Monday, August 29, 2016

Amazon book categories are a joke

A brief non-physics post.  Others have pointed this out, but Amazon's categorizations for books are broken in such a way that they almost have to be designed to encourage scamming.  As an example, my book is, at this instant (and that's also worth noting - these things seem to fluctuate nearly minute-to-minute), the number 30 best seller in "Books > Science & Math > Physics > Solid State Physics".  That's sounds cool, but it's completely meaningless, since if you click on that category you find that it contains such solid state physics classics as "Ugly's Electrical References, 2014 ed.", "Barron's 500 Flash Cards of American Sign Language", "The Industrial Design Reader", and "Electrical Motor Controls for Integrated Systems", along with real solid state books like Kittel, Simon, and Ashcroft & Mermin.  Not quite as badly, the Nanostructures category is filled "Strength of Materials" texts and books about mechanical structures.  Weird, and completely fixable if Amazon actually cared, which they seem not to.

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