Quote:
Originally Posted by GeoffR
Browsing by category at online retailers would be much improved for me if they only allowed each book to be in one category, and I think it would make the sellers think more carefully about which category to put it in.if they could only choose one.
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That's precisely the problem with online bookstores for me: that their classification systems are poor.
The other day, for example, I happened to be looking for books on Shakespearean criticism. Such books would be easy to find in my university library: I'd use their Dewey Decimal classification (822.33E, should anyone be wondering
). If I want to look for such books at Amazon, though, there's simply no way to find them. Sure, there's a category "Literary Criticism and Theory", which is where they
should be, but if you look in that category all you'll see is literally tens of thousands of books that have been misclassified by their publishers (the top one, for example, is a "Harry Hole" novel by Jo Nesbo). Unless you happen to have a title or an author in mind, finding non-fiction books by category at Amazon is close to impossible.
I could very easily find such books at my nearest decent physical bookshop because, like the library, they classify their non-fiction books using the Dewey Decimal system. Unfortunately the shop is a good 3h round trip away from me.