Dear Amazon,
I like you. You're not as special as the library to me, but I like you. You offer options, unlimited affordable options. People will depreciate you, say you are putting indie bookstores out of business. You are not putting them out of business; Barnes & Noble and Borders did that 7-10 years ago. You are putting them the Borders type of suburban bookstore/cafe reasonably out of business (B&N is still strong). Instead you allow indie booksellers to sell their books along yours over the internet and frankly as a rural citizen (which will one day change even if that one day is 10 years from now) I don't care about indie bookstores because rural communities' indie bookstores are usually faith based or severely limited. I mean I want to read Adolfo Bioy Casares or Saul Bellow which may not be at the local bookstore. You make great literature accessible to people in rural areas. Wonderful.
I even like how you are able to present book recommendations that are pedestrian friendly versus other websites. I also like how you're able to present recommendations based on category. After all, I'm more of a scifi reader. I want to know what scifi recommendations of the month there are.
Yet, I have a complaint that I'd like to present. See, besides scifi I devour poetry and comic novels. The problem? You do not have these in separate categories.
Sure, you have Humor & Entertainment, but that is mainly Chelsea Handler memoirs and humor nonfiction a la David Sedaris. If I want something akin to Douglas Adams I'm probably not going to find it in that section. Daniel O'Brien perfectly elucidated on this in his post on Cracked.com, "5 Reasons its impossible to Find Funny Books" (http://www.cracked.com/blog/5-reasons-itE28099s-impossible-to-find-funny-books_p2/). As he said, there's an audience of people who want a deep comic novel, like a "Simpsons episode but in a book."
As difficult as it is to find rewarding comedy fiction, it is ridiculously arduous to find poetry. Look, I understand; not everyone devours poetry like I do. That being said, there's still an audience, and the main reason that audience is small is because most people aren't aware of what poetry is out there. Yet, poetry doesn't have its own section; it's labeled with Literature & Fiction and I'm sorry but it is poorly labeled because each month all ten of those books of month will be fiction prose narrative unless Anne Carson release an epic poem. This is especially frustrating when you finally get to the category of poetry under "browse books" and it's mainly revisions or collections. What if I want a contemporary collection of poetry? I could set the engine to search for "date release" but that'll go all the way into 2014 with unreleased poetry and even then it'll mainly be a new translation of "The Odyssey."
You are now a gatekeeper. Just like the New York Times Book Review, Publisher's Weekly, and so forth you are now a gatekeeper for literary exposure and taste. That means you have power. A lot of power. You are now a proxy for the bookstore that used to have "employee recommendations." With that power you have the capacity to reasonably change the exposure an individual has with certain literature. That means you can put a Poetry collection of the month or Comic Novel of the Month and make it accessible.
You should do this. Please do this. I like Poetry Foundation, and I still have a lot of Douglas Adams to read. But I grow tired of googling and so forth when it would be much easier to have it in one central location.
Comic novels and poetry; make it a distinguishable Books of Month Recommendations whatever genre.
Thank you,
M
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