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By David Rothman

image 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?

 
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