Quote:
Originally Posted by Sirtel
I, too, choose my books mostly through browsing. But I would never want the store to hide self-pubs. I'm happy to choose for myself which books I want to look at. The worst thing would be to see only bestsellers and critically applauded books, for me, at least.
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I had gotten in the habit over the years of discovering new books by browsing (or asking for recommendations). The big issue that I have with Amazon is that they simply don't provide the tools to filter out the books I'm not interested in when I browse. Yes, I know you can jump through a lot of hoops with advanced search and kind of sort of get something that doesn't have too much porn, scam artists and general drek in it, but it's not a good experience.
There is no real reason that we can't have some really great browsing tools, such as show me all the books by authors who I have bought, or that are in this list of publishers, or are in my list of favorite authors. I really expected that we would have had that years ago, but Amazon has no real competition, so they have no incentive to improve. The browser hasn't changed over the last 6 or 7 years, at least as far as I can tell.
I've pretty much given up on browsing for book on Amazon. I have my favorite authors in authoralert, I watch recommendations here and sometimes I'll look at the Amazon recommendations. Every so often, I'll do an individual author search on Amazon, then filter out all the books that weren't written by the author I want (no idea why Amazon would think that when I put in Roger Zelazny, I really want a dozen other authors).