Browsing for Books

Seattle-based Amazon.com recently announced the purchase of Goodreads.com, a site where readers write reviews and make recommendations of the books they've read.  The news excited a lot of chatter among readers (and writers like me) about whether this is a good development or a bad one.  

Where is a reader to browse in 2013?  With Borders Books & Music gone, and with Barnes & Noble closing roughly thirty per cent of its locations nationwide, the choices for book buyers who prefer bricks-and-mortar locations are shrinking.  Independent bookstores have been decimated in the past decade.  On the Eastside, all we have left are Parkplace Books, the University Bookstore in Bellevue, Island Books in Mercer Island, and a few, quickly disappearing used bookstores. 

We do have one of the best public library systems in the country (and it's one of the busiest.)  If what readers tell me bears out for the general population, however, there are still lots of people who want to buy books, not borrow them.  Or, like me, they do both.  How do we choose that next title?  Where do we turn while we're waiting for our favorite author to publish her next book?

It's fairly well established in the publishing business that the one and only thing that always succeeds in bookselling is word of mouth.  Most of us are far more likely to buy a book because a friend loved it than because we see it on an endcap in a bookstore, or in an online advertisement.  I think both Goodreads and Amazon are modern-day extensions of that word-of-mouth approach to book buying.  

I'm a regular user of both Goodread and Amazon.  I read widely.  I don't care much for the best-seller lists or the latest literary award-winning novel.  I want to like the books I read. Consequently, I love Goodread's reader reviews, and I even respond well to Amazon's recommendations.  I'm in hopes that Amazon won't change Goodreads at all, because, in my view, the system is working as it is. I will still go to the site to see what my friends are reading and what they have to say.  (I also read reviews of my own books, which is sometimes lovely and sometimes sobering!)  I take note of things I find on Goodreads, and either click through to a book from there, or go to Amazon and use it as a starting point for my book search.  I think of it as browsing, and even though there's something special about physically browsing the stacks of a brick-and-mortar bookstore, online browsing works pretty well for me.

How do you browse for books?  How far will you drive--and how often--to go to a bookstore?  Time and gasoline add to the cost of the books you buy, of course.  It's hard to resist the convenience and economy of buying online.  The trick is in knowing what you're looking for.