Lesbrary Links: Amazon Listmania!

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I’ve been trying to add to the links in the sidebar ever since I started the Lesbrary. It’s all well and good for me and guest lesbrarians to tell you what to read, but you probably want to go out and find the kind of books you’re interested in.

Originally, I was just putting all the links under “Blogroll”, but that was getting too big to handle, so I separated them out into Book Blogs and Websites (websites that are specifically devoted to books that have lesbrary books), Bookstores (either lesbian/queer bookstores or bookstores that have significant lesbian/queer sections), E-Books, General Blogs and Websites (websites that don’t have books as a main source, but have a significant lesbian/queer section), Lists (with emphasis on lesbian/bi women/women-loving-women lists over general queer lists that mix everything together), and Publishers (either lesbian/queer publishers or publishers that have significant lesbian/queer sections).

I think I’ve got a pretty good selection of resources built up now that I haven’t seen collected anywhere else, but I wanted to go through them individually and spotlight them, hopefully gathering more resources and culling the less helpful ones as I go.

I thought I’d start with Lists, because I think that’s how most of us start when we first started looking for woman/woman romances, looking up lists of what people thought were the best ones and working from there. Starting alphabetically, today I’m spotlighting Amazon’s Listmania!.

Category: Links

Title: Amazon “Lesbian Fiction” Listmania

Summary: I think everyone knows what Amazon is: a large (that’s a bit of an understatement) online bookseller. They have a feature called Listmania! that allows users to create lists of products, mostly books and movies. I’ve linked to “lesbian fiction” Listmania!s in the sidebar because that comes up with mostly lesbrary books, but you can use any query to bring up lists, and there are also Amazon Guides (“So You’d Like to…”), which are very similar.

Advantages: The greatest advantage to Amazon Listmania! is numbers. Searching “lesbian” will give you almost 1400 results. This allows you not only a lot to pick from, but also the ability, at least in theory, to put in more narrow search terms, like “black lesbian fiction” or “lesbian sci fi”. Notice I said in theory, because I can only find one Listmania! with “bi women” in the title, and only one for  “trans fiction”, though there are some general GLBT ones.

Disadvantages: As a disclaimer, I’m not a big fan of Amazon, to be honest: I would much rather support my local bookstore. Still, I included it in the Lists category because of the sheer number of lists. Even that, however, has its downsides.  The lists aren’t guaranteed by anyone; they’re just random people’s opinions, so there’s no guarantee of quality. I also found them pretty difficult to navigate: while looking up “trans fiction”, “More Books About The Russo-Japanese War” was the second list, while “Transgender Literature” was on the third page, right under “Great Nebraska Books”.

Have you used Amazon Listmania? What did you think of it?

Do you have any resources you think should be added to the Lesbrary?

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go look through this “Contemporary Punk Lesbian/Queer Lit” Listmania…