Quote:
Originally Posted by DiapDealer
Can I ask (seriously) what physical bookstore or library has ever been able to provide you that experience?
I get that you like the physical experience better, but the improvements you're wanting in the online experience don't actually seem to match up all that well with the advantages of physical browsing, in my opinion. i.e. "Quick sense of what the author is all about" or "see all the books of a series" or "quickly scanning large amounts of data" aren't things I associate with my trips to the book store.
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- Quick sense of what the author is all about - reading blurbs from the back covers of a few books
- Quickly scanning large amounts of data - looking at the spines of the books. The combination of title, author, and font somehow gave me what I needed. I can't quantify it, but it worked.
- See all the books in a series - Pick up one book, see it's in a series, open up the cover, and the series is listed on the inside, usually on one of the first few pages. Granted, it's not all of the books in the series unless the book is the latest one published, but even that gave me information.
I think part of it is about the compactness of the information. Or maybe information vs. data.
In a physical book store, when you're looking at the "listing", you see only a few "fields" for each book, so you're seeing many books at once. Because you're seeing the important fields, you get a lot of important information at once.
In an online store, the listing shows you a lot of fields for each book, and you are limited to how many books you can see at once. Even if the site lets you show hundreds of books per page, because of the number of fields, your field of vision limits you to only a handful of books. And also because of the number of fields, the important stuff is lost in the noise. So you are getting a lot of data, but little information.
My opinion and experience, anyway.