ebooks | Things I want from Smashwords

I like Smashwords. I buy stuff there; I get free stuff from there. I like that they have a style guide, even if it's so complicated most authors apparently just ignore it and the ebooks come out as poorly-formatted almost-plain-text with no chapter breaks. I like that they have ebooks in several formats--everything except .lit and ereader. (I don't care about .lit, and I don't currently read ereader PDBs, although I love the format.) What I don't like? Their search engine. Or rather, their lack of search options.

I like that they'll show free ebooks in each category. I don't like that they won't show "Pay what you like" books with the free ebooks, although that's probably going to be obsolete, because those can't feed to other bookstores.

What I want to see at Smashwords:

Sort by price, and filter by price range
Sort by star rating
Sort alpha by author
Sort alpha by book title (mainly, this'd work to put series together)
Language filters
Sort alpha by publisher (put "self-pub" either all at the beginning or all at the end, not by author name)
Sort by length/filter by length
Filters. Lots of filter options.
Reader-generated tags (ideally, with something like AO3's tag wrangling, but I get that that's too much to ask for); even a dropdown selection of tags would be good, which would avoid vicious and bigoted tags (please, let them include "needs content editing" and "needs formatting")
Sort/filter by available sample amount: both word count & percentage
Original release vs this was available before (mostly, those'll be pro author re-releases; some were published online in blogs and such)
Show me stuff I haven't bought
Show me stuff not in my library (when I click on a book in my library, it should give me a list of "people also bought")
Show me other stuff people have bought when they bought any of my purchases or anything in my library
Sort my library - allow user-generated tags for groupings; allow other sorting
My library list, downloadable as .csv
Allow me to mark books in my library "I've read this."
Receipts that tell me how much I paid for what
Download from my library in bulk, like Fictionwise (yeah, not gonna happen; that's some serious coding changes)
"Send note to author" option, for those authors that agree to it
Indication of which books are "Premium Catalog"
More encouragement to authors to tag works
List of "recently viewed" books
Top 10 lists: most downloads, most sales, most ratings, most viewed, both site-wide and in each genre
"Needs some attention" list: 10-20 random books that have never been downloaded, never been bought, never been viewed. (Stick to books that have been on the site more than a week. Maybe more than a month.)
Option to make library/purchase list public
Subgenre categories. (These could be part of the dropdown tags option.)
Smutfilter, opposite the "prude filter": only show me the stuff tagged with 18+ warnings (Probably it shouldn't be called a smutfilter)

That's more-or-less off the top of my head. Some of those are dream features, but some are what I really need if I'm going to treat the site as a serious resource rather than a random bookdump. (I mean. SORT BY AUTHOR. I want to be able to browse by some criteria other than "most recently uploaded." I want to look at my library in some order other than "oldest to newest added.")

What features do you want to see in an ebook store? What stores or free ebook sites have features you like; which sites have features that annoy you?

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Thanks for the link!

for Smashwords - this! (and especially the first 7)

Yeah, sort by something other than "genre/free-notfree/short-long" would be really useful. I mean, the default of "most recently posted shows up first" gives a nice showcase to recent uploaders who might otherwise be ignored, but the keyword tagging is awful (in part because so many authors fail at it; how many people are going to search for wrestling teens peer pressure or romance pirates curse dreams boys love mystery suspense action teen fantasy?) and the lack of alpha-based browsing by author or titles is just awful.

Makes the whole site seem like I'm poking through someone's collection of books thrown in boxes for storage... several by an author wind up grouped together, but others by that auther might be in an entirely different box.

This is a great list. A Smashwords author just pointed this out to me.

Bookmarking.

Mark Coker
Smashwords

Things I want from Smashwords

no subject

no subject

no subject

thanks