VP Book Club: Don't Try This at Home..or Anywhere Else

It probably seemed like a good idea at the design stage, but the implementation is, well...go see for yourself, but try to remain patient while the main page loads.  I'm talking about the new VP Book Club, a new joint website offering from Viking and Penguin.

Tim Spalding does an excellent job dissecting the VP site on his LibraryThing blog.  He refers to it as "a gorgeous mistake."  He makes some excellent points about the use of Flash, PDFs and several unnecessary features.  The desktop customization option seems frivolous at best.  With the depth of titles offered by both Viking and Penguin a site like this has a lot of potential.  Here's to hoping they rethink their strategy and focus more on usability and less on implementing shiny objects.

Comments

[Michael Miller]

Yeow, that's one great-looking but really horrible site. This is what happens when you let the techie-designer guys take charge. Absolutely no thought as to usability, or (more important) what the user wants to do. How do I find a particular book or author? Beats me. I just get to waste time watching the books sloooowly load onto the bookshelf... Geez, I have to go revisit the site so I can hate it some more!