Purchasing books has been transformed a lot recently with the arrival of the iPad and Amazon Kindle devices. Browsing through books for purchase has never been simpler.

Unfortunately, browsing for books to buy on the web isn’t quite an elegant experience. Even Amazon‘s own site has felt stale for sometime without major upgrades or special treatment. Having to search for books the same way you would search for clothing or other items to buy on Amazon.com feels almost like it’s from 2001.

Even though books are going digital, people are still buying physical copies. I passed up on buying the digital version of the Steve Jobs book, as I wanted the physical version to hold in my hands.

Bookflavor pulls in books from Amazon’s site and displays them in an extremely attractive and simplistic way, and also shows way more book reviews than even Amazon.

It’s all in the presentation

When you go to Bookflavor, you’re shown the top sellers on Amazon by default. You can also switch between that and the New York Times Best Sellers list.

The books are shown in a large thumbnail on a white background, and aren’t numbered. It’s a simplistic presentation that is reminiscent of how books a shown on the iPad and Kindle Fire. Clicking on the book will take you to its own page, with information pulled from Amazon and GoodReads. The information is shown on a similar white background in large font. The site itself even looks great on the iPad.

As you scroll down the book’s page, you’ll find reviews from both Amazon and GoodReads. This is something that Amazon should take notice of. Getting book reviews from all different services on the web is important. Having as much information and perspective on a book before buying it is nice to have. While Bookflavor only pulls in the two, I imagine that it would be simple for the developer to pull in even more services. That’s the only downside of the site.

If you’re still buying physical books from Amazon, you might want to skip the Amazon site until its time to checkout. Bookflavor has a link on its book pages directly to the Amazon page for purchasing, but your decision may already be made thanks to a recommendation from someone who never wrote it in to Amazon’s site.

➤ Bookflavor

Duedil pronounced Doodle (or Doodil) is a new start-up based in Soho (Silicon Soho East) and is all about professional reputation and the idea that, within a business context, people need to treat themselves as products.

Duedil functions as an augmented browser (i.e. a browser plug-in) which then sits on top of the site you’re viewing. Currently it’s based around LinkedIn, but this will be expanded to other social media sites soon. The real people reviews allow companies to get a better idea of the person, compared to the LinkedIn recommendation system which is really “give me a good recommendation, and I’ll do the same for you”. Duedil allows anyone to review anyone else. If the person doesn’t like the review, they can remove the actual content, but the review will show the that content has been removed.

Anyone can sign-up to Duedil, but it actually makes some assumptions when you enter your details and if it can’t find out anything about you, it wont actually let you in. This is to stop people outside of professional circles from accessing the app. Once you’ve signed-up, you’ll have the ability to invite friends that you trust – so the reputation model expands. The more people that trust you, the more your reputation increases and then, so will the reviews that you give.

The plug-in runs in Google’s Chrome browser (on Windows and MacOS X) with future support for Apple’s Safari, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Mozilla’s Firefox.

The back-end is all based around Drupal/Javascript and MySQL while Chrome was chosen for its ease of development, in fact it only took 2 days to build a working prototype.

Though the system is free to use, Duedil hope to start offering value add services very rapidly which which will bring in revenue and this can be done with a reviewer base as low as 20,000.

Example (paid for) features:
- Reputation feeds: follow and track your colleagues
- InMails: write to the authors of the feedback to find out more
- Statistics: how many people have viewed yours and others’ profiles
- Embed widget: ability to use our product on your site as a trust-mark status
- Email signature: get endorsed by your colleagues
- Dubious profile alerts: be alerted when suspicious profiles contact you
- Allow businesses to respond to feedback on their profiles and sites
- Provide trust network referrals- asking premium members to provide one supplier each of who they trust and sharing that with he rest of the community

People trust is a $bn market and Duedil want to be a big player in that space.

Duedil is the brainchild of Damian Kimmelman, who used to run agency We Are VI but closed it down earlier this year and for the 2 1/2 months since, it’s been full-steam-ahead getting Duedil out. He also brought along Alexandra Wall (Director of Marketing) and has been joined by 2 developers and 3rd person who spends half their time being a developer and the other half being the Duedil community person. They’re hiring and looking for a further developer and a Director of Development.