Thursday July 20, 2006
Thursday July 20, 2006 NY Public Library + Amazon mashup: E41ST - Library Way
Just saw this mashup mentioned as a Macromedia Flex Developer contest winner last month. The site is created by Amit Supta and is called E41ST, http://www.amitgupta.info/E41ST/. It integrates book content from Amazon.com with the catalog holdings of the NYPL. A really neat, enhanced way to browse this info.
Viewing requires the new Flash 9 Player, and I had to restart my browser after that installation in order to access the site. Visitors can view without registering.
Posted by Joe Williams | Jul 20 2006, 01:51:07 PM EDT | Permalink | Comments [2]Post a Comment:
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Thanks for sharing the link!
The book cover scrolling interface has potential, but I'm a little dissatisfied with the implementation. It could just be my Mac browser, but the scrolling itself is very jittery for me. It's hard on my eyes if I look at the book covers scroll for more than a few seconds. The scrolling feature would need to be much smoother for me to use this again.
I also wonder whether the screen space could be more effectively used. On my browser I see between 5 and 6 images at a time on the horizontal scroll bar. Why not present these book covers in a grid (5 x 5?) Perhaps something closer to this:
http://www.monkey.org/~emv/superpatron/aadlnewnonfiction.html
...except with larger images and a smooth scroll function. This would be nice!
Posted by Tito Sierra on July 20, 2006 at 05:22 PM EDT #
Tito: Thanks for the suggestions. I'll revise the flimstrip-based scrolling book browser asap. The reason I initially adopted the filmstrip metaphor was because Amazon Web Services deliver books 10-at-a-time. In a scenario where I had to incrementally load books, the filmstrip seemed like a good idea. In hindsight, I agree that it is not very usable!
Posted by E41ST Admin on July 24, 2006 at 05:22 PM EDT #