Zoomii.com - Your Virtual Bookstore

If you enjoy Amazon’s prices, but miss the browsing the way you would in an actual bookstore, Zoomii may be what you’re looking for. Their site is laid out as if you are in a bookstore, viewing books based on categories and arranged by author on shelves. You can see the books on the shelves lined up with their covers facing out, all in relative size to their actual physical representations. Bestsellers are the first rack of shelves you see, as you would entering a real bookstore. You can zoom in or out to see more categories or get a better look at the books. If you find one in particular that interests you, you can click on it to get the full background of information on that selection, including the Amazon price and summary. You can then choose to add the book to your cart or to your wishlist to check out later. If you know exactly what you’re looking for, you can search for it specifically as well. Once you’ve chosen the books you want, you get taken to checkout, which is the Amazon site. From there, everything is done in Amazon. So if you want a unique way to browse for books that is closer to the actual experience when you’re in a bookstore, you might want to give Zoomii a try.

"Because I love bookstores. Spending afternoons wandering the shelves. Happening across great books I didn't even know existed. But it's an experience I never found online. Online bookstores are wonderful. They've got amazing prices, huge selections, and they're open all the time. If you know exactly what you want, they're perfect. But somehow I kept coming back to the bookstore just to browse. Zoomii is my attempt to bring online as much of the real bookstore experience as possible."

Sometimes searching for books on Amazon is difficult because there are so many options on the page, and you don’t get to see as big of a selection all at once compared to if you were taking in an actual bookstore. With real bookstores, it’s fun to check out books based on their covers based on the category the belong to. That’s what Zoomii is for. For people who have been looking for a new way to view what they want on Amazon, this will be appealing.

Will they create another similar section for music and other media to add other Amazon categories to the site? Could they maybe add in some social features to make it more like an actual bookstore, where maybe you can chat with people also browsing the site for recommendations and what not? Maybe they could offer another section that sells coffee or something as would be done in a café part of a bookstore.