User interface design is all about creating onscreen metaphors for real life objects, actions and behaviours. Browsing books on Amazon is more like flipping through a catalogue than wandering through the aisles and lingering over shelves in a bookshop.
Zoomii.com offers a realworld metaphor for book buying – visual bookshelves, covers out (if this takes off, I wonder if they’ll start putting books in spine out and charging publishers to show the cover on the shelf?) that you can click, grab and move along. You can zoom in and out to see more or less books, or examine a cover in detail.
It is perhaps a sign of the times (or just the Bezos strategy) that this new book browsing service is built on Amazon’s cloud computing services, EC2 and S3 (via ReadWriteWeb)
The challenge now, as I’m sure the folks at zoomii are aware, will be to keep the prices competitive, get more books in there, refine the UI in response to user behaviour, and spread the word. Good luck to them!
Update: Shelfari has had a makeover – looks like visual bookshelves are making deeper in-roads on the web. (via GalleyCat)
Photo: Entering Hyperspace by Eole Wind
2 Comments
Is it just me (and don’t get me wrong, this is pretty) but isn’t this like having a pencil lab?
Why are we recreating the real world online?
Seems a bit pointless to me!
Eoin
Hi Eoin – I agree it has something of the gimmick about it but I wonder if this is the way online shopping might go… it’s sort of like the coolroom (https://www.coolroom.com/#Coolroom_1) concept… books alone probably won’t win any races but if they branch out into other product categories… for folks with the right connectivity, this *could* be an easier way to shop (needs a bit of smart search and predicitive stuff going on first, I reckon).
The look inside concept, or read/watch now, or invite your friends … could all be applied to books, DVDs, TV shows, podcasts, games, maps, etc. that are accessed via the shelf.