Quote:
Originally Posted by RobFreundlich
- 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. |
I agree with you. Plus in a physical store or library it's usually pretty easy to see where a series begins and ends - typically the spines of books in a series will look similar - and quickly move past it to the next one if you're not interested.
It's great that online stores and libraries have more books available than could possibly be carried in any one physical store or library. I just wish they could come up with better ways of browsing.