Friday, June 27, 2008

A "Real" Bookstore Online

Buying books with an Amazon click provides nowhere near the fun of browsing a real bookshop. Now there's a website (found via The Bookseller) that seeks to replicate that experience.

Visit Zoomii and you find yourself able to browse shelves of books, organised as they would be in a real shop. You can zoom in on covers and titles that catch your eye, open the book to see what's inside and read about it, and then, if you so wish, order via Amazon.

Chris Thiessen says he set up the site:
Because I love bookstores. Spending afternoons wandering the shelves. Happening across great books I didn't even know existed. But it's an experience I never found online. Online bookstores are wonderful. They've got amazing prices, huge selections, and they're open all the time. If you know exactly what you want, they're perfect. But somehow I kept coming back to the bookstore just to browse. Zoomii is my attempt to bring online as much of the real bookstore experience as possible.
It's certainly a nicer interface than Amazon's, though I'm scared of how much time I might "waste" here. Amazon, incidentally, may be buying the site.

2 comments:

savante said...

Whoa. But how do you shove all of Amazon's books into a few shelves? Mind-boggling!

said mirro said...

TQ...TQ....if only they didn't increase oil price (reason).