Quote:
Originally Posted by darryl
To the OP. What on earth is the point of your post? A visit to Amazon or most online bookstores is to me far superior to a visit to any physical bookstore I have ever graced with my presence. But I appreciate that some others feel differently.
But why would an online store seek to mimic the inferior physical bookstore experience?
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The point of my post is that I don't find a visit to an online bookstore to be superior to a visit o a physical bookstore. Not for browsing, at least.
I appreciate that you feel differently, but for me, at least, I would like to see an online store provide a similar experience to the (in my opinion)
superior physical store browsing experience precisely because I find the physical experience to be better. There's no reason it couldn't offer both - one for you, and one for me.
Quote:
Originally Posted by darryl
What would it have to do? Firstly, it would have to cut availability dramatically. Then, perhaps we could have a VR walk-through of virtual shelves with this limited collection displayed in whatever perverse order bookshops used. Perhaps you could select from random, alphabetical, or perhaps dewey decimal.
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I never said I wanted an identical experience - I want a similar or equivalent experience. I want the ease of browsing by author and getting a quick sense of what the author is all about by looking at the blurbs about his or her books. I want to see all of the books in a series in one fell swoop. I want to easily differentiate between books. I want to be able to quickly scan through large amounts of data.
These are all things that user interfaces can make possible, without requiring VR. The fact that Amazon et al haven't done it doesn't mean it's not possible - it means it doesn't fit their purpose. That's the point of the soapbox-ish part of my original post.