Do you ever miss the days when getting a new book meant going to a book store and wandering between the aisles, browsing and perusing the latest works from your favorite authors?
Even though I love the age of ebooks, I do still sometimes miss those days. Well, Bookflavor is a way we can get just a little bit of those days back. And although it is not 100% finished yet, the concept is very much worth taking a closer look at, so that’s what I did.
Bookflavor is a free to use web site that is currently under development but has already reached a usable and useful format. Essentially, it offers you the chance to view the latest books in a kind of virtual book shelf. When you select, for example, the New York Times Bestseller list you will be shown a page that offers you the covers of the books currently on that list. Each cover can be clicked to open a page devoted to that book, giving you information about the plot, the author, the history of the book itself (where applicable).
Along with that information, you’ll also (sometimes) be able to get reviews that have been posted from different people, both famous (such as critics or other authors) as well as personal reviews from people just like you that have read it. Alternately, you will eventually also be able to type in the name of a specific book or author and get information about that specific listing in the same manner. Once you find a book you like, using Bookflavor, you can easily get the link to purchase it from Amazon or another source of your choice.
While Bookflavor is still in development, it already offers a wealth of information and shows a great deal of promise as to what the finished and final product will look like. There’s a link in the upper right corner to the Bookflavor Blog, which will keep you up to date on all the latest developments and implementations for Bookflavor, as well as a link to the Bookflavor Twitter page with similar news in tweet format. One of the most interesting things about it (and you can read more on the blog page) is that it is being developed to work in harmony with other methods of searching, specifically for books. DuckDuckGo, for example, is now capable of using bang(!) search terms through DuckDuckGo to get results from the Bookflavor engine. It is this kind of forward-thinking and planning that will make Bookflavor a major success when it finally gets out of it’s Beta stages. In the meantime, try it out, and use the Feedback link (located beneath the Twitter and Blog links) to let the developer know what you think of it, what could make it better, where you think it’s falling down. Remember, your experience with a Beta program or product may not be the same as everyone else’s so it is always useful to give feedback. Until next time, my friends!
