Monday, April 21, 2008

New aStore: Author Mania - Popular Fiction Book Categories @ Amazon.com

Most libraries divide their books into fiction and nonfiction, arranging the nonfiction by topic and the fiction alphabetically by author. Amazon.com does something similar, although their reliance on their internal search function makes the relevant links links pretty obscure. You can always search for your favorite authors within their Literature and Fiction category, but you are liable to get a lot of extraneous results (like all authors with the same first or last name!)

Alternatively, you can drill down to their author pages which feature selected authors in selected fiction genres. This produces considerably more relevant results, although there are still some occasional glitches. Our Author Mania aStore is designed to make it easy to find books by your favorite authors. Because the aStore format only allows searching within the top two categories, each of the top-level categories below contains a somewhat unwieldy list of authors, but they're in alphabetical order, so just take a deep breath and scroll down...

As of this posting, this store is still "under construction," and is rapidly approaching Amazon's 999-category limit. Accordingly, there are currently (and perhaps permanently) no subcategories under some of the top-level categories below:

Author Mania



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Sunday, April 20, 2008

New aStore: Popular Non-Fiction - Categories @ Amazon.com

What do we mean by "Popular Non-Fiction?" It 's probably easier to describe what we don't mean: Amazon.com has a book category "Professional & Technical" which covers a number of fields in science, law, medicine, business and engineeering. This "Popular Non-Fiction" aStore is meant to cover everything else.

As is common with Amazon's categories, there is some significant overlap here: Theoretically, the Mind & Body Health section here should include books intended for a general audience, while medical & nursing books should be in our Technical Bookmania store. In fact you will find a lot of books listed in both places that don't conform to this convention. This is should be only a minor irritation, since those books are usually listed in both places, but it's a good idea to check both.

Below you will find our current category listings for this new store. In the near future (after the search engines begin to find some of these pages) we'll be expanding it to include the relevant subcategories.

Popular Non-Fiction

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New aStore: Technical Bookmania - Categories @ Amazon.com

The Technical Bookmania aStore isn't that new, but it was added since my earlier article My Top-Level aStores. As our discussion of search engines suggests, the best way to find items at Amazon.com is to use Amazon's own internal search. Specifically, it is best to use their "search within this category" facility for an appropriately specific product group. The biggest problem with that is the confusing "jungle" of literally thousands of categories Amazon provides, within a taxonomy that is often obscure at best.

One problem this site attempts to address is the need to locate the appropriate Amazon categories quickly and easily. To that end, I'm beginning a series of article that will simply highlight the categories and subcategories included in our aStores, which can then be found using the "search this blog" forms above. Herewith are the top-level categories within the Technical Bookmania aStore:

Technical Bookmania

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