Use a Catalogue or Use only Keywords to Search Inventory?

Are These Realistic Options?

Your editor, Blogaulaire, for the blog you are looking at now -- Cheap Priceless Editions -- did a bit of browsing to find the online address to access books offered for sale by the Housing Works Bookstore Cafe in the Soho District of Manhattan.

We came up with a searchable listing of 11,137 titles on the mega-vendor site, www.abebooks.com. (HWBC stated on their own organization's homepage that they have +45,000 titles in the bookstore cafe which translates into having 25 % of total inventory offered for sale online.)

For those of you who are interested, whether to buy or browse, below we offer a link to the inventory of the New York City based group as it appears at Advanced Book Exchange.

We discussed how catalogue categories vary from bookstore to bookstore. And we all know that the strategy for Internet searches is keyword based and not like the Dewey Decimal System. But have the volunteers at Housing Works Bookstore Cafe taken too big a short-cut by not organizing their books by any means whatsoever? How can we -- staring at the top of a book list 11,000 titles long -- come away with any idea whatsoever about what authors, genres, subjects or categories this book place is a good bet for finding a book we are looking for?

Well, given some of the catalogues posted at Cheap Priceless Editions, the wisdom of cataloguing versus leaving the shoppers to blindly search on a browser is not a clear-cut matter. Poor catalogue entries: are they better than none at all given the power of search engines online?

SEE Bookseller-> Housing Works Bookstore Cafe



Housing Works Used Book Cafe is an independent open bookstore in New York City that presents great used, new and antiquarian books, good coffee, the opportunity to hear from many of the best writers and performers in America and the chance to make a difference in the fight against AIDS and Homelessness, in New YOrk City and the world.

We are a non-profit bookstore relying on volunteers to help run the store. Housing Works provides housing, healthcare, job training and advocacy for people living with HIV and AIDS.


Fighting AIDS One Book At A Time