Amazon Launches Author Stores

December 31, 2008

In its never-ending roll-out of new features and incremental redesigns, Amazon has introduced “Author Stores,” which Amazon calls “new corners of our bookstore dedicated to offering customers a new way to browse and shop favorite authors, discover new books, and more.”

Basically, Amazon has created dedicated pages for several hundred authors. It’s a nice little navigational upgrade since it is sometimes difficult to get a sense of an author’s oeuvre using Amazon’s search, though for Author Stores to be a truly useful navigational tool, Amazon would need to create them for many thousands more writers.

The Stores themselves are moderately interesting. At their most bare bones, Sherman Alexie’s, for example, the Stores offer just a list of the books the author has written. Stephen King’s, on the other hand, offers more substantial diversions including a video of the author himself. It will be interesting to see how much Amazon expands these stores and whether the features Amazon promises to add “in the months to come” will be genuinely unique or just more repackaging of content.

Meanwhile, LibraryThing’s author pages are far cooler, with lots of meta-data and interesting tidbits supplied by LibraryThing’s active community. By way of comparison, here is David Mitchell on LibraryThing and on Amazon.

created The Millions and is its publisher. He and his family live in New Jersey.