Up the Amazon!

November 2, 2016

Friend of the Bookshelf James M. wrote to tell me a way to get around some of those pesky Amazon search annoyances. Thank you, sir.

I tried your Amazon search for recently published “baseball” books and replicated your results with too many children’s and romance titles.  I could not find a negative filter on Amazon as you noted.  I did use the Advanced Search option with the following parameters: keyword (baseball), subject (sports and outdoors), pub date (during October 2016).  This brought back 69 titles with no children’s or romance selections.  However, it might also have eliminated too much for your purposes.

After a little more work, I found this thread.

http://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/20069/is-there-a-way-to-use-the-not-operator-on-amazon

Again, using the Advance Search option: keywords (baseball -romance), but now all subjects, publication date (during October 2016) yields 111 results and no apparent romance titles.  Given that doing a similar search for keywords (baseball romance) yields 146 titles, I think this is an effective way to eliminate at least the romance titles.

It also seemed to get rid of most of the children’s books, but not all.  So I tried keywords (baseball -romance -age) and got 96 titles, no romance and fewer children’s books.  Again, you might be getting rid of too much this way, but it is an option you can investigate.

Hope that helps.

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