Mike Shatzkin (@MikeShatzkin) says, “It never took me much time to find what I wanted to read next until I started reading ebooks.”
Just about every new book I’d want to read is available for my device of choice (the iPhone) and the digitization of the backlist just carries on going deeper and deeper into publishers’ repositories.
But the merchandising, at least for somebody who shops on the iPhone (it’s a bit better through the ereading devices or PCs), leaves a lot to be desired. My shopping experiences are actually a bit of a random walk. I ask my ebook retailer to show me books by category and, since my categories don’t change much (and haven’t since I was a kid) I tend to see the same books over and over again, far too many of which I have already read....
A short time ago I was shopping for my next read on the iPhone. I started out shopping with Kindle (@AmazonKindle) and then Nook (@nookBN) and a few minutes on each of their mobile sites didn’t turn up anything that moved me. Then at Google Ebooks (@googlebooks) I found Making of the President 1968 by Theodore White. That was definitely one I wanted to read. I bought it and I’m in the middle of it.
There is no particular guarantee that I’ll find my next book on Google. I haven’t found any clear pattern yet among the four stores I shop regularly (Kobo (@kobo) being the fourth). Obviously, if I know I want to read another James Patterson or John Locke thriller, any of them would deliver it to me quickly and painlessly in response to a search. It is when I am hunting by subject that the search returns seem to be pot luck. I’m probably not making it any easier on the retailers by spreading my shopping around; if any of them actually did have a good engine to take my purchasing and reading profile and make the next great recommendation, I’d be screwing it up by spreading around my data.
All of this underscores how difficult is the challenge being faced by Bookish in the US and aNobii (@aNobii) in the UK, two “find what to read next” sites financed by major publishers. And they join a long line of sites that have tried to build recommendations and community conversation around what people are reading: Goodreads (@goodreads), Shelfari (@shelfari), LibraryThing, (@LibraryThing), and the new ebook platform, Copia (@TheCopia).
Other book sharing websites Mike doesn’t mention, but you may want to check out, are BookRabbit (@thebookrabbit) and ShelfLuv (@shelfluv).
What are some ways publishers and etailers should help consumers effectively find ebooks?