My niece wants to learn French. Specifically reading and writing French. So she specifically wants a book on learning French.
So I went to Amazon and typed in “learning French” as a search term and specified I wanted “books”.
The first item that came up was Easy French Step-by-Step, a paperback book by Myrna Bell Rochester. Okay, certainly something to consider.
The second item was Learn French - Word Power 101. A kindle product. Which is not a book.
The third item is French, Conversational: Learn to Speak and Understand French with Pimsleur Language Programs. Which is a audio cd.
The fourth item is a notebook insert French Conversation (Quickstudy: Academic).
The fifth item is another audio cd, French For Dummies.
At this point, I’m thinking, “Wow, apparently Myrna Bell Rochester has written the only book on learning French in the world. Who knew it was such a narrow field?”
But no. The sixth item was another actual book: Learn French In 7 Days!: The Ultimate Crash Course to Learning The Basics of the French Language In No Time by Dagny Taggart. So there is apparently more than one book in this category. So why was Amazon sending me off into the land of audio cd’s and kindles and other things which are not books?
Of the twelve items that Amazon recommended on the first page - when I had specified I wanted books - six of them were non-books.
Has Amazon wandered so far away from its original market that it’s forgotten what a book is?
Yes it is… oral sex is sex and e-books are books. The rest, I agree. They’re pulling that shit a lot: you ask for digital music and they show you CDs and DVDs, you ask for movies and they try to sell you the soundtrack.
Everything Amazon sells is assigned to some category/department. Audiobooks are categorized as books (which IMHO makes perfect sense). And things like the audio CDs listed in the OP are at least borderline audiobooks.
Amazon search box, type in “learning French”. In the drop down box, select category: Books.
The results are exactly as the OP reports, which includes things that clearly are not ink and paper books.
However. Amazon sells a LOT of products, so it takes a little more work to craft a suitably selective search that will weed out the broader category of products tagged as “books.”
On the left hand (in my browser) of the page, the search results can be further refined, including which particular “Book Category” search terms one wants. These include “Paperback” and “Hardcover”, both of which can be selected, which will then yield only paper and ink books.
Dagny Taggart? Really? I was intrigued and looked her up on Amazon. Quite the polyglot. She has 7 day books on more than a dozen languages. All that while running a railroad. I am impressed.
I think it depends on context. There are situations when an e-book is not a book and oral sex is not sex (if you’re trying to get pregnant, oral sex won’t get the job done).
If Amazon is going to have filters in their search engine, then I think they should sort their products and put them into the appropriate categories. If they want to have filters for books, e-books, and books or e-books, that’s fine. But you shouldn’t include e-books in a books filter.
I don’t think anybody can learn to read a language from an audiobook. You pretty much have to see the words written in front of you.
You might argue that most people aren’t trying to learn a new language. But why try to sell an illiterate person a book? Or sell a deaf person an audiobook? If people are looking for a specific product, list those products.
I don’t know about you, but I learned my native language by hearing it, not by seeing the words written in front of me.
With that obvious rebuttal out of the way, I don’t think it would work for me to learn a foreign language strictly by hearing, without seeing the words in front of me, but it must work for some people or else such products wouldn’t sell or get good reviews.
Often the same book is available in multiple formats (hardback, paperback, ebook, audiobook) and it makes sense to show all the available formats on the same screen. If you want to limit the results to a specific format, there’s a way to do that, as other posters have already pointed out.
I love Amazon for many things, but their search is not one of them. They are so damn determined to give you 100 pages of results they just throw anything vaguely related in there. Even when you search for specific model numbers they give you similar items and even unrelated items. I’d hate to think of how many returns are from someone searching for a model/part number and ordering what looked like the right thing at the top of the search results.
What one person posted was that they did the same search I described and got the same results.
There is no way you can go to the initial search engine and filter out all non-book results. You have to do the initial search and get all the results - even if you specified books only - and then do follow-up searches to filter out the non-books.
My point is that Amazon should make it possible for a customer to filter out non-books at the initial search. And if for some reason, they don’t want to do that, they shouldn’t pretend they have a filter for doing it.
If that one additional click is too much for you, you could start with Advanced Search. You can specify a format, although AFAIK you can’t specify more than one an a time (e.g. Paperback or Hardback).
“Pretend they have a filter for doing it”?
This is quite possibly the first-worldest problem I’ve seen in a very long time. For a really good Pitting, you should have mentioned how angry you were and thrown in some colorful obscene insults directed at Amazon.
