[pwalker8]

In my experience, the none of ebook stores has a very satisfying experience shopping for books.

Amazon has the best selection, but it works best if I am looking for specific book or author. If I want to simply browse, the experience is quite frustrating for me. I like to browse to see what books are new since the last time I visited, however, so many independent publishers are gaming the system to get their books at the front of the list, I have to wade through three pages of self published or PD stuff to see the one or two books that I actually might be interested in. Plus a lot of books seem to be put in the wrong category. I don't know if they depend on the publisher to put in the correct information, but it really needs to be cleaned up, a lot.

Sony's web site is much better, but you can't buy from the website, only the eBook Library, which which much improved from the original, suffers from not having tabs and being single threaded. I find myself with both the Sony website and the Sony eBook Library application open, using the web version to browse and just putting in the author's name in the store when I see something I want to buy.

B&N's website isn't much different than Sony's and you can buy from the website, but it appears that they are still bringing it up to speed. The last time that I used it, it would crash when I selected the show 100 books rather than 10. They seem to have fixed that one, so I will need to play with it a bit.

I've tried a couple of the ebook websites that aren't associated with a specific reader, but all seem a bit dated.

Hopefully, with all the competition, they will improve the experience. Here are some of the things that I would like.

1) Notification when they get something in from a favored author. Sony claims to do this, but I've never received a notification from them. Perhaps it's just me.

2) Putting a book in a wishlist. Amazon sort of has this, but I'm talking about the way that Audible.com implements it. Basically, it's a way of saying, I'm interested in this book, but I'm not ready to buy it at the moment. Keep it in a list for me, so I can come back to it at a later date.

3) All the stores have the ability to search, but for the most part, it only works well where searching for a specific author. For example, I might want to find a book on the Eastern Front in WW II. Using that as a search pulls back a couple of books on Amazon. Doing the same search on Sony yields 15 books, though I was unaware that D-Day and the Yom Kippur War occurred in the Eastern Front. In neither case did the search pull back books that I was looking for.

I'm sure other people have other things that they would like, but right now, the best buying experience that I've seen have been Audible.com and the iTunes store. Amazon use to be pretty good, but they just seem to have gotten a bit sloppy with the ebooks.