What the shoes show

If you want to buy a pair of shoes online - now you can. Shoes, where one size does not fit all, and which a computer screen can never represent in the necessary touch-and-feel 3D. It's the same for a sweater, for jeans, a hat or earrings, all things that were once bought strictly in person, because they are supposed to fit us and make us feel good, individually, physically.

Photography is one reason why. Thousands of pairs of shoes were being re-photographed when I visited a big e-commerce warehouse last year. The stylish, coiffed head of the photo department explained that the new images would give online customers a less generic and more detailed look at each pair. All angles, the sole, the material, the stitching.

But the company had also applied ingeniousness. Buy a pair of shoes, they said, and we'll ship you two sizes; you pick the pair that fits just right. Consider the effort that takes. And remember the discount pricing. Admirable.

This is still, however, way behind clothes shopping in the richer countries, where brand websites have detailed size and style charts, better inform you what other items go with this product, and cannily offer a closer look at specifics as cuffs and collars. What's more, some sites allow user comments, and these are extraordinarily useful. So here is a shirt in my size, but here also is someone to tell me that the sleeves are disproportionately long! Wah, wah.

Now, to books. The paragraph above might well describe the experience of book-surfing on Amazon.com, still the cleverest books hard-seller on the Internet. But it does not describe the e-retail of books in India.

There are now a dozen or more Indian sites for book-shopping, which is fast growth over few years. They have models to follow, yet how many of them try to offer an intuitive way to look for, and look at, books. How many wisely leverage their users? How many open a door to books, rather than showcase one book at a time? None, I think.

Yes, books are a non-standard product. Unlike a T-shirt, you cannot look at a book and know that you'll like it. But that doesn't mean you can't showcase a book as you might a shoe. It means replicating some aspects of the physical bookstore experience. And then, going beyond.

An e-bookseller should make it possible for a customer to flip pages, ask a friend what she thinks, browse neighbouring shelves. It can go further, giving a customer the opportunity to interact with the author, to write a review, search within, collect passages, argue with his peers, form a reading group, track his reading, and so on. The tools are available, they just have to be assembled.

Perhaps an e-retailer is not best equipped to handle such community activities. Well, there is Goodreads.com, a popular (20 million members!) and rather clever site from San Francisco. And now in India, there is IndiaBookStore.net, which is not a bookstore but a "book search engine" according to co-founder Priyanka Gupta. It searches for any title you enter in all the Indian e-bookseller sites, and presents its finds together. This can get you the lowest price, but Gupta says that's not the point - the idea is to help book-shoppers more broadly.

Her focus is on building community and content - for now editorial content, but soon it will be mostly user-generated. The site, which opened in 2010, already has 70,000 unique visitors a month, Gupta says, and the audience is growing fast. The menu is the usual stuff - reviews, author interviews, contests, giveaways, quizzes and lit-fests. But because the plan is to suck in user content, there is a lot of hidden potential. One sign of IndiaBookStore's popularity is the predominance of popular titles and authors in the current content.

I have a feeling about this site. And I think it's possible that out of such sites will come a more intuitive, personalised and yet communal way to make "online" work for books in India. E-booksellers: try harder, and pay attention.