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If you have to search a book in hundreds of shelves and you’re running short of time, you would really get frustrated. Worry not because Zoomii is here to help you out. It is a virtual bookstore browsing service.

The site which was made public a week ago is built on Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Simple Storage Services (S3). Using Zoomii is some what like using Google Maps in terms of navigation as it allows you to zoom in and out of bookshelves and also move anywhere by grabbing your cursor. The bookshelves are decorated so beautifully that it makes you feel like you’re sorting it out from a real bookshelf. The only thing unusual in the shelf is that the book cover is facing forward which I think is cool. Books are categorised by authors. You can also see book sizes and even compare them with each other.

You can also search the books. All you have to do is to write the name of the book in the search box and you’ll get the results. You can also acquire book summaries, include books to your Amazon Wishlist or your cart to buy books using Amazon. Book reviews can also be found.

Zoomii’s services are available for Canada and USA (i.e. Zoomii Canada & Zoomii USA).

According to founder of Zoomi Inc., Chris Thiessen:

Zoomii is my attempt to bring online as much of the real bookstore experience as possible.

The only problem I saw was that the site runs slow on Firefox 3 and it is mentioned on the website (certainly a smart move).

Overall the website is as good as it is innovative. People are usually attracted towards books having nice cover designs and at Zoomii you get to see them in huge quantity at the same page which is absolutely amazing. So far it has proved its worth but I hope they add more bookstores like Nobles and Barnes and also expand it to Europe, Asia and other markets.

Update:
The site is running fine on Firefox 3 now.