Quote:
Originally Posted by ZodWallop
I feel like I killed the conversation  |
I can try to revive it
I have a tendency to draft long answers and then never getting around to posting them. I wrote this some days ago:
The bookstores could fix this by having a few employees do spot checks of tags now and then, increase a publisher's "sloppy tagger" score every time they found an obvious mistake, and make it easy for customers to exclude publishers with a bad score from their search results. If a few big stores did this, we'd quickly see an improvement.
I've never seen a bookstore with a good interface for searching or browsing, oddly enough. I'd think it would be worthwhile to make it easy for customers to find something they want to buy.
There are some good implementations of search outside stores, though:
- Storygraph (a Goodreads type site) lets you both include and exclude genres, ie. show me books which are tagged with "science fiction" and are NOT tagged with "fantasy". It also requires you to add one or more "moods" to your search - adventurous, dark, hopeful, etc.
- Smart Bitches Trashy Books (a book review site for romance) has a book finder which lets you filter for genres, tropes, and character archetypes, for instance contemporary romance with an enemies-to-lovers story arch and a single parent as one of the protagonists.
- Archive of Our Own (a fan fiction archive) has the most extensive tagging and searching interface I've seen, with options to include and exclude works on more than 20 different criteria. Since anyone can publish there with no quality filter, the need for good tools to sort through the multitude is high. Authors can add any tags they want, without any restrictions, and volunteer "tag wranglers" do maintenance, like fixing tags with typos, and marking synonyms, so if you're searching for the tag "doctors without borders" you'll also find works tagged with "Médicins Sans Frontières | Doctors Without Borders" and "kinda like doctors without borders". (Yes, those are real tags.) It's run by fan volunteers with a passion for what they do. I'm guessing this would be too labour intensive for a commercial site which needs to pay people for their time.
There should be a market for a good book finding site! The search results could link to several book stores, and it could make money on affiliate links and paid supporting membership. I'd gladly pay to keep a site like that alive!