E-bookstore Browsing?

With the Kindle 2 out and e-readers becoming more and more popular, I have been thinking more and more about the bookstore experience, and what I enjoy most about it: browsing. Most of the times when I enter a bookstore, it’s not with a particular book in mind, but with the desire to see what’s come out and if anything’s worth buying and adding to my ever-growing to-read-pile…and half of the times, I actually will buy something. How do I find these books? I first go the “new fiction” table and shelves, then walk around the fiction and sci-fi aisles and see if anything grabs my attention.

How can we translate this “bookstore browsing” to “e-bookstore browsing”? Amazon is already ahead of the curve with the features it offers on amazon.com, but have they made this available on their Kindle? What if when you wanted to buy another e-book, you could click on a feature which showed you the “covers” of the latest releases, and then can further filter by genre. If you like something, you could click on the cover and have the option of reading the “back cover copy,” the first chapter, or a random sampling.

Or does the Kindle or Sony E-Reader already do this? Since I don’t own one (I’ll explain in a bit why), I may be behind and this has already been done. So let me ask those of you who do own one: how does the e-reader browsing experience compare to the brick-and-mortar browsing experience? Which do you prefer, and why?

And the reason I don’t own an e-reader is very simple, and not related to any of the above: I’m an Orthodox Jew and would not be able to use the Kindle on the Sabbath or on any of the holidays, which is when I do most of my reading.