Trouble finding books in order at Amazon

[Kyle]

Aaargh, I just spoiled the hell out of "The Last Apprentice" series by starting book 10 before 9. When searching by publication date at Amazon I got the usual confusing mess. I find I constantly have to leave Amazon and Google other sources just to find proper book order (this time I chose...poorly) . Am I missing something here? Like is there a "View Series" button at Amazon I've been missing all these years?

[Rob, Roberator]

I've just always used an outside source to make sure I have the right name/order for books if I'm catching up on something older.

Often times amazon does include a number in the titles though. I can usually have success by searching for the series title (rather than the book title) with the appropriate number

ex: Wheel of time 11 has Knife of Dreams as the top 2 results (physical then kindle editions)

[Stan]

I usually click on the authors name to see the list of all the books they have written and look at all the titles, which as Rob mentionted, often includes a series's name and book number order.

When they don't have the order in the title I can at least glance at all of them and compare publication dates. On the authors page you can also filter by clicking on the Kindle link so you are only looking at titles that have an ebook format.

Note:

I think publication dates on amazon get messed up because they include the most recent of the ebook, trade paperback, hardback, etc. dates. Maybe filtering to only look at paperbacks and then sorting by publication date will give you more consistent results

[Random]

Have you tried looking at the series information here on Gooders? A lot of volunteer librarians spend a lot of effort making sure that information is as accurate as possible.

[Kevin]

It's one of the reasons I use goodreads ...

[Leesa]

I used to be able to do this on Amazon, but gave up. Now I just go to Wikipedia.

Audible has added to their summary something like "series name, book #" with a "view series link. Very helpful!

[Kyle]

Glad to hear it's not just me. I expected someone to say "you mean you haven't been pushing the blue X all this time?!!" or something along those lines. It's hard to believe Amazon hasn't implemented some kind series-at-a-glance feature. You'd think they'd get that going long before they started selling "marital aids" and such.

Props to Goodreads for having the right book order. Too late for me because someone's head is in a bag, and now I have to read all of book 9 knowing that's where it ends up :(

[Robert]

I'm not sure how much of this problem with series books is Amazon's and how much falls onto publishers. If the publisher doesn't fill in the right boxes when putting up a book, I don't think Amazon has the time to do that for them. That's why it's good to have options like Goodreads, Wikipedia, even author blogs and sites created by book fans.

[Kyle]

I've half suspected they omit those numbers on purpose because they want you to just buy that book as a one-off without further consideration: the equivalent of putting candy by the check out counter.

There's probably some marketing chart somewhere tracking "Literary Impulse Buying Habits" that takes a 0.2% dip when they include book numbers. I doubt Amazon would play that game, but publishers? Yeah, I could almost see that, even with my tinfoil hat off.

[Ulmer Ian]

If only there was a website curated by users which did a good job of keeping track of series. :D

But it's for sure annoying that you have to open a tab with Goodreads or Wikipedia. It made sense for retail stores to be a bit mysterious about whether the book was part of series, but it doesn't make sense for Amazon. But the Amazon store is like a big vortex of databases and it has little to no human curation, as far as I can tell. If publishers ever take away Amazon's DRM-enabled monopsony I think Amazon will start having tough competition from e-book retailers that try.

[Noel]

I always go the author's bibliography on fantastic fiction website which does a great job of listing their work in chronological and series order. I'd be lost without it.

[Neil]

There is also a site www.fictfact.com. They track any series you might want to read. They will email you when new books come out. It works pretty well and I have been using it for a year or so.

[terpkristin]

Like others have said, I rely on Wikipedia and Goodreads for determining the order of books most often. I like Wikipedia because sometimes they suggest alternate reading orders, such as with the Narnia books. Alternate reading orders sometimes help a series flow better.