My dad (Jody Gorran) is a crazy entrepreneur. He has had more businesses (and business ideas) since I was born than years that I’ve been alive. From a hair salon, to treasure hunting, to water beds and gel matresses, to solar panels, to a housing development, to home security kits, to online scrapbooks and many, many, many more. Two of them made him enough money that he could afford to invest in the rest of the more off-the-wall ideas.
Ever since I got a blog, my dad has been badgering me to get him feedback on this idea he’d had years and years ago that he’d tried to promote to bookstores and libraries but no one was interested. I guess I put him off long enough, since last night, when he asked me to put it on my blog and I said I didn’t want to do that, he hung up on me. I realized that he is probably going to continue badgering me about this until one of us dies. So I give up. Here it is:
His idea is a genre fiction ID system. You know how when you’re browsing books in the fiction section of a bookstore or a library, you don’t really know if the book is in the fiction genre you like (say, historical fiction or detective stories or religious) until you take it off the shelf. It’s really difficult to browse the shelves. And probably in many cases, people who just come in to browse the fiction shelves end up with nothing because it’s so hard to find something in your genre while browsing. I think he definitely identified a real problem with identifying fiction one would like on the shelf.
So what he came up with was a system of color-coded concentric circles. Each sub-genre would have its own combination of three colors in three concentric circles so that people who were really into that type of fiction could easily find it. His idea is that libraries would put these little colored stickers on their new fiction so that people would know what genre/sub-genre it fits into (it would just be too time-consuming to put them on all of the older stuff).
My problem with it was visual. No one is going to be able to look at all of those different colored circles in the stacks and pick out the right one they’re looking for. And people with low-vision will have it even worse! When I try to picture rows of shelves and all of the books on them with three different colored concentric circles on the spine of each book, I imagine visual confusion.
But he really needs to hear from other people who aren’t related to him. If you could do me a huge favor and give your feedback to this idea (either here on my blog or at jgorran at bellsouth dot net), I would be eternally grateful. Otherwise, I may hear about this for the rest of my life! đ
Hey Meredith,
I agree with you about the visual. For one, our paperback shelves look ugly enough without all kinds of bullseye dots hanging around.
I think the bullseye look would also have a negative cognitive effect. In fact, it may mean “Robert Ludlum” rather than the respective genre.
Also, people have a hard time remembering more than 7 concepts. I don’t think breaking them up into sets of three will help the matter.
I wonder if there was a way to “social tag” paperbacks without destroying them? đ
Well, I am not sure how other public libraries do it, but in the last one that I worked in, we did have genre-specific stickers. Romance, western, graphic novels, sci fi…
Yeah, we had a few stickers too, but it only covered the really major groupings like science fiction, westerns, mystery and romance.
I really love the idea, but I don’t think it would work out for practical use.
I like the main (outer circle) colors chosen for each genre; they really seem to intuitively fit each genre (particularly horror/black, romance/red, fantasy/purple). And being one of those really really nitpicky specific-genre enthusiasts, I love how drilled-down each category under each genre is.
But… yes, it’s too much, visually. I can see using just the main color for each genre, but that’s about it. Two different colors might have a ghost of a chance for people to understand, but three dazzles even my eyes.
I really love the creative thinking, though!
How great to have a creative, entrepreneurial dad!
I have worked in public libraries where we put stickers on the spines of our fiction to indicate Western, Romance, Family Saga etc. Sometimes I was tempted to mess with the readers’ minds and swap stickers so they were introduced to a whole new world of reading. Of course I didn’t.
Sorry Mr Gorran, I think that the concentric circles would be confusing because people would need to remember what they meant. With just a few image subdivisions, I could never remember whether the picture of the castle meant “historical fiction” or “fantasy”.
I agree that if it was universally used, people would get to know what it meant, particularly if they were only interested in 2 or three categories. But, the same could be said about Dewey, which is probably a numeric respresentation of the same thing for nonfiction (ie. major division, more specific subdicions). I’m presuming that the concentric circles would indicate subdivisions, so Red outer, green middle, blue inner would be something like Outer red circle = historical, Middle circle = 16th century, Blue circle = knights and castles. I think, however, few readers do remember the call numbers in which they are interested…and Dewey has the added advantage of like numbers all being shelved in the same place.
I wonder if there would be some way of creating a device that interacts between an RFID tag and some added genre information in the catalogue, so that you run it over the spines on the shelves and it lights up when it finds an item of the genre you’d like. I think your dad is right and the human eye and brain are much better at processing stickers on spines, actually.
Color-coding is a problem, though – this comes up in usability testing quite a bit. Is it 25% of all males are color-blind for red/green? It’s a significant portion, at any rate.
Not to be too repetitive of other comments, but I immediately thought of the color-blindness issue and the fact that many libraries do add genre stickers like M for Mystery or putting genre fiction in separate areas with colored dots. And, obviously, there are many novels that fit into more than one category or not quite in a particular one, but I think that here we’re dealing with genre-fiction enthusiasts who are in the mood for a particular variety. They may read many other kinds of fiction, but at the moment they’re looking for a fix of a particular kind–fantasy today, no westerns or realism wanted just now.
I like the concept – a lot – but not the implementation. Bullseyes are not intuitive. If he could come up with intuitive icons (like the skull-and-crossbones for mysteries) it would be a great system. A parchment roll for historical fiction? A spaceship for science fiction?
It’s a really good beginning of an idea, so hopefully your father can do something constructive with all our comments. My concerns were #1) the issue of having to remember all of this and #2) what if something fit into more than one category (gay graphic novels, for example). Also, I don’t know where these categories came from. Maybe he could do focus groups to figure out how people categorize books in their heads, because these don’t fit very well with how I usually think. I tend to think in terms of how heavy (conceptually) a book is – whether it’s primarily just a story, a story with moral questions, not much story but a lot of character development… I imagine we all categorize differently, though – hence the value of focus groups.
Well, my criticism would be I don’t think that necessarily finding the section is the hard part. What would make sense if that is the problems is maps of the store with layouts.
From what I’ve noticed the real problem is often where individual books get shelved. What ends up in general literature? What ends up in Science Fiction? Fantasy? Romance? Some books blur the lines. Even worse I’ve noticed lately is non-fiction books in bookstores. It took me forever in several stores to find books on homebrewing. One was in cooking, one was in “fine living”, another with “do it yourself”. This system doesn’t help that at all. At best it makes the section standard, but the problem of books that “blur” the lines is still present.
Many libraries implement their own genre systems. While standardation is nice, it also is problematic. Imagine a library in a very techie town. If they get high enough demand, it might be nice to have a seperate cyberpunk section so you don’t have to browse through shelves of De Lint books to get to Snowcrash.
What I’d rather see is better computer systems so I can just look up where books are located in the bookstore. I hate having to ask an employee who’s obviously worse at searching than I am. It takes everything I got not to snatch the keyboard from their hands.
I like the idea – but agree with the aforementioned challenges of colorblindness and remembering the combinations.
The other issue I see is that in many cases genre is in the eye of the beholder. What do you put on the spine of my favorite Vampire Mystery Thriller? All three relevant bullseyes? I know the world of libraries loves to force a main classification of things – but darn those authors – they create what they want to create and publishers and libraries attempt to put them in neat genre buckets.
I have a problem that you didn’t mention – at our library we use the colored circles to identify locations. So books found on my desk all have a green circle on them, books found behind the reference desk have a blue circle on them – and so on – but then again we don’t have many fiction books – so I guess we’re not a good library to use as an example.
Another point. Do you organize paperbacks by genre, then subgenre, then author?
That would get fairly frustrating if you are just looking for the latest John Grisham.
Of course you could organize by genre then author last name and ignore subgenre, but then your stickers are all confused (is the middle color the genre or the outer circle?).
You know, language is still the most efficient descriptor system. Why not a one word or three-letter code for sub-genre? Of course, then people might think that’s a code for the Author.
I want to thank my daughter Meredith for finally posting something about Genre Fiction. I understood that her personal comments were valid but I simply never had the opportunity for feedback from others. My belief has always been that nothing ventured, nothing gained! I also want to thank those of her readers who took the time to look at what I created and give me their impressions. I can accept all of it. You play the game and you take your chances. I was always just hoping that the idea was workable. Oh well…
Don’t give up, Jody!
Librarians would love a good system for identifying genres of fiction and communicating that to readers. The best way, of course, is to let the readers themselves decide which books go into which categories. I’m sure your daughter has already introduced you to librarything.com.
Maybe a better way to achieve your goal is to draw the users to an easy-to-use list of book in their favorite genre(s)–something apart from already-cluttered library web pages. Include an easily-printed page for the reader to take with them to the stacks, and you might have something. Assuming you’ve got the computer skills to pull it off.