Well that's not what I was hoping for. I want to see bookshelves - like in the physical store. I want to go to a section (sci-fi, fantasy, cooking, whatever) and browse the bookshelf, with a rendered cover.
Then, I want to click on that cover and read the back of the book, on the book jacket. A sample of a page or two would be nice, but for me it's unnecessary. Finally, buttons to purchase the treepub, epub, audiobook, etc. are all fine - keep that experience digital.
I keep visiting physical bookstores for this reason. Book discovery online is nowhere near as fun, as it was in a physical store.
Given the submitted title said "like wandering a bookstore", the actual site didn't meet my expectations at all :(
What you are describing sounds pretty cool though. I'd only add 2 things:
First, for non-fiction books, an inside preview is a must for me (e.g. for recipe books).
Second, I want the same kind of quantity of books you'd find in a book shop - one of the things that makes it hard to find books on the likes of Amazon is just how many there are. A curated library of books would be preferable.
> Second, I want the same kind of quantity of books you'd find in a book shop
Boutique book shop with airy rooms and lots of places to meet with authors and hold readings, or used book shops with books piled on books and all larger spaces subdivided into warrens and alleys using bookshelves which are, quite often, double-stacked? The former is more manageable, sure, but you'll only find that one philosophy book with interesting marginalia in the latter.
Thanks Gordon, yep we are a starting point and a ways to go. We've got some good stuff coming next month and then a big update toward July/August to get closer to that goal.
An inside preview would be great, we point to Amazon for that as that isn't data available to anyone beyond the big guys who pay to scan every book.
We have around 2,500 books on the site now, and should have around 10,000 by the end of the year. So far more than most book shops I believe.
Please keep in mind that is a very early mockup and I am currently redoing it heavily. But the idea is to recommend books one by one to start, as well as better ways to view them (ignore the bottom of the mockup as that is all being redone).
The back of the book jacket costs about $1,000 to $2,000 a month to license, so I can't do that yet. But down the road I might look at that. For now people can click through to the store to see that too.
$1k-2k per month for the back cover of a single book makes me think that the publishing industry should be explosively disrupted. Not sure how exactly, but that is ridiculous.
Here is an idea: a movement towards exclusively epub with open source DRM and cryptocurrency. And local physical stores can just start printing jackets.
Well that includes all the books metadata like cover image, author etc, but ya I agree :). I think part of the problem is that fee to Ingram is for flat files or their API, and you are basically paying them to centralize what they collect from authors.
> The back of the book jacket costs about $1,000 to $2,000 a month to license, so I can't do that yet.
Wow, what?! If true, that is absolute madness... I mean, it's basically advertising material - as an author, why on earth wouldn't I want it to be as available as possible?
Plus, surely online book shops are not selling $2,000+ of each single book before they break even?
Wait, does the text of the blurb cost $1000-2000/mo? If so, does GoodReads pay that? Because they have the back blurb of every book, don't they?
If it's the specific image of the back of the book, I don't actually see that being make-or-break for anyone. You can put the blurb that's styled vaguely like the back of a book if it makes people read it more.
This site is actually doing something interesting through its curation, and I would be pretty impressed if that was how it was pitched to me.
But I have to agree, expecting a bookstore and then getting something totally other is too much of a clash. If you want a bookstore, nothing's going to beat a bookstore. If this site offers something different, it should be sold on its merits.
Physical bookstores across Europe have dwindling stock of actual books. Instead, a relative few books are kept around as token attempts at being a bookstore, while the owners seek higher profit margins on things like gimmicky stationery, tea sets, vinyl records, etc. So, even physical locations are no longer very useful for discovery. You are lucky if you still have a local bookshop as capable of surprises as back in the 1990s.
Bookselling is truly a sui generis endeavor. A bookstore will typically have thousands of distinct items in inventory with most having only a single copy in stock. For better or for worse, non-book inventory has a much better rate of return for the bookseller than actual books. The trend you describe is not unique to Europe, but has been happening in the US as well. That said, while my local indie does have a lot of non-book inventory for sale, the bulk of their square footage is still books. It's been a while since I was in Europe, but when I was, the bookshops that I visited (mostly in Paris, but I think I may have looked into one in Bruges as well), were all well-stocked with books. Same with my visit to Prague and Vienna in 2008. What I have noticed is that the density of bookstores in the US has declined greatly over the last 30 years. I used to travel a lot to give workshops in LaTeX and I would pull out the pages in the hotel yellow pages to visit all the local bookstores wherever I was teaching¹. This would occupy my evenings for the whole week of my trip. On my last business trip, to Atlanta, about 6 years ago, there were only 6 bookstores I could find in the whole city and two were chain stores.
1. One memorable moment happened in Denver when I didn't realize that the bookstore I was visiting was an adult bookstore. I wandered the shelves wondering why I didn't recognize any of the authors. It wasn't until I returned to my rental car and looked back at the store that I realized what had happened.
That's an interesting trend for Europe. In the US physical bookstores have thrived over the past decade. I can't remember the last place I was - small town or large city - that didn't have a normal physical bookstore filled with actual books, as was common 30 years ago.
Really? I've noticed a huge decline in the numbers of bookstores over the last 30 years. There was a stretch of about 3 blocks near DePaul University in Chicago that had about 8 bookstores in the 80s/90s and now I don't think there's a single bookstores there. 3rd Street Promenade in Santa Monica used to have about a dozen bookstores and now only has Barnes & Noble (plus an arts and architecture bookshop whose name I don't recall at the moment which used to be on the promenade but moved to Wilshire). Venice Blvd in Venice also had 3 or 4 bookstores which are all gone now.
The number of independent bookstores in the United States was impressively high in 2019, with 1,887 independent bookselling companies running 2,524 stores.
That said, compared to numbers in the 1990s it is down. But lately going up.
I'd say it can never be as fun online. Part of the experience is being physically there, touching the books, feeling their weight, seeing the inside, sitting down on the sofa to read a bit, wandering around, in many stores you can also grab a coffee etc.
Getting a randomized "book feed" is not the same as randomly wandering in a bookstore.
The other thing is that in a bookstore, you can just start reading the book. There’s no limit on how much you can access for free, other than the length of time you’re willing to spend in a bookstore. Which is a real limit, but it doesn’t stop me from becoming invested in what I’m reading, because I know I could theoretically read the whole thing.
Also maybe we could bump into and chat with other store browsers? This started off as a tongue in cheek thought but now I'm thinking this would be a very cool function... :)
I love my local small book stores, but I rarely explore the bookshelves on my own. I go straight to the owner and tell them what book i recently read and what aspects about I liked, which not and ask them what they recommend me reading next. And over time they have a better and better understanding about my tastes. This has worked better for me than any algorithm or crowd sourced recommendations, because neither of them understands why I enjoyed something.
This only works in the small shops where the people there live for books, not in the big chain stores where they just work.
Then, I want to click on that cover and read the back of the book, on the book jacket. A sample of a page or two would be nice, but for me it's unnecessary. Finally, buttons to purchase the treepub, epub, audiobook, etc. are all fine - keep that experience digital.
I keep visiting physical bookstores for this reason. Book discovery online is nowhere near as fun, as it was in a physical store.