Zoomii – A Virtual Bookstore Actually Worth Looking At
Updated: June 26th, 2008
I am usually very skeptical towards new startups, as most tend to do one thing and not so well or many things even less successfully. Zoomii, however, is what I found very useful. It creates the kind of feeling that you get when you're in control, when you can see at a glance what's going on. Zoomii is a virtual bookstore, with an Amazon backend. They took a different approach and made everything very visual, just like in the brick and mortar store – and I love it.
You can browse the latest releases or the top sellers, or perform a search and get hundreds of book covers, uncluttered by any text (until you click on any of them). The interface is amazingly friendly and simple, everything is draggable and zoomable – hence the name Zoomii, and here's the best part: it doesn't use Flash, everything is in Javascript. You can buy books without leaving the site or reloading any pages (of course, how else would they make money?). I think it's better explained through a couple of screenshots I took or by going to Zoomii itself:
My Search for 'Perl':
The Fiction bookshelf (It has Everything is Illuminated, weee!):
What a breath of fresh air, don't you think? Credit to MakeUseOf for the tip.
In the meantime, if you found this article useful, feel free to buy me a cup of coffee below.
beer planet is a blog about technology, programming, computers, and geek life. It is run by Artem Russakovskii - a local San Francisco geek who is currently pursuing his own projects and regularly enjoys hacking Android, PHP, CSS, Javascript, AJAX, Perl, and regular expressions, working on Wordpress plugins and tools, tweaking MySQL queries and server settings, administering Linux machines, blogging, learning new things, and other geeky stuff.
