Saturday, June 21, 2008

Zoomii - Visually browsing in Amazon for books

Miss that real bookstore ambiance? The random book discovery that happens when you were looking for something else? The visual appeal of the book covers?

Except for actually handling the books (no little cafe either; bring your own drink...), Zoomii recreates something of that kind of experience for Amazon. You can move around by categories, and then you can zoom in/out to check the shelves. (Use the onscreen keys or your wheel mouse.) Clicking on the book will bring you more detail, and from there you can buy it, add it to your Amazon Wish List (after signing in), or go to the Amazon page.
I've given a little screen shot of the Religion section, and you can see that it is organized alphabetically by author like in a bookstore. Rendering is a bit slow (apparently in Firefox3), but not really a problem. You can perform searches, but don't expect to find every Amazon book. (I'm not sure what filters are used to return the limited results shown.) There is still the link to perform the same search on Amazon. (E.g., searching for "bible atlas" on Zoomii gave me 8 results. Clicking through to the same search on Amazon gave me 1531.)
For more info, watch this video:

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