On the (online) shelf
Ordering books online may be old hat by now, but along comes the next manifestation of the Web 2.0 bookstore: Zoomii.com (the Canuck version is at zoomii.ca), a nifty new online application that marries the ease of online ordering with the fun of browsing through a bookstore.
The ArsTechnica blog explains:
Zoomii, in a nutshell, is a visual bookshelf browser for over 19,000 books from Amazon’s catalog, though it can search for over 162,000 titles. Instead of browsing through flat lists of book titles and their cold statistics, Zoomii stacks books in shelves alphabetically by author, organized by genre. You can click and drag across Zoomii’s landscape of shelves, zoom in and out with your scrollwheel, and click a book’s cover for basic statistics from Amazon, including the ability to add the book to your cart or wishlist. We aren’t quite sure how Zoomii picks the books that stock its shelves, but some kind of system that picks through a combination of top sellers and new releases is a safe bet.
[…] Zoomii’s attempt to bring the bookshelf back to the online bookstore experience is a novel – and mostly successful – experience. Scrolling across Zoomii’s shelves is snappy, and book images render in crisp detail surprisingly quickly. Clicking a book’s cover displays a higher-res version and plenty of details instantly, and all refreshingly without a single drop of Flash.
The blog goes on to point out that, surprisingly, Amazon itself hasn’t actually scooped up Zoomii – the site is the brainchild of a single developer, Chris Thiessen, who worked on the project for two years in an “attempt to bring online as much of the real bookstore experience as possible.”
