Check out Inkflash, a pretty revolutionary new way to browse books. Inkflash is all about discovering new books and authors in a 3D environment as you explore from room to room; and it all runs in hardware-accelerated 3D in your web browser, courtesy of WebGL.
For authors, it's a way to promote their books in a growing online community. Each author has a virtual room containing their books. The 3D room can also contain a tweet wall, blog messages, book trailer video etc; lots of fun stuff; and the room's theme can be tailored to match the look & feel of the books.
One of Inkflash's real strengths is the "activity trawler" - behind the scenes, it crawls the web for book reviews, author interviews etc, and then links them back to the relevant book. The result is that for each book, you see a summary of its online activity, to get a feel for the Internet zeitgeist for that book. It's a better way to quickly see if a book is for you, rather than someone else's personal 1-star or 5-star rating on Amazon or wherever.
But the best way to find out what Inkflash is, is to try it out! There are hundreds of rooms to explore, each one with its own personality and selection of books.
inkflash.com
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