After a quick jaunt in to a local bookstore, I was remarking to myself just how terrible finding books are in these massive wastelands littered with non-approachable employees. Given how pervasive tagging is as an available “web 2.0″ option, I think it’s only a matter of time until we see some sort of taxonomy entering a physical environment (like a bookstore). I recently saw a statistic, and I’m afraid I can’t find the source again (my failure to bookmark using tags!??!), that indicated slightly more than 25% of online web users have actively used a tagging system. That’s good! I think most savvy internet users have tags available on their favorite sites. In fact tag clouds are an increasingly common find on nearly all types of sites now.
And yet bookstores are so damned frustrating! As a quick example, I was looking for a book related to some self-management. It wasn’t under Self-Help, or Time Management. It was listed under Business. Why? I have no fucking clue. It literally has -nothing- to do with Business, except perhaps businesses use a clock like everyone else. That’s the best I could come up with. I started to look around the adjacent bookshelves, and noticed that there was very little in the way of cohesive organizing. A smattering of MBA books tucked up against a mish-mosh of finance books and Canadian small business law books. What laws of Man governed these shelves!? It made no sense. Diving deeper around I began to see there were no markings or sub-markings on the shelves. So much for the Dewey Decimal system, we’ve basically gone dumb and now group in vast swaths. Business. Fiction. Non-Fiction. New Stuff. The rest is up to you. I eventually found an employee and asked them to explain how the bookshelves were categorized. I was politely told they had no clue, that it was done by large common themes. Even this employee was unable to find my book (I had been curious to see if there was indeed a ‘secret’ system I was not in the loop about). Good grief!
So where does this leave us? I’m not really sure, but I know I must not be the only one being pushed to Amazon because of how torturous big bookstores are now. Using the same book I was looking for, I popped on Amazon’s Canadian site, and hit up the tag cloud. A couple clicks later and there’s my book. No walking from one bookshelf to another, wandering like a lost soul from section to section in the hopes I find what it is I was looking for.
Another new component to the mix are authors who switch up. Take, for example, a rather interesting and expensive crossing that Neal Stephenson has done.
Neal Stephenson confirmed his status as one of science fiction’s leading authors, in the wake of the acclaimed Anathem, by selling his next book in what Publisher’s Marketplace calls a “major deal.” (In other words, it was worth at least $500,000.) But the book, called REAMDE, is classified as “thriller” rather than “science fiction.”
(http://io9.com/5314665/neal-stephenson-gets-half-a-million-dollars-but-did-he-have-to-switch-genres-to-get-it)
So this begs the question of where REAMDE will be in the store – Thrillers/Mystery or Science Fiction? Stephenson has been in Thriller-land for some time now, but he’s still in Science Fiction in all the bookstores I know of. Yet, this “major deal” seems to hint at not wanting the novel, at all, to be associated with Science Fiction. Am I then forced to use one of the terribly inaccurate public store terminals? Or will I be made to find some employee who will roll their eyes at me as though I was asking them to borrow their car? We are spoiled by the conveniences of information display on the internet, but surely a store would not want to be inconvenient? I am supposed to be lulled in to a purchasing state via my enchanted surroundings!
Not all is lost, however. The only section that seems to be functionally accurate is Biographies. That’s easily concluded by the fact every biographical writing has the person’s face on the cover. It’s like picture books all over again.
For me the local bookstore, and I’m sad to say this, is basically a glorified magazine/periodical rack. I know there are exceptions to the rule, especially places like Bakka Books in Toronto, but I’m definitely becoming more and more jaded on the issue. I know Libraries do things with a brilliant system. I don’t dismiss that fact. Nor am I dismissing that commercial sales and vast quantities of merchandise can be very difficult to manage. It’s just that there must be a better way. Some type of consumer paradigm will come, that much is for sure.
And so I dream of the day when I walk in to a bookstore, greeted by a localized software agent nudging my phone. A quick search entry or even a tag cloud greets me and off I go, following the arrows on my screen to my wordy treasure tucked away in some far off shelf. And with gleeful excitement I shall rejoice, book in hand, my adventure concluded by a happy confirmation chime ringing from my phone.
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