I don’t really like shopping for books online. I do enjoy reader comments, but unless there are several and they all gave 1 star out of 5, I’m still not convinced. I like looking at book covers, a lot. As an information professional I should probably exercise my logic and dig a little deeper, but I always fall off the bandwagon: I judge books by covers and I like browsing at bookstores.
Enter: Zoomii, launched June 16. Think of it as a mash-up of the Amazon storefront. Book browsing in bookstores is a fun experience for me. The new and popular books usually have their covers turned right toward me, books are divided in broad categories, new books and bestsellers are all thrown to me at the front of the store, it’s great. Zoomii takes this type of organization and applies it to books sold on Amazon.com.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHuMbNzFKmw[/youtube]
Browse books with Zoomii and add them to your Amazon cart. Zoom in, zoom out, click and hold your mouse to drag the screen to other sections, this works much like any of the popular online maps. When you’re finished, check out as usual. Or, if you’re like me, load up your Amazon cart and then go check your list against your library catalog. 
How about eliminating that middle step and create an overlay option like this for our library catalogs? General bestsellers/subject sections, or maybe even our own most frequently used items–I think a lot of us might be surprised to see what really gets used the most.
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You might be interested in this post over at Dave Pattern’s weblog where he has looked at integrating visual bookshelves in the OPAC: http://www.daveyp.com/blog/index.php/archives/314/
Wow, imagine an OPAC like this! I hope some libraries jump on this idea and go with it. I wonder if they could purchase the basic program from zoomii. This would be a real boon to online catalogs.
Oooh, this will improve my bookmooch list. It’s very hard to “browse” books online, but this is just the answer!
$80 later….love this site.
As a librarian, I don’t buy books anymore. I have moved beyond the colonialist mindset of having to ‘own’ stuff. I find my awesome public library has more than enough reading material to keep me busy. And they have this handy tool called ‘interlibrary loan’ which allows me to retrieve books from other libraries. Check it out. Libraries rule!
So you can keep using these intertubes if you want to, I am going to the library.
Jo - Thanks so much for sharing that link! I took a look at the Huddlesfield catalog and their implementation is interesting. They did a prototype but put the browsing at the bottom of a catalog record and for similar items only. I wonder if Zoomii would be willing to produce an opac overlay.
Nancy - I know! I would like to be able to choose how I want to search–the regular opac way, visually, etc. It’s also (for me) a much different process to browse books I want to read and searching for specific books. I don’t know why we can’t have multiple available tools to cater to varying styles.
Laurie - No kidding, that reminds me, I still need to ship out some Bookmooch books!
Loretta - Yeow! I stocked up on freebies and *very* cheap books at ALA–I think I should be good for the next few months now.
Royce - Thanks for the PSA, we all already know that libraries are awesome, we just have access/interface issues from time to time.
I am excited for any interface that breaks the ‘lists of things’ model just a little bit.
Caleb, interesting new blog! It’ll be fun to see where this trifecta of librarians takes things.