Amazon.com's purchase circles and the digital library

[Prentiss Riddle]

Amazon.com has just introduced a new feature called "purchase
circles":

        http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/subst/community/community.html

No, they're not a way to get discounts by getting your friends to buy
stuff; they're a way to waste endless time entertaining yourself with
armchair sociology.

The purchase circles are specialized bestseller lists organized by
geography and by Internet domain.  They're weighted toward "uniquely"
high-selling items, to keep every town from looking like everyplace
else.  There are all kinds of intriguing factoids lurking in the data.

For instance, Austinites go heavily for musical Texana (Lyle Lovett,
etc.) but buy books about perl and e-business.  New Yorkers read enough
middlebrow fiction to push computer and corporate get-ahead books
completely off their list.  Every would-be hip locale I've looked at
(Austin, SF, NY) is crazy about the Buena Vista Social Club.  The .gov
domain buys lots of Microsoft-related computer books but the party
animals in house.gov are reading George Stephanopolous and Bridget
Jones's Diary.  Rice is into artificial intelligence, the Onion, U2 and
a lot of semi-lame music that they'd never play on KTRU in a million
years. :-)

Of course the results aren't presented in a way to permit serious
analysis, just this sort of fun trivia game.  Check it out.

I do have a serious WEB4LIB-related topic at the end of this long
meander: when will the digital library go beyond the "card" catalog
model and start implementing friendly features like this?  Amazon.com's
interface is a superb tool for serendipitous browsing, even if most
online catalogs beat it easily for systematic searching.  Of course,
Amazon's basic motivation is to shovel books as fast as they can while
a library is usually motivated to supply the smallest set of resources
that will meet a patron's needs; their tools have been optimized
differently for these different ends.  But I wonder if there will ever
be a digital library which combines the sheer *fun* of Amazon.com with
the precision of good bibliography?

-- Prentiss Riddle ("aprendiz de todo, maestro de nada") riddle at rice.edu
-- Webmaster, Rice University / http://is.rice.edu/~riddle