Portent

This is a very clever bit of Flash programming. In fact the whole thing is pretty good. Normally when you look for books online you search rather than browse. It’s a way of life- Amazon have a couple of million books so how could you possibly browse them?

Well Canadian Chris Thiessen has worked out how, though at present there are only 21,000 books in his (I’d guess) Amazon affiliate store. The top one of the three screen shots show the whole bookstore at the top, each square is a rack. You can zoom in to see the individual racks (the middle shows one rack zoomed in) and clearly see the book covers. It always amazes me that it is book covers that attract people but it is.

The racks are laid out like in a conventional bookstore, but at least here you don’t have to worry about books in the wrong racks or trying to get to a book with people standing in the way! Just click on a cover and you get the cover plus details (shown in the bottom screenshot) with a link to buy from Amazon. I suspect the 21,000 selected for Zoomii are the top sellers which makes sense.

It’s a fast interface and works very well with a mouse wheel button for quick zoom in and out. I wonder if someone like Amazon would pick up this and use it. Could it be improved? Possibly. How about a pop-up that appears and vanishes (without clicking) giving a summary as you move over the book cover? That might eat up a lot of bandwidth of course! This site is highly recommended for being innovative.

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Popularity: 3% [?]

This site combines two concepts. The first is helping to correct poorly scanned in books. Machines can’t always correctly scan and convert to text images of text. Humans are much better at it. And identifying humans to stop scripts being used say to create free email accounts is often done by using a captcha. You are shown an image and asked to type in the text or numbers. Captcha is short for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart .

This site serves captcha images to websites and email anti-spam using text images from badly scanned books. The correct results are then used to update the scanned book image. Quite clever though I do wonder how they know an answer is correct without doing the donkey work in the first place!

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Popularity: 15% [?]

This is really clever. Select one of the Amazon websites (com, uk, Japan or Canada) then a category (books, music or dvd/videos) and a search phrase.

I entered portent and you can see the word in the picture. Move your mouse over and click and it expands- I clicked a picture in the lower half of the “o” in portent (I highlighted this and combined into one image with box and arrow) , so you can see the book covers. As you move over then you get a pop up with book details etc. Now click again and you’re on the chosen site, on the page for that book etc. Quite clever especially as it’s a Japanese site (with text in English) and it has to pull the details and images from the selected Amazon site.

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Popularity: 9% [?]

This is probably one of the oldest as it originated back in my 2nd year at school in 1971. Michael Hart was given a lot of free (and very expensive back then) computer time and decided to try and store everything that could be stored electronically (and out of copyright).

So the concept pre-dates the web by 20 years and was there almost from the inception of the internet. Project Gutenberg is the first and largest single collection of free electronic books. Of course the book have to be proof read so that is why there are currently 20,000 titles available for download and 100,000 titles amongst all the partners of Project Gutenberg. If this is your kind of thing they are always looking for volunteers.

The website is of course a more recent addition to the project and is a Wiki.

Interesting the five most popular authors over the last 30 days.

1. Twain, Mark (56676)
2. Doyle, Arthur Conan, Sir (25434)
3. Ralph, Lester (24461)
4. Shakespeare, William (24378)
5. Dickens, Charles (23915)

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Popularity: 6% [?]

Enid Blyton was a very popular author whose work attracted a bit of controversy in the 50s and 60s but despite that she is ranked as the 5th most prolific author worldwide- she wrote over 800 books at an average daily speed of 10,000 words. Her work has many fans today and of course she created Noddy who continues to this day. As a kid I read many of her books but I was still astonished to find out just how many she had written.

I wonder if some of the appeal is because her works harken back to the 50s which is perceived as better in some ways than now. Plus her books always had a moral background- the heroes and heroines did the right thing and baddies got their comeuppance.

This website sells her books but is more than that- it’s a kind of tribute by Keith Robinson (the owner) and several others around the world- see the About page. It’s nicely designed and any Enid Blyton fan will find lots here, including some fanfic.

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Popularity: 6% [?]

This is a bit of a curious site. Thousands of books and some magazines in text form. I haven’t checked out all the books but most that I have seen are out of copright. Eg works by Dickens. I’d hazard a guess that many originated in Project Gutenberg.

A quick check on Google returns nearly 50,000 pages but many books are split into 4 or more parts.

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Popularity: 3% [?]

I’d heard of bookcrossing before but on Sunday actually found the first book I’d ever seen in a lift in the Brittania Hotel in Nottingham, left by a Dutch visitor. If you’re interested, it was by Daphne Du Maurier (no not Rebecca!) and I’ll update the Bookcrossing website later today. Not all books get journalled but I like the idea and with over 3.5 million books released by half a million readers that means sodo a lot of people.

Bookcrossing is a clever form of viral marketing. Well it’s actually about giving books away. You put a sticker on to identify the book, then leave it somewhere it can be found. Each book has an ID number (a BCID), and this is put on the front of the book on a sticker.

The idea is that you read a book then “send it on its way” by leaving it somewhere where someone can find it. As they say I’”m looking at your site here, and I can’t believe what I’m reading. Do you actually want me to give away my books? – Registering your books with BookCrossing.com, then giving them to a friend, a charity, or otherwise releasing them “into the wild” and following their progress and travels, is infinitely more fulfilling than the small satisfaction you’ll get by looking at your books in your bookcase every day.”

It’s a form of sending a message in a bottle. “Make the world one big library!”. A very laudable aim. Of course once electronic book readers (that you can safely read in the bath) emerge then maybe it will be no longer useful. But until then, maybe 20 years in the future…

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Popularity: 3% [?]