When Amazon.com burst on to the scene as the world’s first virtual bookstore who knew that it would eventually turn an entire industry upside down. Overnight, practically every book in print was made available at discounted prices to anyone with computer access. It wasn’t long before the traditional independent new bookstore began to die.
Now comes Zoomii “an online version of a real bookstore with Amazon’s low prices, secure payment and fast shipping.” Zoomii takes Amazon’s entire catalog and turns it into a visual browsing trip. Essentially an Amazon affiliate, with all order processing done by Amazon, that utilizes Amazon’s powerful Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Simple Storage Service (S3) Zoomii is banking on the armies of readers and book buyers who do judge a book by its cover.
While it feels a little gimmicky, and their claim of being “an online version of a real bookstore” is a bit of an oxymoron, I can see potential crossover application to the antiquarian market. I can imagine a bookseller using the technology to create a visual online representation of a catalog or to highlight particular sections of their shop.
Here is a two minute video of how it works:
Thanks to ReadWriteWeb for the lead