If you shop Amazon.com frequently for books for whatever reason, maybe because they are more affordable than your local bookstore, but you miss the experience of actually looking at books on the shelf, checkout Zoomii.
Zoomii is a site I recently stumbled upon that tries to give users a “real” bookstore experience by placing books on shelves to browse through. You use your mouse to “drag” yourself all over the bookstore, and you can zoom in and out of the shelves and search for a topic you’re looking for. Clicking on a book will pull up a page with all of the details on it. From there you can add the book to your cart, read reviews, or continue shopping. Zoomii uses Amazon’s API so when you go to buy a book, you are still buying from Amazon which is key.
Below is a video that will give you a better idea of how the site works:
It’s actually kinda fun to browse through the books on a shelf, although the site seemed a bit resource intensive and slowed my browser down. With how many book covers that are displayed at one time, it’s understandable that it would need a lot of resources to function. One area of improvement that we see is when you are searching for books, it would look incredible if books got pulled off the shelf as you narrow down your search so that in the end, all that would be left on the shelves would be the books that pertained to your search.
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Looks like a good idea for a site…like it. The interface is fast.
I’m glad everything was fast for you. I did have some issues with it slowing down my browser, but it wasn’t TOO bad. It’s an interesting concept though.
Definitely fun to use and the the interface was fast. Only downside was that in order to really browse I had to zoom in to the point that there were only 3-4 books on the screen (1400×1040). Only then did it feel like a books store.
Yes, there’s definitely some limitations with trying to get a real book store feel online. If you can’t get to a book store though, it’s not too bad.