Feed me!

Amazon.com offers RSS feeds for books, but only for tagged items. In other words, a work has to be known by potential readers and then tagged by users. As Tim Spalding at LibraryThing explained, tagging on Amazon is not a very successful endeavor. Amazon already puts its books into categories; why can’t it offer RSS feeds for those categories? This would mean that alerts would be issued once the title was entered into the system, not after someone finally decided to tag it. There’s no telling when someone would finally be interested enough to tag a title: months or years after publication? Especially for those trying to keep on top of new titles (librarians, scholars, etc.), Amazon’s feed options are hardly satisfactory.

Recently I stumbled across the site: Get new book titles by RSS. The subtitle says it all: “This site offers one thing: RSS feeds for new books on amazon.com.” There are many categories and subcategories to chose from, and while it’s not comprehensive (for instance it lacks a feed for titles on the 18th century or the Enlightenment), it’s still quite a large selection. I’ve added several feeds, from Romanticism to literary criticism, to my Netvibes page.

How do you keep up with new titles on Amazon.com?

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