BOOKS!

Have you been in our new bookstore section on the website? I'm really not shooting for self promotion here, I'm just VERY impressed by the interface. It's no secret I love the internet, and well made interfaces just make me happy. It's also no secret that I can lose myself for hours browsing in the martial arts, yoga, or philosophy sections in a bookstore... Now I can do that from my own website!

Earlier this year (or was it last year?) I signed up to be part of amazon.com's affiliate program. I figured, what the hell; I've always recommended books on this site for further study in Tai Chi, Yoga, and meditation. I even included links back to amazon.com, because I figure if you're interested in a particular book, you should have the chance to find it and buy it for yourself. Besides what're you going to do, write it down for your next visit to Barnes and Noble? Right. Links made sense to me, and what made even more sense was getting paid to host those links, so I joined the affiliate program.

Recently I got an email from amazon.com inviting me to try out their new "aStore." At first glance, it looked like another way to get images on my pages of the books, much like the ad blocks I was already using, and I was disappointed that they would only let me show nine books... I mean, I can recommend nineTEEN books off the top of my head when asked. Still, I wanted to give it a try, so I selected a magic nine (and believe me, that was no easy task) and started kinda playing around with it... WOW! The interface they provided really surprised me! Give it a try:

Go to the books page by clicking the link on your left in the menu bar. Yes, that one that says Bookstore... WAIT! Don't click it just yet, I haven't told you the coolest part!

Select any of the books from the main nine list that maybe interest you... This opens a single page for just that book, with additional information, reviews, etc. I know, boring. Though, watch the little menu on the right... it changes with each book to provide you options within the genre, or by the same author. How sweet is that?

I know what you're thinking, "sure, Amazon does that all the time on their site." But this interface is tied into my web design (like this blog), so you don't leave my site, and yet you can browse a library of books related to my teachings.

And did I mention... if you buy a book, I get a percentage of that sale? Not too big of one, sadly, and I'm hoping that enough people will take advantage of this that I can maybe use that money to pay for my operating costs for the server... or at least to buy some more books.

Namaste!