

Bookstores and serendipity - benwerd
http://benwerd.com/2011/04/bookstores-and-serendipity/

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rmason
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.

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Bravais
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?

