Bookstores and serendipity

#1

Post by benwerd » Fri, Apr 15, 2011, 7:44 PM UTC

Re: Bookstores and serendipity

#2

Post by Bravais » Sat, Apr 16, 2011, 2:15 PM UTC

Many is the time that I’ve gone to Amazon’s site, clicked on a genre and spent 30 mins working through the top 100 list, which remains fairly static, and wondering where do I go from here. It’s all rather frustrating when Amazon trumpets 15,000 books in some genre but there’s means or mechanism to get at them, no way to dive into the middle of them all and just “browse about”.

As a weekend hobby I’ve been toying around with some way to “deep browse” Amazon book offerings. http://goo.gl/tPPJz I’m very interested in any thoughts on how this is best done. Are carefully curated recommendations by a select and passionate few the right way to go? The current set social book sites seem focus on the “hits” being read by the “masses”. But the deep long tail isn’t being addressed. But how?

Re: Bookstores and serendipity

#3

Post by rmason » Sat, Apr 16, 2011, 9:18 PM UTC

I used to spend my Sunday afternoons browsing several bookstores. Then shortly after the bubble burst those stores abandoned me.

They cut by 80% the computer titles and business titles by half. They started adding music/video and carved out space for a coffee shop. When business went down they cut wages and lost the knowledgeable staff which were replaced by minimum wage drones interchangeable with those working at fast food restaurants.

I'd started buying books online in late '94 but strongly felt the majority of the money I spent should be supporting the local stores.

I no longer feel any loyalty at all and in fact probably only visit my old haunts no more than twice a year at most.