Lookybook

» see lookybook.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

In 2008 I was an engineering student in Turkey with no child to read to. Every book on Lookybook was in English, and every buy link on it led to an American bookseller. The people it was made for were parents and librarians in the United States who had to choose picture books without holding them.

That was the problem it went after. A picture book is mostly its pictures, and online stores of the time showed a cover with a spread or two. Lookybook showed the whole book, cover to cover, in a Flash viewer that turned pages, and it did so with the publishers' permission. Publishers Weekly introduced it on 15 November 2007 as a site that "opens to the book trade today and is expected to go live for consumers on November 29, with about 300 books". Chronicle Books and Penguin were among the four charter publishers.

The team page named five founders in Mill Valley, California. Craig Frazier, the chief executive, had founded Frazier Design in 1980 and wrote the Stanley picture books for Chronicle. "This grew from my own frustration of my own books falling off the retail shelf and getting harder to find," he told School Library Journal. Craig Virden had been president of Random House Children's Books until he retired in 2002, and the illustrator Ron Chan built the page-turner. The same article described the financing only as seed money, and no figure was ever published.

The site closed on Friday 20 March 2009. By Saturday morning every address on it led to a single page called thankyou.html.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ who paid for the free look ~

Readers never did. Each book page carried affiliate links to Amazon and to BookSense, the storefront of the independent bookstores, and the FAQ told publishers that listing was free for the first year with an agreed fee possible after that. The viewer was kept small on purpose and the type could not be zoomed. "Because it was really about the sale of the book," Frazier said. A small embeddable version called the Minibook let bloggers put a whole book inside a post. Members kept bookshelves and left ratings.

Time's Anita Hamilton put it among the 50 best websites of 2008: "Lookybook is one of those sites we can't believe no one thought of before." The site's own press page credited the piece to Anna Hamilton. On 16 February 2009 Publishers Weekly gave it "500 titles" and "nearly 60,000 monthly visits", and in the same article called it financially troubled. The footer of the site still promised "over 300 titles" that month.

~ thankyou.html ~

The first farewell began: "Regrettably, we have come to the last page in our adventure together". From 24 March a second version added one sentence, "Lookybook is closed simply due to lack of resources", over Frazier's signature. He told School Library Journal that "it became difficult in this environment to get money" and that it would take an angel to reverse the closure. He had also heard from teachers who put the books on a classroom projector and read them aloud without buying a copy.

Craig Virden died on 6 May 2009, less than seven weeks after the closing. By then the contact address on the farewell page had been changed to Frazier's own studio. Nothing was captured at lookybook.com between the end of that May and 2022, and the address now shows a registrar's parking page.

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