Book tags on Amazon and elsewhere

[Misfit]

I'm sure someone will have the answer. Clearly Amazon wants us to tag books, i.e. historical fiction/romance, etc. but I've been asked why and I frankly don't have an answer. Why do we want to do this?

[Tanzanite]

The only thing I can think of is then you can do searches on the tag words and find books related to a certain subject or in a specific genre.

[JMJacobsen]

I just thought it was to ease the workload on them....make us do the work. ;)

[Divia]

I think both!

Also, does google pick up on those tags?

[diamondlil]

The main use of tags, at least on blogs, is to help you find posts that might feature the same author, or the same genre or similar topics etc.

[Misfit]

I recall a discussion on the HF forums at Amazon and author David Blixt had joined in -- and while discussing his book he nicely asked us to tag it. I'm not sure why but it was of some importance to the author. I think they might have some to do with those if you like this you might try this rec's on Amazon.

[michellemoran]

I think it must have to do with searches, as Tanzanite said. They've always seemed sort of useless to me, but then I don't search Amazon using the tags. Maybe other people do?

[JaneConsumer]

It's just another way to find books on Amazon. I wish more consumers would tag the books. Amazon's search engine is really, really bad. If you just want to find books on a topic, it's not the best finding tool - ironically!

But until more people tag products, the tags will be less useful.

LibraryThing is really the site to check out if you like tagging. It's so easy to find fiction on a particular person or event. You just search "fiction" and the person or event as tags.

[Carine]

I think it must have to do with searches, as Tanzanite said. They've always seemed sort of useless to me, but then I don't search Amazon using the tags. Maybe other people do?

Sometimes I do that, if I want to see if there are new writers that I don't know yet, I just type in "historical fiction" and browse through what comes up.

[LCW]

I've tagged a few books but I don't do it often. I don't use the tag feature to find books. I find most of my books through Listmania, their recommendations, or from you all!

[ukhrh]

I do tag, but of late I've trying to be more specific - though generally I don't use tags for searchs