Among the various things that get me fuming and fretting is the casual manner in which books are arranged in bookstores and libraries. You know what I'm talking about - those oh-so-innocent mistakes in categorization, the inability to check up inventory and, the general feeling of being ill-at-ease when using these services. Yes, that's the same feeling that returned with a vengeance when looking at BigBooks.

Cut to random anecdote.

During my student days when we were doing lab-work, we had a teacher whose daily drill was "a student is known by how clean he/she keeps her workspace". This, to me, was a small variation of the one my dad has - "the cleanliness habits of a family is known by how clean and organized the kitchen table is".

Cut to present day rant.

Why are the above to ditties relevant ? When you visit a bookstore, all you want to do is search for the books you want and hope that they will be under the appropriate categories. Once you've built up your stash you queue up in front of the cash counter, plonk down the cash and waltz out of the door (err... if you are at the Kolkata Book Fair, you'd either have to lug your sorry behind through a gate that is open just enough for anyone wearing skinny jeans to slip through or, you get pushed by the "maashimaas" into the wide open space in front of the stall). When you go to a library you figure out the way books are organized and then look them up. In both these cases the single most important aspect is the ability to look up what you want and, then obtain it. This is precisely where BigBooks fails completely miserably. Let me put it in some context - I used Flipkart when their search results were unpredictable and, the resultset displayed after the query was abominable. However, it didn't take them long to start fixing large parts of it (they got an important thing right though - they kept the site very sparse and simple in those initial days) . I didn't have to listen to "yeah we know that the search is a bit broken, why don't you send a list of books and we'd add it to your queue".

In my world of consuming online services that's fail. I hope that BigBooks revisits this part. If searching and building up a queue is difficult then using the service is difficult. A service that is difficult to use would have some uphill climb in customer acquisition even if it is backed up by a superb telephone-based networking and support.