Hacker News Reader

Comment by girzel | Hacker News Reader

I was highly amused to discover recently that Pegasus Book Exchange here in Seattle had gone to the trouble of photographing all their shelves, so you can "browse" remotely. You still can't smell the books, but this might be the closest you can get.

http://www.pegasusbookexchange.com/p/browse-shelves.html

View on HN

When I first heard of Amazon I thought it’d be like this: a curated list presented as spines-on-shelves. It feels like spines-on-shelves organized-by-Dewey let’s me use contextual knowledge to rapidly browse books in a way that the much higher-information-content “list of books” in, say, iOS books, or Kindle does not.

I guess I want curation and taxonomy, but book information should be minimal until I “pull it from the shelf”. I’d support (Patreon) a group that did high-quality curation.

This is cool, and a little bit bizarre. I feel like it would be a fun experience to be able to view these photos in Three.js

I expected an old-fashioned "click part of the image and go to a different link" where I could click on a book's spine and get linked to a page with more details about it. Of course, this is a lot more work so I can see why they didn't do this. But this was one of my favorite elements of '90s websites. You have some big (for the time) image up top and you, say, click on one of the characters in it to get to the guestbook.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com