How do you browse for e-books? Can e-stores improve browsing and sampling? And could they learn from Netflix?
Say, you’re in the mood for fiction or maybe a good biography or history.
How do you tend to browse? Do you start out with the bestseller lists? Or books selling briskly within a topic? Or just look for specific authors or titles, following up on friends’ recs? Could bookstores do a better job for browsers—the human kind? And are samples of chapters, a staple at many online stores, really enough?
Netflix a lesson for online bookstores?
Go to a movie site, or at least the highly usable Netflixs, and you’ll understand how backwards most e-booksellers and online p-book retailers are in some ways at pleasing browsers. Netflix doesn’t just rate rate movies. It tells how they would fare among people with your tastes, at least as the site perceives your likes and dislikes. These individualized ratings can go far, far astray, but I’m still glad to see Netflix making a stab at this.
The visual presentation is much more attractive, too, in certain respects. I myself would like to see a text-heavy option, but oh how well Netflix can present the electronic equivalent of movie posters. Place the cursor over them, and up will pop a summary of the movie. There are also links to viewer reviews. Couldn’t e-bookstores offer some of Netflix’s better features as options at least?
Book samples: Early chapters enough?
On to the issue of samples, I continue to wonder if the first chapter, or two or even three, would really suffice. What about lists of characters, in the case of fiction?
I applaud discussion of grand business issues such as pricing, but maybe it’s also time to return to the good old-fashioned issue of optimal presentation of the merchandise. Is it possible that most online stores, including Amazon, whose ugly site looks like a veritable zoo, have it all wrong? That some of the biggest winners in e-tail could be successful in spite of, rather than because of, their current presentational approaches?
August 24th, 2009 at 8:09 am
Utterly agree. I have yet to find an online bookseller where I was happy or even mildly pleased with the browsing experience. Someone could likely build a reputation (and business) creating an book e-store that did things exceptionally well.
August 24th, 2009 at 9:31 am
Other great things from Netflix that could work for books: the friends feature that lets you browse what your friends are watching and see their ratings (not unlike GoodReads or Shelfari but with a buy option), new releases, recommendations, hot titles in your local area. All this combined with good old fashioned bookseller wisdom in genre categories would be killer.
August 24th, 2009 at 9:49 am
Could not agree more. I love the ease by which I can now purchase ebooks, but I hate browsing for them — on the ebook selling sites, at least. I do like some of the browsing features of IndieBound, though.
August 24th, 2009 at 10:44 am
I buy most of my e-books from Fictionwise. But I do my serious browsing on Amazon. Why? Because Amazon provides recommendations based on past purchases and Amazon lets me rate items that I haven’t purchased from them. This gives me a much-improved chance of finding something I will like. Also, Amazon’s summary rating algorithm is better than what FW uses.
I have written Fictionwise many times to suggest changes to improve the buyer experience. It took years before I (and presumably thousands of other users) convinced them to do the obvious: create a mobile-friendly site. I wonder how long it will be before they begin providing recommendations?
August 24th, 2009 at 12:01 pm
Oh yes, this could be so much better. I do enjoy Powell’s.com’s website - does a better job at highlighting things I’d like than even Amazon (because it’s well curated, not because they have a sophisticated recommendation system).
eReader’s bookstore is wretched. They are always highlighting crap I have ZERO interest in.
August 24th, 2009 at 2:45 pm
I agree. Amazon is ugly, cluttered and confusing. That’s one reason I have high hopes for:
http://www.bookdepository.com/
Free shipping from the U.S. or U.K. to some seventy countries is impressive. But they don’t seem to be selling ebooks yet. When they do, it will fit well with their worldwide distribution. Seven-day deliveries, impressive as they are, will become seven-minute deliveries.
I’d like to see every distributor and online store offer a downloaded PDF/ePub version of the book whose contents is the choice of the author and publisher.
August 24th, 2009 at 11:20 pm
Yep, they are bad.
Here’s an example.
Random House - got the latest Del Rey newsletter by email.
It touts a book having been optioned as a movie deal - Peter Brett’s the Warded Man. So went to look:-
Excerpts = zero.
As it turned out, it was a crappy book, so could have saved my time, but still, completely hopeless.