I miss the experience of going to the book store or library, picking a section ("genre", for those of you who only ever shop online), and just looking around.
Starting in the A's, looking at the spines of the books, trailing my fingers along them, seeing and feeling the different sizes, reading the titles until one grabs my attention and I pull it out to read the blurb on the back. Looking at the covers of the books the staff have turned face-out instead of spine-out.
Moving along to the B's, C's, etc. Spending forever in the S's, because there are so many authors whose names start with S! Going back to that book that grabbed me in the K's to re-read the blurb. Knowing my favorite author is in the T's, wondering if there's a new release but waiting until I get there.
Leaving that section with a book or two, and moving on to another one and doing it all over again.
Is there any website that offers an experience like this? Amazon and the others are great if you know what you're looking for, but they suck for this kind of browsing.
Seriously - have you ever gone to one of them and just tried to browse alphabetically in some genre, no matter how specific? You get page after page of identical-looking displays of identical-looking books, and there are so many
Aaronson, Alan - An Aardvark's Adventures, Book 1
Aaronson, Alan - An Aardvark's Adventures, Book 2
Aaronson, Alan - An Aardvark's Adventures, Book 3
Aaronson, Alan - An Aardvark's Adventures, Book 4
that you can spend hours paging through the A's and finding nothing at all!
Yes, I know. Amazon's website is there for Amazon to make money - to sell me stuff. Get me in, get me to what I want, sell it to me, and get me to see related stuff that I will then decide to buy. It's not there for my convenience.
And yet, wasn't the bookstore around the corner there to sell me books? The browsing model worked for them ...
Anyway, sorry to rant. I meant to just come here and ask my question (Are there any truly browsable book sites?) and this soapbox just kind of slid under my feet. So are there? Any truly browsable book sites?