New Italian ebook site, Ultima Books, has an innovative user interface

Dear Paul,

I’m Marco Croella, Managing Director of Simplicissimus Book Farm*.

I’m writing you because today we launched a brand new version of our ebook store www.ultimabooks.it that we humbly see as revolutionary.

As you will see the store it’s in Italian (we’ll soon launch also an International version) but nonetheless I’d like to show you the approach we adopted.

Up till now in the ebookstores we’ve been accustomed to a ‘push’ approach: today someone, a product manager, an algorithm, an analysis tool, decides which titles are most important for you and put the on the relevant pages of the shop.

Ultimabooks.it reverses this approach, and put the control in the hands of the customer. In our website we put browsable shelves, and the great enhancement is that they are fully customizable, based on your choices!

By using the small controls in the right side, every single shelf can be moved, deleted, hidden or… added to the home page by the customer itself.

Are you interestend in Science Fiction? Let’s add a shelf and let’s request the system to fill it with the ebooks of that category!

Are you interested in a single author? Let’s add a shelf with the author’s name!

Are you willing to monitor a very specific area? Let’s add another shelf in which we’ll put all the updated results of your query, parsed with our powerful conceptual search engine!

And obviously the shelves are persistent, so next time you’ll come back to the store, you’ll get all the updates in all of your shelves, so you will have YOUR OWN EBOOKSTORE.

Next step? In Q1 2012 we’ll release the last feature: the customers will be able to share their own shelves, giving everyone the possibility to pick up the most interesting selections.

After that, we’ll release the technology to every single retailer that will want to implement it.

If anyone wants to be kept updated about it, please feel free to contact me at marco.croella@simplicissimus.it

Bye!

Marco Croella

Managing DirectorSimplicissimus Book Farm – www.simplicissimus.itEmailGTalk: marco.croella@simplicissimus.it Skype: marcosecondomePhone: +39 329 1365815

* Born in 2006, Simplicissimus Book Farm is a pioneer of Italian digital publishing sector. Today is the largest Italian ebooks distributor with his digital distrubtion platform Stealth (http://stealth.simplicissimus.it), with over 200 publishers aggregated and 23 ebookstore connected, and it’s also running the webstore www.ultimabooks.it, the self-publishing digital platform Narcissus (www.sbfnarcissus.com) and the iOS (and soon Android) newspapers and periodicals newsstand Ultima Kiosk (www.ultimakiosk.it).