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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:
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?
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)
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?

thanks
(Anonymous) 2011-05-15 02:48 pm (UTC)(link)Bookmarking.
Mark Coker
Smashwords