a half hour worth of browsing. Which in itself is a pleasant diversion. |
Right, I think we browse & buy books differently
I tend to buy a bunch every 3-6 months, read them, then buy more.
Frankly browsing through 6000 titles to find a handful I may want seems incredibly... inelegant.
If they had a filter that said something along the lines of "only show titles with more than x reviews" that might work. But the only filter on ratings seems to be x stars or above - and for some reason huge numbers of books have only a single review of 5 stars
Just in the list of 142 books you linked to - of the 19 rated books 18 of them are 4 stars and above making it a fairly useless metric. It gets worse looking for older books as all those single 5 star reviews are ranked above anything that doesn't only get 5 star reviews (Or to put it another way higher ranked than the lord of the rings trilogy with 9082 reviews averaging 4.6 stars)