New categories in the USA Kindle store

New categories in the USA Kindle store

In March of last year (2012), I did a post which broke down the categories in the USA Kindle store:

Kindle bestsellers (free and paid)…by category

Well, I’ve noticed recently that the categories have really changed! There are a lot more of them, and they seem more…in the know.

There are also some other searches which appear in the Kindle store: for example, I’ve seen searches for types of characters, for authors within a category, and for series.

I find categories of things fascinating. It just intrigues me the way that humans try to lump things together, and split other things apart.

It’s a natural tendency and yes, it can make things a lot more efficient.

However, it can also paint things with an inappropriate brush. Let’s say you decided that, oh, all bees will sting you. Certainly, some bees will, but some bees are not going to sting you. It’s a safe strategy to avoid all bees in that case, by lumping them into the “stingers” group. The “bee fly” takes advantage of that, and even though it doesn’t have a stinger, it looks like a bee…so it stays safe because people (and other animals) avoid it.

Forteans (followers of Charles Fort) make an effort not to categorize things. One of the core ideas of Fort is that definitions are artificial. As Fort put it,

“…if, upon the basis of yellowness and redness, Science should attempt to classify all phenomena, including all red things as veritable, and excluding all yellow things as false or illusory, the demarcation would have to be false and arbitrary, because things colored orange, constituting continuity, would belong on both sides of the attempted border-line.”

One of my old jokes: “Question: Why did the Fortean cross the road? Answer: There isn’t another side.”

Let’s, then, take a look at some of these new categories…and a bit at the other searches.

We’ll start out with

Science Fiction & Fantasy

The categories are:

• Adventure (16,991)
• Alien Invasion (688)
• Alternative History (3,109)
• Anthologies & Short Stories (8,879)
• Classics (591)
• Colonization (516)
• Cyberpunk (583)
• Dystopian (1,647)
• First Contact (297)
• Galactic Empire (322)
• Genetic Engineering (1,126)
• Hard Science Fiction (4,116)
• Metaphysical & Visionary (1,140)
• Military (3,598)
• Post-Apocalyptic (1,805)
• Space Exploration (429)
• Space Opera (5,378)
• Steampunk (865)
• Time Travel (1,955)
• TV, Movie, Video Game Adaptations (1,548)

Under that, we get an author list that calls out to me what is an odd assortment:

• Victor Methos (4)
• Susan Kaye Quinn (12)
• Orson Scott Card (57)
• Max Brooks (1)
• Hugh Howey (19)
• Matthew Mather (3)
• Kurt Vonnegut (20)

However, there is also a link to “See more…”, and that brought me to this fascinating page:

Science Fiction authors page

It has thirty-four pages, with about 50 authors per page…and some of those authors only have one title listed. It’s possible that every author is listed (alphabetically by first name, by the way).

For example, I could click

Alastair Reynolds

and get to a page with just that author’s books…which I could bookmark for future use using my browser.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen people wanting to search by author. Yes, you can put the name in the browser, but that’s not really very reliable. Well, there is a search box on the author page, and it seems to work.

That should mean…yes, there is an authors page for the whole Kindle store!

Kindle Store authors page

There you go: you can now search by author. I’m going to add that link into the blogsite.

Okay, back to SF&F.

After authors, you have series, and again, that list is a bit odd to me:

• Mindjack (5)
• Sookie Stackhouse/True Blood (18)
• Ender (8)
• The Descent (8)
• Odd Thomas (8)
• Elemental Mysteries (4)
• Silo Saga (10)

Again, clicking “See more” brings up this:

SF&F series page

There doesn’t seem to be one of those for the whole store, though.

It does have a searchbox.

Here are the filters for types of characters:

• Aliens (4,781)
• AIs (535)
• Clones (345)
• Corporations (124)
• Mutants (197)
• Pirates (341)
• Psychics (624)
• Robots & Androids (1,140)

No “See more…” on that one, though.

Next we get genres:

Horror (2,884)
Humor (1,975)
Mystery (2,320)
Non-Romantic (45,922)
Romantic (4,505)
Thriller (3,493)

Those are genres within science fiction and fantasy.

One more thing: there is a link to filter for books which have Whispersync for Voice:

Whispersync for Voice (1,157)

Oh, actually, there is another filter…number of stars:

4 & Up (19,120)
3 & Up (22,903)
2 & Up (23,644)
1 Up (24,032)

Hm…does that mean that no SF&F book has gotten 5 stars average? Sorting by Customer Reviews for the whole list, that seems to be correct…nothing higher than 4.9. Looking at these numbers, my guess is that there is a threshold for number of reviews before it counts for this listing.

Okay, let’s take a look at Romance:

African American (2,598)
Collections & Anthologies (5,993)
Contemporary (40,800)
Fantasy (9,506)
Gay Romance (6,611)
Gothic (600)
Historical Romance (18,051)
Holidays (2,031)
Inspirational (6,958)
Lesbian Romance (1,371)
Military (1,232)
Multicultural & Interracial (1,893)
Mystery & Suspense (12,279)
New Adult & College (1,026)
Paranormal (15,394)
Romantic Comedy (5,203)
Science Fiction (1,615)
Series (14,777)
Sports (764)
Time Travel (1,645)
Westerns (3,640)

Author
Anya Wylde (1)
Ann Charles (2)
Martin Crosbie (1)
Kate Perry (7)
Marie Force (17)
Linda Ladd (2)
Kimberly Kinrade (2)
› See more…

Romantic Themes
Amnesia (182)
Beaches (536)
Gambling (200)
International (119)
Love Triangle (1,243)
Medical (928)
Secret Baby (553)
Vacation (184)
Wedding (689)
Workplace (230)

Romantic Heroes
Cowboys (1,364)
Doctors (321)
Firefighters (115)
Highlanders (473)
Pirates (436)
Politicians (510)
Royalty & Aristocrats (1,097)
Spies (749)
Vikings (181)
Wealthy (942)

Whispersync for Voice
Whispersync for Voice (3,731)

Avg. Customer Review
4 & Up (67,675)
3 & Up (80,362)
2 & Up (82,839)
1 & Up (83,929)

Looking at these, I wonder if they are derived from customer placed tags? It seems odd for an Amazon employee to create a category for “Secret Baby”. You know, that would make sense: Amazon is probably creating filters out of popular tags…clever. That crowdsources the categorizing, which is probably not a bad way to go.

Now, what Amazon needs to do is let us sign up for an e-mail when a page changes, so we could know when our favorite authors/genres/characters/series have new books…

What do you think? Are these the categories you would have picked? Do you care about categories? Are you going to bookmark author or series pages? Feel free to let me and my readers know by commenting on this post.

This post by Bufo Calvin originally appeared in the I Love My Kindle blog.

Hey, Amazon, buy this: BookAnd

Hey, Amazon, buy this: BookAnd

I don’t think that when Amazon buys something it’s automatically a bad thing, although I know some see them as the United Fruit Company* of the past couple of decades.

They generally buy something which is already working very well…and I believe they tend to continue to work well. However, they can become better integrated with Amazon.

IMDb.com

is, I think, a good example. I liked it before, and I like it now. It’s my favorite movie reference site on the web, and I visit it literally every day. Now, though, it can take me to Amazon Instant Video, show me something related that’s on sale from Amazon, and supplies data for X-Ray for Movies on my Kindle Fire.

I’ve also been saying a lot about how I think Amazon should get more social.

Well, I downloaded a free app from the Amazon Appstore this morning:

BookAnd : Your Dream Bookstore

and I think it has great potential for Amazon. It has a good concept…and does not execute it particularly well. Tying it into Amazon directly would also be a big benefit.

Here’s the idea:

Users create virtual 3D bookstores. They put their own books in there, and you can (even as an unregistered guest) wander around them. You see the books on stores in aisles (with their actual covers), pick one up, read what the person has said about it (if anything).

The “bookstore manager” (I’m a former brick and mortar bookstore manager) names the aisles, groups the books, writes the reviews.

You can go from the review of a book in one store to other users reviews…and jump from there to their stores.

It’s a brilliant idea, and has just the right amount of social for me. I’m not going to be interrupted: it isn’t user to user, it’s user to book to user (as far as I’ve seen).

The negative for me is that the interface is unusually clunky. It’s very slow to respond. I had to lock the rotation (swipe down-locked), because it kept insisting on being upside down. Searching for a book to add to your store was painfully slow and hard to work.

Amazon could fix all those interface issues. They could let us add books we’ve bought from Amazon, or easily import the results of a search at the Amazon store.

BookAnd supposedly lets you import from book sites, but you need the ISBN (International Standard Book Number) to be showing on the screen, I think, so I couldn’t import from Manage Your Kindle or kindle.amazon.com or my media collection.

Right now, it’s purely social, except for some public domain books, which you can read in the store. You find a book in BookAnd, then you would go to Amazon to buy it.

Here’s the other piece that would be cool: let Amazon Associates get advertising fees from the virtual bookstores, and people can buy them directly through Amazon’s version of the store (although you’d really be going to Amazon, of course).

I really think this could be hugely innovative. Instead of shopping around Amazon.com, you go into a virtual mall of bookstores (you can mark favorites and move them around, in my vision of this). The users “decorate” the stores (you can do this in BookAnd…I believe they sell you decorations, but I haven’t tried that part yet).

You could have some very specialty stores this way…Dutch Military History or Science Fiction Sleuths, for example.

Ooh, and physical bookstores could do it, too! What a way for Amazon to work with them! They could sort of simulate the physical location. Amazon could let them upload a picture of the actual storefront! Hm…you could also do avatars of employees whether it was pros or not.

I’m liking this more and more the more I think about it. How about a science fiction bookstore…that you virtually enter in space and is staffed by aliens?

You could also do book events with real authors, certainly by running a chat, but perhaps traditional publishers would set up a video stream.

I think some folks from Amazon read this blog…maybe this will get them looking into it.

They could, of course, develop this all from scratch. It didn’t look to me like BookAnd was being used much yet, but buying it might be a good way to go (and avoids some legal issues).

If you try out the app and have a comment, please let me know. I’d be interested in the experience in using the app on other devices, like an iPad. Maybe it’s just clunky on the Fire. That’s another thing Amazon could do…make PC and Mac versions.

There’s a world of opportunity out there yet in books…we’ve seen something, to refute Al Jolson, but we haven’t seen it all.

* United Fruit Company bought out many other banana suppliers in Central America, and has not earned a good reputation for corporate citizenship, to put it mildly. It was nicknamed El Pulpo (“The Octopus”). I’ve been reading it about it in The Fish That Ate the Whale: The Life and Times of America’s Banana King

This post by Bufo Calvin originally appeared in the I Love My Kindle blog.