Ten Bookish Site Designs

Books have long been a staple for ecommerce merchants.

Books are, after all, a nearly perfect long tail item. A local bookstore can certainly have the latest releases in stock, but there will always be hard-to-find texts or specialty genres that are beyond the scope of a local brick-and-mortar bookshop.

Even before ecommerce, lots of books were sold via catalog. That was how, for example, Christian Book Distributors got started in 1978, when the Hendrickson brothers started selling religious books out of their parents' garage in Massachusetts.

This week, I decided to share with you some of my favorite online bookstores and describe what I like about each site. No doubt, you have your own favorite online bookstore, and I would love to learn about it in the comments at the end of this post.

AbeBooks

AbeBooks puts a premium on search. In fact, the first thing I notice when I visit the home page is the large search box with fields for author, title, keyword, and ISBN. I also like the combination content slider and tooltip just below the search box. It makes for great merchandising.

Macmillan

The Macmillan home page has a number of good examples of merchandising, including an invitation to hear an excerpt from a recently published book. I also like the content slider for the featured editors list about midway down the page.

Powell's Books

The Powell's Books site features fluid layout and expanding background images. The concept is great, although they do need larger graphics as screen widths have increased beyond 1,600 pixels.

Borders

The Magic Self is the best element on Border's homepage. It stands out as an early and excellent example of interactive content sliders. I also like the background details on this site, especially the thin, 3D-ish background image that separates each of the main vertical merchandising sections.

Safari Books Online

If you like focus, you should like the Safari Books Online home page. It is focused on getting visitors to sign up for a membership. The slot machine style content slider is cool, too.

Atomic Books

Whoever said that online books stores had to use bland graphics as not seen this site.

Penguin

Checkout the "Browse Penguin" navigation on this site. It demonstrates vertical fly-out navigation. Another interesting site feature is the "Favorite Character" content slider near the bottom of the page.

Christian Book Distributors

Of the sites I reviewed for this post, none has as many products or as much of a product focus as the Christian Book Distributors' ChrisitanBook.com. The site includes a content slider, layered and faceted navigation, and 44 additional product-related merchandising sections by my count.