Instead of starting at Amazon with books you like, using Amazon’s “customer who bought this also bought…” feature to find similar books, reading the reviews of the book, searching you library’s catalog, now you can have an integrated experience for all these tiresome steps. Named after New York’s East 41st Street, Library Way, E41ST provides an integrated interface for browsing at Amazon, and looking up at your public library.
In the Find Books panel, you can browse the popular books in different countries and of different subjects. Selecting a country and a subject, all books of that subject and specific to the country from Amazon (.com/.uk/.de/.fr/.ca) are then showed in the Browse Book Panel right to it with covers of the books. You can then filter out books with keywords. You can also browse all books by sales ranking. Items are loaded 10 at a time, and you can click the More button at the right of the panel to load more items.
Clicking the cover of the book, it brings you the detail information of the book including the title, average rating based at Amazon.com, reviews, etc. You then have the options to Search in My Library, Add to My Bookshelf and Close to start over. What is greater is you will see a list of similar books at the right of the current selected books. Three similarity criterion are currently supported - Topsellers in the Subject that the book belongs to, People who bought/viewed this book also bought/viewed, and by author.
The My Bookshelf panel, quite self-explanatory, is a place to hold all your favorite books. It has a link to share your bookshelf on the web and you can link to it from your personal website or blog.
The My Library panel lets you specify what libraries you use. It seems like you can only add 2 public libraries and they should be the libraries currently supporting the E41ST. The good news is Austin Public Library is on the list. So when you click the Search in My Library button in the Book Details panel it searches if it is available in the primary library you defined. And if not found, it will search your Secondary library. The status of the book will then be shown with a link directly to your library’s web page of the book.
Library catalogs are notorious for being isolated from the outside world. When the web has developed a lot as including all kinds of cool and convenient features making things easy for users, library catalogs are still of 1990 looking and with only limited features. This great tool to my opinion, successfully combined the library catalogs and commercial website Amazon, bringing new features to Library catalogs without spending too much money, time, and energy to develop them. It also saves users from difficulties of finding books from library with good ratings from Amazon users. I really appreciate it.
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