Zoomii – A Virtual Bookshop You can Browse
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.
Posted: August 30th, 2008 under books, flash, literature, visualisations.
Tags: bookshop, browse, flash, online
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