Péter's Digital Reference Shelf:
December 1999

BORDERS — BOOKS

URL: http://www.borders.com
Publisher: Borders
Examined: October 28-November 22, 1999
Price: free, no registration required

Borders was the last of the large online bookstores out of the gate, and even a few months ago had to shut down for a few days for technical errors. It has sections on books, music and video. Only the features of the book section are reviewed here. Borders claims to have 10 million books, CDs and videos in its database. Considering that there may be about 2 million books in print, 250,000 CDs, and at best 400,000 video flicks, Borders must have information about a very substantial collection of out-of-print books through its partner, Harvest Booksearch. The total number seems to be too large, but to the credit of Borders, it found the most (10) out-of-print books in a test search of professor Lancaster, searched as either Wilfred or Wilfrid because of the common misspelling of his first name. Amazon could locate eight of his books, Barnes and Noble merely three. On the other hand, Lancaster's in-print books were not found on the Borders site. At least for one of them the reason for not finding it is clear. His name does not appear in the record and there is another mistake, too. The entry claims that the book is hard cover, but there is no such edition of this book. Muze, Inc. provides book records to Borders.

The default search on the Borders site is a keyword search, looking at title, author and subject indexes. There are separate mini-templates for Title, Author, Title/Author, and ISBN searches. The help information for these searches is good, although somewhat redundant. The search rules are clear and simple. Using the % sign for truncation is rather unusual, the * sign is much more customary.

The search options are minimal, and it is grandiose to call them "expert" searches. There are filters by medium (audio book versus printed book), form (paperback, hardcopy), price ranges and age groups as there are in Amazon and Barnes and Noble. These are really needed to increase the relevance of the search. For example, someone looking for books on database design may want to limit the search to those published in 1999, in paperback format and at a cost less than $30. This could reduce the set of 266 hits to a more manageable size. It is good to be able to sort the results by author and title, but except for known-item searching it is not sufficient. As a partial alternative to the filtering, it would help to be able to sort by publication year (as Barnes & Noble does) and price, too. In searching by ISBN (if anyone would ever do that) the parser program should take care of eliminating the spaces, as well as the hyphens that the help information does not mention.

Borders has very broad subject/genre categories and very unusual but funny and cynical cluster names for related books, such as Extreme Dating, Pretend Dating, Dating Yourself and Giving Up Dating. Given the large number of books, extremely few are listed under the genre and subject categories, such as merely two dozen titles under various biography subcategories. Children books are browsable by age category (which brings up the question why are they not searchable by age group) and specific learning activities: reading, arithmetic, etc. Computer books get special treatment and good subject categories. The subject/genre headings are not hotlinked, neither are the author names — both very typical links in book databases on the Web as they allow easy follow-up searches by authors and/or subjects.

Borders Online has in-house reviewers whose substantial reviews are as good as many of those syndicated ones in major newspapers. There are review excerpts (often just a sentence or two) from the New York Times, Los Angeles Times and Entertainment Weekly, as well as publicity blurbs from the publisher.

The large size of its database is Borders' only advantage. Its software capabilities and content features do not come close to those of Amazon and Barnes & Noble and fall short of the expectations of Web users who have been spoiled by other digital resources about books.