[NormHart]

I don't often buy Amazon ebooks although I own a Kindle 2 but I was inspired tonight to poke around on their site to see what new and interesting books they might have. Now I read Science Fiction, lots and lots of Science Fiction, and have done so for over fifty years so seeing that they had 8,577 Science Fiction ebooks was interesting.

I noticed several things right off the bat.

1) There are a lot of ebooks listed as Sci-Fi that are not, in fact, Sci-Fi at all.

2) In the default "Bestsellers" sort, the top listed ebooks are either free or old classics. Not too surprising since you see much the same thing at Gutenberg and elsewhere.

3) Sorting by "Price low to high" gets you a lot of low priced ebooks that either are not Sci-Fi, are short stories, are repackaged Public Domain ebooks, and lots of duplicates.

Trying to find new and good Science Fiction is amazingly hard on Amazon. I finally sorted the ebooks by "Price high to low" and, after going through several pages of weird stuff at unreal prices I came upon some newer Sci-Fi at hard bound prices.

By this time I was exhausted and still found nothing I really wanted to read and could afford.

Is this true for other genera?

Is there some other way of finding good ebooks? I am used to wandering along the shelves at a bookstore looking at covers, selecting by author or publisher, Amazon certainly does not lend itself to that kind of browsing so far as I can tell.