Personanondata: The Resilient Bookshelf Motiff: Done Better

Sunday, June 22, 2008

The Resilient Bookshelf Motiff: Done Better

Read Write Web takes a look at a new 3rd party application of Amazon.com data and services. A company named Zoomii has developed a book browsing UI that mimics the experience of walking through the isles of a local bookstore. (As a side note, with technology implementations like this why would Amazon need to buy Borders)? As RWW notes,

Launched to the public earlier this week, Zoomii is one great bookstore browser. Built on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Simple Storage Service (S3), interacting with Zoomii is reminiscent of Google Maps. You can zoom in and out of bookshelves or pan around to navigate the service. The site design feels just like you're browsing a bookshelf at any bookstore except the books are facing cover-forward instead of spine-out. To keep up with the feel of a bookstore, books are organized by author and you can also compare book sizes to get a feel for how big or small a book is.

And gosh, my Canadian readers will be happy! (Via Brantley-again). Also Amazon Web Services Blog.

Note: The product is subject to Amazon.com's meta data which is why Simon Winchester's book The Man Who Loved China comes up on the "Mystery" shelf.

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Michael Cairns

Michael Cairns is currently Head of Partner and Channel Development for the publishing unit of the American Psychological Association which is a $100million scholarly, academic and educational publisher. In this role, he is responsible for all sales and marketing activities supporting the revenue base and working with current and new partners to expand APA's publishing program and mission. Michael Cairns has served as President, CEO and CRO of several brand name publishing, technology and content-centric businesses. His career includes a wide range of publishing and information products, services and B2B categories and his operating and consulting experience has largely been with brand-name companies such as PriceWaterhouseCoopers, Macmillan, Inc., Berlitz International, AARP, R.R. Bowker and Wolters Kluwer. Mr. Cairns has also served on boards including the Association of American Publishers (AAP), the Book Industry Study Group (BISG) and also served as Chairman of the International ISBN Executive Committee.