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Okay, so I'm not so special. David Crow: Information Architecture Overload writes about the glut of IA/UX/UCD books hitting the shelves these days.
BTW, I guess this is as good a place as any to mention if you are an educator like David or a reviewer for a periodical, you can get a free evaluation copy of my book by sending your name, mailing address and phone number to me. christina at the domain you see in your browser (now that's low-tech spam evation!). Oh, and some sort of proof that you are a writer for a periodical or teacher.
I also think David misses one key point: the benefit of book reviews. Now I know there is a review for nearly every book on his list out there... and not just any old Amazon.com user review, but a review by an expert or a professional in the field or related field. Why doesn't David consider a book review valuable in helping determine which book would work best for his class? I don't know.
Book reviews are great, they are just a little difficult to access when you are standing in front of a book shelf in the real-world. I have spent some time reading the book reviews on Amazon, but this doesn't change my feeling of being overwhelmed in the bookstore.
I didn't really get it until I was in borders on rainy Friday night. wow. what a wall of books, and so many now seem to be about designing for usability. Which is a good thing; but certainly poses a challenge when facing the stacks.
On a side note, does anyone understand the "classification" scheme Borders uses? Web usability and web design books were scattered about.. there was a grouping of flash books, then some design books, then some ASP and then in another row, another little cluster of flash, design, usability... really no discernable pattern. I did a little guerilla IA, and put all the blogging books together. Luckily Andi drug me out before I could rearrange all the stacks in the computer section.
I wondered if it was a "why we buy" kinda logic that was unique to physical stores, or if it was just lazy/random/confused.
I think lazy/random/confused just about hits the nail on the head. Our IA book has been classified by Borders under General Web Programming for years...given the glut of usability books, maybe it's not such a bad thing for our book to be in the wrong place.
Wonder why bookstores haven't figured out a way to provide in-store access to online customer reviews. I think Borders' already has in-store kiosks for searching and finding books on the shelves, but without reviews.
I guess the problem is that everybody writes their reviews at Amazon; not likely that Borders' would license that content for their in-store use. Same for Barnes and Noble, although their site seems to have the same reviews as Amazon (or at least a few of the books I checked seem to have a subset of Amazon reviews). Is there already some review-sharing going on?
Why all those books about IA and Usability?
Because people in those fields tend to be academics trained in writing. So they CAN write a book.