Music Blog Romania

Stupid Bookstores

17.Sep

I am trying for some time to find a nice bookstore in Romania, preferably one that also has a good online store so that I can quickly search for what I want and order online – but I find it very hard to find one.

Recently I decided to try buybooks.ro, a site which appears listed in usor.ro as the second best in its category. I open the site, looks pretty good and simple. So I decide to browse and search for some business boks.

Browsing: The closest category I could find related to business books is called “Management, marketing, sales”. Ok, fair enough, let’s look. The first thing that strikes me is that the books are listed in an apparently random order…the criteria is not popularity, nor the author name. After browsing through some pages, I got it – their are ranked by price, from the most expensive to the cheapest ! Wow, this is an interesting ranking. Probably they thought that if they list the most expensive ones first people will buy those, so that they make more profit… but it’s so stupid ! Never in a bookstore I found this ranking, it’s just so unfriendly to usability.

Ok, could not find many interesting things in here, just a lot of mistakes – for example, the book of Ferdinand F Fournies – Employee’s psichology has as picture the cover of a Peter Drucker book. So, if I order it, what would I get ?? Fournies or Drucker :)
Search: Ok, browsing did not work, so let’s search for what I was interested in – “Gene Zelazny – Say it with charts“. As I expected the title of the book had been translated in Romanian in some stupid manner, I decided not to risk anything and search by the author. Search for Zelazny did not return any results, so browsing by author might have been better. Ups, another surprise – there is no letter Z in the authors list ! This is quite strange, but let’s see maybe it is starting with G, so I opened the list of authors starting with G. Well, here I really lost it. The list is fully messed up, the authors are falling into the G section sometimes by their first name – like George Bacovia, sometimes by their last name, like Goleman Daniel and sometimes their appear under various names, like having both G. Liiceanu and Gabriel Liiceanu !

Now, an online library is the last place where I would expect this to happen. I used to go to libraries pretty often and I know how strict they are with putting a book on the right shelf – in the right section and in the right author order. How could someone find something in this chaos?

Madalin, all due respect for usor.ro, but please take this site out of the 2nd place in Libraries, because there is nothing “usor” about this buying experience.

Seems that it’s too hard to find a decent bookstore in Romania, so I get back to Amazon. Just as a comparison, here is what they would return on a Gene Zelazny search.

2 comments so far

Although the site is listed second, it doesn’t mean that it’s second-best.
It’s there because of the date it was entered.That’s it!
And, btw, I couldn’t find any comments regarding your experience. :) You can write a review and I can guarantee that’ll be published.
Regards.

I admit I only briefly visited usor.ro and this is why I did not post the review there. Now I did, by putting a link to the review above, in the article.



Leave a comment
Line and paragraph breaks automatic, e-mail address never displayed, HTML allowed: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>

(required)

(required but not displayed)