Browsing the Library is more fun

Browsing the Library is more fun than browsing Amazon. Tracing my eyes over the shelves and side-stepping to move to the next shelf was more fun than clicking on "other customers viewed" or whatever. It was a striking yet low-key experience. 

 See, I went to my local library the other day to return a book. It was "So I'm a Spider, So What?" manga volume 2, in case you are curious. That was a simple enough process. Then I went inside to pick up a reserve book. That's a thing with me; whenever I return a book I want to pick up a book. That creates a cycle of library visits. 

Because of the COVID-19 Pandemic, I had gotten into the habit of reserving a book and then picking it up. That didn't happen this time. See, I had reserved a book that was at this library, already present at this location, but it was marked on the website as "in transit", as if it were moving from another location. So I decided to look for it where it would normally be, thinking it was "in transit" between shelves. 

I browsed the shelves looking for it and I spotted another series. This was Sword Art Online Girls Ops. Volumes 1-3 were available. I had read about that series and I was interested in it, so I picked up all three. Then I found another series that I hadn't heard of, but it looked good, so I picked it up too. Then I saw a book with the title, "I Kill Giants" with a beautiful cover illustration. So I picked it up and started reading it then and there. 

Eventually, I came away with five books total, including the one that I had originally come to pick up from the reserve shelf. I had also spent a lot more time at the library than I had planned for. However, I didn't regret it. 

For one, I accomplished my two objectives, dropping off a book and picking up a new one. More importantly, I had fun. Browsing the shelves was fun. It was more fun than a similar activity at an online place like Amazon. 

Amazon, and, I imagine, other online book retailers, use algorithms to provide links to the next book. All Amazon points me towards these days are isekai manga and light novels. I've even been routed into the Reincarnation sub-genre of isekai manga and light novels. That gets, I don't know, shallow? "You bought that so how about buying this too? It's very similar." That sort of thing, like a salesman pointing you to the next sale. 

Browsing at the library is a discovery thing. Books in a library are grouped by subject matter. That's how the Dewey Decimal system works. Physical books belonging to the same category are shelved together for the purpose of organizing the collection. It has nothing to do with patrons. Everyone who comes in sees the same thing. The exception, of course, is books that are checked out when a given person arrives. 

So there is no data funnel. There is no separation of people by the choices made by an algorithm. Everyone gets the same view of the books available at a given location at a given time. So everyone gets a chance to discover something entirely new. Something unexpected could be on the next shelf; something that an algorithm would never show you. And that could be your next favorite book. 

The reserve book I came to pick up was called "Sleepy Princess in the Demon Castle". It is a fantasy slice-of-life comedy. Sword Art Online Girls Ops is a Fantasy Adventure Shojo series. The fifth book was a realistic fiction detective manga. I found them all in the same corner of the library because they were all manga (Japanese comics).  They all belong to different subcategories and I found them all by browsing on my own. 

That is part of why I'm going to Barnes and Nobles the next time I want to buy a book. There are a host of reasons for why I'm shifting away from the Amazon-for-everything mindset. This is one of them. I can browse the physical shelves like I would the library, except, of course, no reading the material before I purchase it. 

That is a key difference, but if I go into that then I will diverge from the topic of this post. Browsing the library is fun. I wonder which books will be available the next time I visit. 

Brian Wilkerson is an independent novelist, freelance book reviewer, and writing advice blogger. He studied at the University of Minnesota and came away with bachelor's degrees in English Literature and History (Classical Mediterranean Period concentration).

His fantasy series, Journey to Chaos, is currently available on Amazon as an ebook or paperback (and might be available at Barnes and Nobles in the future ^_~).