At least for serious researchers.
To paraphrase a complaint made by Fraser Crane on Cheers, “They can put a man on the moon; why can’t Amazon make a better search function?”
I am in the early stages of revising 501 Baseball Books Fans Must Read before They Die. The idea is to add several great works that have been published since it came out in 2013 and ten years seems like a nice round number.
Amazon, of course, is the go-to when looking for books. Problem is…where do I start?
You can limit the choices by publication date. That’s about the only good thing I can say. Otherwise, it’s not very intuitive. There’s no function to eliminate certain thematic material, such as the inordinate amount of “romance novels” that seem to have a hint of a baseball element. Similarly, you can’t knock out books for young readers. Clicking on the “Reader’s Age” feature just gives you a choice of selecting books meant for young readers of different age groups.
Then there are the number of non-book items that find their way into the search. Notebooks, sporting goods, other brick-a-brac (“GoSports Inflataman Baseball Toss Challenge – Inflatable Catcher Strike Zone Pitching Game,” for example).
I have tried worldcat.org, “a great resource for locating unique, trustworthy materials that you often can’t find anywhere except in a library.” You can also specify the year of publication. And I’ve tried to pare down the choices to just print books (as opposed to e-books, peer-reviewed works, manuscripts, theses/dissertations, etc.). In looking for books for 2017, there were more than 215,000 results. Picking just books gets you down to a manageable 927. But after a couple of passes, everything gets included again, so back up to 215,000+. Frustrating.
Sure I could just google “baseball books published in 20xx,” but I’ve found many lists are just collections of material gleaned from press releases or have other biases by the writer/website/blog and don’t necessarily reflect quality. And I say this even as MLB.com included Hank Greenberg in 1938: Hatred and Home Runs in the Shadow of War in their story, “Looking back at a page-turning year in baseball: Several notable books about America’s pastime were published in ’17.”
It may be that I just focus on the books I’ve reviewed over the years. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
But if anyone has any suggestions for better search strategies, I’m all ears.
is available on Amazon.com,
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