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Originally Posted by RobFreundlich
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.
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Here is the
Amazon author page for Arthur C. Clarke
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I want to see all of the books in a series in one fell swoop.
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Here is the
series page for Rama
What if the physical bookstore doesn't have every book in the series? Also, from what I remember bookstores would typically shelve the titles alphabetically.
If the publisher didn't clearly label the cover as part of a series (and they didn't always do that) how would you know their order? I remember having a tough time figuring out the order for Asimov's Foundation books, Moorcock's Elric books and so on.
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I want to easily differentiate between books.
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The author page I linked to gives you the option to sort by all, Kindle, paperback, hardcover, large print audio book, etc.
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I want to be able to quickly scan through large amounts of data.
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The internet will always be better for that than a store.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not holding Amazon up as the pinnacle of book selling. But I do think a lot of your points are based primarily on nostalgia and the way you were used to doing things.
You were able to browse the way you did because the stores only had a minor fraction of the books available to you online.
If shopping for books at a store were so superior an experience, Borders would still be open and B&N wouldn't be foundering.
B&N allows you to take your Nook into any of their stores and read any book available for an hour for free. You could browse a physical store the way you want to, find a book and spend an hour with it on your Nook before purchasing. That seems like it would be the perfect marriage between stores and e-books. Yet Nook is practically a joke in the e-reader community and Amazon rules the roost. Why? Are book readers just a bunch of gullible fools?
I have some of the nostalgia you do. But then I am also honest enough to notice that nostalgia aside, I'm not making trips to B&N and Half Price Books the way I used to.
And as I mentioned, shopping online has not made my TBR list shorter than it was. If anything, it's mushroomed.