The interface is fairly simple, including colorful, large buttons. The Simple Search has an array of buttons that provide one click grouping of books by facets such as "three to five", "true books", "imaginary creature characters", and "short books." Clicking on each button narrows the search in a cumulative way, the more buttons you click on, the narrower the search.

Clicking on a book takes you to a "Book Preview" page. The page displays an image of the cover, links to the book viewer (will get to that gem in a minute), and essential book metadata (summary, pub date, languages, contributor, publisher).

From the Book Preview page, the reader can view the entire book using several interesting Book Readers. There is the Standard Reader that uses your browser, one Reader that uses the DJVU Plugin, and two Readers that use downloaded JAVA applications. It is these JAVA apps that make the experience more interactive and downright fun. You are presented with a thumbnail listing of all pages in the book and a single click zooms the page into view. From there you can browse page-to-page or zoom back out to see the thumbnails again. The Reader color scheme can be changed with the click of a button, go from single page view to double-page view, go from portrait to landscape, all easily.

Other interesting additions to the site. The user can translate the entire interface into nine languages. So a child in Central America could navigate in Spanish and a child in Germany could navigate in German. Truly an international scope.

Link: http://www.icdlbooks.org/