This search took me to Waterstones, but as soon as I got there a pop-up popped up telling me they'd love my feedback if I've got a minute to fill in a short survey. Yes, well I have got some feedback: Dear Waterstones, don't get in the way of my browsing by asking me for my feedback!!
This is an increasingly frequent occurence with websites. It's a bit like entering a shop in RL and as soon as you get through the door, someone leaping in front of you and asking you how good the shop is and what needs improving! Don't they realise how annoying it is? Ah, but there's the rub: with so much competition and so many places competing for the attention of the human eye and wallet, the businesses are understandably frantic to make sure they are doing everything possible to keep us on board.
Anyway, the upshot for me (as always) is that I can't be bothered with their site. I want browsing to be easy and fun, not laced with an ambush when I stick my head round the corner, to mix metaphors. Next search Fantastic OR Savings LOL
Tuesday 10 August 2010
Wednesday 4 August 2010
a AND domestic
First try of my new search strategy and it returned this:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/How-Domestic-Goddess-Comfort-Cooking/dp/0701171081 Amazon is pretty much my second home on occasions and I would sorely miss it if it wasn't there. So what is it good for apart from buying books? Well, obviously there is the 'search inside' function which means I can check out the book first to see if it's what I want. It's also VERY useful for detecting palgiarism LOL!! Amazon saves me a great deal of time and money in travel too. But as for the wider implications.....
......just thinking in terms of saving time and money, the effect of Amazon and similar for anyone in academcia anyway is that research time is speeded up. There's no waiting for weeks for a book to arrive at the library or bookshop any more - quite often it's easily available online to buy instantly and/or available as a googlebook. Thinking about this on the wider scale, one can argue that at least for certain areas, the production of knowledge must have also speeded up - perhaps we will see the implications of this somewhere down the line.
Borrowing from Dave Kenyon's thinking, there is also a problem created here for research by students, and that is a tendency to use the "search inside" function on Amazon as a way of generating quotes. Unfortunately what this means is that often only a page of the text is read - or even just the bit that has the search word in it - which means the context is not grasped and there is a deal of misunderstanding of what the words actually mean. The result is an essay full of info-bits which are thinly understood, if at all. In comparison, when a book is taken from a library shelf there is more of a likelihood that the student will read the bits before and after their passage of interest and so grasp the wider picture.
As for the Domestic Goddess in the link above, there is no search inside function here - unsurprising really! I'm not even going to start on what I think about the idea of domestic goddessness.
A final thought. The war between the online and real-world booksellers has clearly brought many changes, most obviously the bookshop-coffee house binary which has definitely made the world a better place. 'Search inside', and suggestions for similar titles etc are the online bookshop's way of replacing the bookshop experience. I'm not sure where each might go from here, but one thing that has dealt the real-world shop a leftfield blow has been the electronic reader - it remains to be seen how much, if atall, this supports one or the other business.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/How-Domestic-Goddess-Comfort-Cooking/dp/0701171081 Amazon is pretty much my second home on occasions and I would sorely miss it if it wasn't there. So what is it good for apart from buying books? Well, obviously there is the 'search inside' function which means I can check out the book first to see if it's what I want. It's also VERY useful for detecting palgiarism LOL!! Amazon saves me a great deal of time and money in travel too. But as for the wider implications.....
......just thinking in terms of saving time and money, the effect of Amazon and similar for anyone in academcia anyway is that research time is speeded up. There's no waiting for weeks for a book to arrive at the library or bookshop any more - quite often it's easily available online to buy instantly and/or available as a googlebook. Thinking about this on the wider scale, one can argue that at least for certain areas, the production of knowledge must have also speeded up - perhaps we will see the implications of this somewhere down the line.
Borrowing from Dave Kenyon's thinking, there is also a problem created here for research by students, and that is a tendency to use the "search inside" function on Amazon as a way of generating quotes. Unfortunately what this means is that often only a page of the text is read - or even just the bit that has the search word in it - which means the context is not grasped and there is a deal of misunderstanding of what the words actually mean. The result is an essay full of info-bits which are thinly understood, if at all. In comparison, when a book is taken from a library shelf there is more of a likelihood that the student will read the bits before and after their passage of interest and so grasp the wider picture.
As for the Domestic Goddess in the link above, there is no search inside function here - unsurprising really! I'm not even going to start on what I think about the idea of domestic goddessness.
A final thought. The war between the online and real-world booksellers has clearly brought many changes, most obviously the bookshop-coffee house binary which has definitely made the world a better place. 'Search inside', and suggestions for similar titles etc are the online bookshop's way of replacing the bookshop experience. I'm not sure where each might go from here, but one thing that has dealt the real-world shop a leftfield blow has been the electronic reader - it remains to be seen how much, if atall, this supports one or the other business.
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