Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
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. |
This is interesting; I view online bookstores as where I go once I know what I want, not where I look to find what I might want. Whereas physical bookstores did double-duty, because a) there weren't tons of other lists of books floating around and; b) you couldn't count on the bookstore to have any random book you decided you wanted, so limiting yourself to what was on their shelves was convenient.
But I'd never think of searching for a broad category like that on Amazon/Kobo/etc. I'd use a generally search engine to search for “best books on Shakespearean criticism”, which would pull up:
http://www.bardweb.net/read.html
https://www.theguardian.com/books/20...books.classics
https://www.goodreads.com/shelf/show...eare-criticism
Then I'd flip through those, decide what looked good, and go to Amazon/Kobo/etc to buy them (or put them on a wishlist). This decouples the reviews from the person who's profiting from them.
It is a different model, for sure, and I get people who miss browsing the shelves; that was particularly good not just for finding blurbs, but for actually grabbing an interesting looking book and thumbing through it, maybe reading a whole chapter, etc. There were times as a kid I'd worked my way through half a book over the course of a few days visiting the bookstore before deciding I wanted to buy it.
But there are pretty big advantages to the new way, too.