Knowledge is Geographical. Lumps and Splits.

In Chapter's three and four of Weinberger's book Everything Is Miscellaneous readers are introduced to the Dewey Decimal System, and several other fundamental ideas that Dewey had. Weinberger discusses how web-shopping on sites such as Amazon allows customers to set up their own book preferences, verses Dewey's layout of book hierarchy. Dewey created a logical way to layout books, giving the general public the ability to browse and see books for themselves. Yet his system was faulty in its layout of books since it presented a hierarchy of subjects and as well as people and places. Today the diversity of customers and readers leads to debates about the placement of books and which subject deserves it's own category and so on, leads to many heated debates. To which Weinberger exhibits the solution that Amazon uses, allowing businesses to stay free from categorizing and ordering books into a hierarchy. Instead customers themselves can chose what books they wish to look at, building preference lists, while Amazon is still able to advertise, showing readers miscellaneous books, or books that relate to other books a customer has purchased. This way of selling and showing books seems best because while it is a warehouse, customers and the general public can view every and any-book they wish to see. It also allows customers to browse randomly, or categorically through books, without having any type of hierarchy. Although one cannot ignore the fact that some customers may not know how or want to use this (internet) system. An example of this type of system can be seen at alibris.com, which is literally the same type of set-up as Amazon.com. Or even craigslist.org which has a seemingly endless amount of categorizes to browse through.