Kobo book site becoming worse?

[Acousticvillage]

I am completely fed up with Kobo website. Its search facility has always been poor, throwing up everything including the kitchen sink when you provide exact details of a book or an author.
But now they seem to be focussing on trying to sell you audio books rather than ebooks. Some titles are only in audio format.
Are there better epub book sites than kobo?

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Acousticvillage

I am completely fed up with Kobo website. Its search facility has always been poor, throwing up everything including the kitchen sink when you provide exact details of a book or an author.
But now they seem to be focussing on trying to sell you audio books rather than ebooks. Some titles are only in audio format.
Are there better epub book sites than kobo?

Not Amazon. That's for sure.

[Sirtel]

I've had Google searching the Kobo site for a specific title. Often I've gotten the result when Kobo itself couldn't find it.

Yes, their search is awful.

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by Acousticvillage

Are there better epub book sites than kobo?

Not really. Amazon sells no epubs (except for providing epub downloads for some DRM-free ebooks, and there's no way to tell before purchasing if a book has the option to download or not). Google Play is worse than Kobo. Apple books cannot be deDRMed.

[JSWolf]

There is eBooks.com.

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

There is eBooks.com.

Is it better than Kobo? I've bought very few books from them.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Sirtel

Is it better than Kobo? I've bought very few books from them.

It's an alternative.

[j.p.s]

Originally Posted by Sirtel

Not really. Amazon sells no epubs (except for providing epub downloads for some DRM-free ebooks, and there's no way to tell before purchasing if a book has the option to download or not). Google Play is worse than Kobo. Apple books cannot be deDRMed.

Search on amazon has been terrible for years, and not just for books.

I had to give up on kobo and ebooks.com a year or so ago because their web sites stopped working with some particularly nasty third party cookies blocked. Before that happened, I noticed the rising emphasis on audio books when I almost accidentally bought some audio books because they were listed first or no ebook was listed. Good thing they didn't have oneclick.

[DNSB]

My habit when searching on Kobo is to click either the Kobo Plus or the eBooks button before starting to look through the search results.

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by DNSB

My habit when searching on Kobo is to click either the Kobo Plus or the eBooks button before starting to look through the search results.

Clicking on the ebook button often doesn't help, as the results can still be in hundreds and most of them totally irrelevant. As to clicking on Kobo Plus, there are lots of books not in Kobo Plus.

[DNSB]

I find that my search for author shows that author for the first however many results and then goes off to partial matches. A quick search on H. Beam Piper gave me at least the first 10 pages of search results that matched the author name though that did include some multi-author collections. Still beats the heck out of the same search on Amazon where I get a lot more sponsored results and results that seem to have no relationship at all to the search term.

And yes, there are quite a few books that are not in Kobo Plus, even some authors/publishers only have part of their catalogue in K+. OTOH, since I have K+, I find it worthwhile at times to limit my search to those results.

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by DNSB

I find that my search for author shows that author for the first however many results and then goes off to partial matches. A quick search on H. Beam Piper gave me at least the first 10 pages of search results that matched the author name though that did include some multi-author collections. Still beats the heck out of the same search on Amazon where I get a lot more sponsored results and results that seem to have no relationship at all to the search term.

Funnily enough I have far fewer issues with Amazon search than with Kobo search (yes, there are sponsored results, but I just ignore those. Kobo, OTOH, often enough gives me completely irrelevant results, even though I've found the book with Google searching the Kobo site later. Maybe Kobo search is optimised for Canadians?)

[JSWolf]

One option is to search bookstore sites if any have better search and once you find what you want, you can go back to Kobo and search since you know specifically what you want.

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

One option is to search bookstore sites if any have better search and once you find what you want, you can go back to Kobo and search since you know specifically what you want.

I've done this with Amazon many times, as I prefer the Amazon search to the Kobo one.

Still, Kobo search often sucks for me even when I know exactly what to search for.

[bustacap]

one recent addition i like is that theyre finally showing file sizes of ebooks