I miss browsing libraries and book stores

[kacir]

Originally Posted by HarryT

I've always found this a most peculiar site myself. It is not based on any similarity between authors, but simply on people's likes. If a lot of people like author "A" and author "B", then searching for "A" will display "B" in close proximity. That's not at all the same thing as saying that the two authors are similar in any way, unless one happens to believe that people are not capable of liking different types of book.

Ooops ...
I never paid attention to where they get the relationships of various authors.
Now I should go to www.gnooks.com and fill in *my* favorite authors, so the AI is a tiny bit wiser the next time I am looking for a book.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by kacir

Ooops ...
I never paid attention to where they get the relationships of various authors.
Now I should go to www.gnooks.com and fill in *my* favorite authors, so the AI is a tiny bit wiser the next time I am looking for a book.

I only noticed when I happened to look at Peter Ackroyd (a writer of biographies) and noticed that the closest author listed to him is Martin Cruz Smith, who writes thrillers . They're both excellent authors, certainly, but not even remotely similar.

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by HarryT

I know. I was responding to kacir's description of it:


which does suggest that the search is by similarity.

Ahh... makes, sense then.

It should be clear to anyone who uses the site, though. The following is displayed prominently on the search results page:

What else do readers of Author X read? The closer two writers are, the more likely someone will like both of them. Click on any name to travel along.

[issybird]

The best ebook store was Borders. You could drill down a category to find something quite specific. Amazon has nothing remotely resembling it. The problem is that there's no middle ground between listing best sellers (which don't interest me, ever) or getting the aforementioned two million hits.

I do miss libraries and bookstores, and card catalogues as well. They allowed for serendipity, the discovery of something of which you had never heard but which was entirely the thing, just because of propinquity or because it jumped out at you. Now, you only get what you're looking for at best and sometimes not even that.

That said, when I say I miss them, I miss the results and the fun and the joy of discovery. I wouldn't go back; the advantages of the current system outweigh the losses and by a significant factor.

[BenG]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

People seem to have a really hard time understanding that literature-map is not about finding similar authors. It's about exactly what you mentioned: grouping authors simply on people's likes. Nothing more, nothing less. A lot of people who like A, also tend to like B, C, D and E. Nothing more, nothing less. I find that incredibly helpful; regardless of the similarities (or lack thereof) between authors close to the center of the map. Why does it need to group similar authors to be un-peculiar/more useful?

Basically, it's the same principle as Amazon's recommendations.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by issybird

The best ebook store was Borders. You could drill down a category to find something quite specific. Amazon has nothing remotely resembling it. The problem is that there's no middle ground between listing best sellers (which don't interest me, ever) or getting the aforementioned two million hits.

I do miss libraries and bookstores, and card catalogues as well. They allowed for serendipity, the discovery of something of which you had never heard but which was entirely the thing, just because of propinquity or because it jumped out at you. Now, you only get what you're looking for at best and sometimes not even that.

That said, when I say I miss them, I miss the results and the fun and the joy of discovery. I wouldn't go back; the advantages of the current system outweigh the losses and by a significant factor.

Amazon's great for finding a specific book which, to be fair, is what I want to do 95% of the time. It would be nice on occasions, though, to be able to say "What books are available on such-and-such a subject?", and that's where it falls down. One really has to use other resources to answer that question, and then, having obtained a recommendation, find the book by title or author.

[BenG]

Browsing online bookstores by category is practically useless. The publishers want their book seen by as many people as possible, so they put it in any remotely plausible, and often implausible, category.

[Apache]

I would like to see eBook Stores require a maximum of two category listings for books. One main listing and one sub genre. For example Science Fiction and Military Science Fiction, or Space Opera. This would make it easier to find books by category. When you are looking for a specific genre in Science Fiction and the publisher lists it in twenty different genres, including Fantasy it can be difficult to find what you want without looking at books that aren't even close.
Apache

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by BenG

Basically, it's the same principle as Amazon's recommendations.

Possibly. I've no idea. I don't utilize Amazon's recommendations.

Where literature map is helpful to me is this scenario:

1) I put in a favorite author
2) It brings up an author "cloud" with several authors that I also really like in close proximity to my search author. Yay! The algorithm is "working" obviously.
3) There's an unknown author (unknown to me) that is also in close proximity to my search author. After looking them up and verifying that their works indeed sound interesting to me, I'm very likely to try their work.

Thus I'm able to discover new authors I might like without having to limit my search to authors who write like (or write in the same genre as) author X.

I have very eclectic tastes. I don't want recommendations based on author/genre similarities. That would be way too limiting. Give me a fuzzy recommendation algorithm any day. I can pare the results down easily myself.

When I go to the bookstore, everything is so ... alphabetical, linear, and well ... boring. I don't want to BE the algorithm (randomly bouncing from aisle to section to shelf--staring at spines (unless the bookstore wants me to see a particular book's face)). I want to USE the algorithm to bring an eclectic assortment of candidates to me.

[Nabeel]

I've used both the 'old' method of browsing shelves in bookstores and the 'new' method of Amazon, etc. I agree with a previous contributor: the 'they also bought' entries on Amazon are useful, and the ability to search a single term can really speed up work. (I've found Abe.books to be an excellent search engine.)

But I've got to confess that some of my greatest, most useful discoveries have been in second-hand bookshops. I think the point here is that you get away from the tyranny of the key-term. I've got a good example of this: a while ago I was researching hippies. I missed a whole cache of relevant material as it was categorised under 'beatniks'. In a bookshop, I can compensate for this: I can see that although a title doesn't include my exact key-term, it might still be relevant.

There's something to be said for both.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by Nabeel

But I've got to confess that some of my greatest, most useful discoveries have been in second-hand bookshops. I think the point here is that you get away from the tyranny of the key-term. I've got a good example of this: a while ago I was researching hippies. I missed a whole cache of relevant material as it was categorised under 'beatniks'. In a bookshop, I can compensate for this: I can see that although a title doesn't include my exact key-term, it might still be relevant.

That's the point, though. You cannot assume that books about hippies will include the word "hippie" in their title, any more than I could assume that literary criticism of Shakespeare will include the word "Shakespeare" in their title. Organising books by Dewey decimal classification, as libraries and good bookshops do, is a far more productive method of research.

[shalym]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Amazon's great for finding a specific book which, to be fair, is what I want to do 95% of the time. It would be nice on occasions, though, to be able to say "What books are available on such-and-such a subject?", and that's where it falls down. One really has to use other resources to answer that question, and then, having obtained a recommendation, find the book by title or author.

If I want to browse, I am more likely to go to Goodreads than to Amazon. I do find new books by chance on Amazon sometimes, though, usually because I look for a particular book and follow the "Also boughts". The only publisher site I usually use is Baen Books, though, because I don't find the others easy to use for discovery.

Shari

[ekbell]

Originally Posted by HarryT

I've always found this a most peculiar site myself. It is not based on any similarity between authors, but simply on people's likes. If a lot of people like author "A" and author "B", then searching for "A" will display "B" in close proximity. That's not at all the same thing as saying that the two authors are similar in any way, unless one happens to believe that people are not capable of liking different types of book.

It's not really any different then the 'Customers who bought this item also bought' stuff at the major booksellers except that a) these are *favorite* authors and b)the literature map likely has fewer contributors.

Personally I like the site.

[ZodWallop]

Originally Posted by RobFreundlich

I never said I wanted an identical experience - I want a similar or equivalent experience. I want the ease of browsing by author and getting a quick sense of what the author is all about by looking at the blurbs about his or her books.

Here is the Amazon author page for Arthur C. Clarke

I want to see all of the books in a series in one fell swoop.

Here is the series page for Rama

What if the physical bookstore doesn't have every book in the series? Also, from what I remember bookstores would typically shelve the titles alphabetically.

If the publisher didn't clearly label the cover as part of a series (and they didn't always do that) how would you know their order? I remember having a tough time figuring out the order for Asimov's Foundation books, Moorcock's Elric books and so on.

I want to easily differentiate between books.

The author page I linked to gives you the option to sort by all, Kindle, paperback, hardcover, large print audio book, etc.

I want to be able to quickly scan through large amounts of data.

The internet will always be better for that than a store.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not holding Amazon up as the pinnacle of book selling. But I do think a lot of your points are based primarily on nostalgia and the way you were used to doing things.

You were able to browse the way you did because the stores only had a minor fraction of the books available to you online.

If shopping for books at a store were so superior an experience, Borders would still be open and B&N wouldn't be foundering.

B&N allows you to take your Nook into any of their stores and read any book available for an hour for free. You could browse a physical store the way you want to, find a book and spend an hour with it on your Nook before purchasing. That seems like it would be the perfect marriage between stores and e-books. Yet Nook is practically a joke in the e-reader community and Amazon rules the roost. Why? Are book readers just a bunch of gullible fools?

I have some of the nostalgia you do. But then I am also honest enough to notice that nostalgia aside, I'm not making trips to B&N and Half Price Books the way I used to.

And as I mentioned, shopping online has not made my TBR list shorter than it was. If anything, it's mushroomed.

[ekbell]

Originally Posted by issybird

The best ebook store was Borders. You could drill down a category to find something quite specific. Amazon has nothing remotely resembling it. The problem is that there's no middle ground between listing best sellers (which don't interest me, ever) or getting the aforementioned two million hits.

I do miss libraries and bookstores, and card catalogues as well. They allowed for serendipity, the discovery of something of which you had never heard but which was entirely the thing, just because of propinquity or because it jumped out at you. Now, you only get what you're looking for at best and sometimes not even that.

That said, when I say I miss them, I miss the results and the fun and the joy of discovery. I wouldn't go back; the advantages of the current system outweigh the losses and by a significant factor.

I found this amusing because I've experienced more serendipity and vastly broadened my reading by moving to ebooks. Back when I scanned library and bookstore shelves I tended to stick to the genre stacks as I found it difficult to assess the rows of 'general fiction' and the non-fiction was too expensive in bookstores (I did find interesting non-fiction in libraries). These days it's entirely too easy to run into interesting books at prices I'm willing to pay (as the number of unread books in my calibre library demonstrates) and my library has gone from more then 1/3 SF with very little non-fiction to about 27 percent SF with about 40 percent non-fiction.

Of course a good chunk of this has been because I changed what I was actively looking for and how I was looking rather then the method of buying but the number of backlist fiction and not-too-outdated non-fiction ebooks on sale for $1.99 has certainly been an contributing cause.