You have built up your bookshelf on MySpace, or weRead.com, but now you want to access all your reads on Facebook, or vice versa.   With weRead’s Take Your Bookshelf with You feature, you can link up all your accounts and see any updates you make in one place reflected everywhere.  We have had this option available for a while, but just recently made it possible for you to send your reads to Facebook.

To access this feature, go to the “More” tab on weRead, and then click “Take your bookshelf with you.”  This takes you to a screen with the options for where you can send your bookshelf.

Once you select the destination site, you will be prompted to confirm your login and identity, and then you can start updating weRead wherever you want to use it!

Ever since I blogged about iRead back in April, a lot has changed. We have introduced tons of new features, and there is really not one place where we have captured all of them.

So this is my attempt to describe the features to our readers.

• iRead is now called weRead and we have partnered with Lulu
  This post from our official blog has more details.
• We now have a destination site
  You don’t have to login to Facebook or some social network to access weRead. You can directly access your bookshelf from our destination site. If you have already used weRead in Facebook or one of the social networks, you can link your account and access the same account from the destination site.
• Connections - find people like you
  This Facebook feature allows you to find people who have similar book tastes like you. You can look for people of a specific gender, people in your network and people in specific age groups.
• We now have friend activities in the homepage
  We now show activities from your friends on weRead in the homepage. This helps you keep track of which books your friends have been reading, and if they have participated in any discussions.

  

• Book discussion boards
  This is the place to discuss with your friends and network about your favorite books, what you liked, what you didn’t like, why someone should or shouldn’t read a book.
• Author discussion boards
  If you want to discuss about a specific author, talk about what works of an author are good, or what you would expect his next book to be like, this is the place to do it. Check out the latest discussions here.

  

• Author profile claim
  Are you an author? Then you should be on weRead. weRead makes it ultra simple for you to setup a profile and interact with your readers. Writing a new book? Want to know who might like it? Want to get suggestions from your readers? Want to promote your book on various social networks? Start here

  

• New catalogs
  We now have catalogs from Amazon, Google and OCLC integrated into weRead. This means you have a whole range of books to choose from. More catalogs are coming soon.
• weRead is now available in multiple languages
  weRead is now available in 6 different languages - English(US), English(UK), German, French, Spanish (on Hi5 only) and Portuguese (on Orkut only). We have more languages being added soon. Want weRead in a local language? Help us translate weRead here.
• We now have limited previews of books from Harper Collins and Google Books and full preview of some books from Gutenburg
  This will give you some sort of a ‘bookstore experience’ by allowing you to preview books.
• See how a book fares in your network
  Curious to know how a book has been rated by people in your network? We now give you near realtime statistics about a book - how people have rated the book in your network, how many people own the book, how many have marked it favorite etc.
  
• Readers now have a profile page which displays their bookshelf
  Each weRead user gets his/her own personal page that they can then share with their friends, bookmark, etc. In order to set up your own profile page, link your account from Facebook to our destination site and click on the “Profile” link in the top blue bar. Check out my profile page here.
• Readers can showcase their bookshelf in their blogs and other sites
  Want to advertise your bookshelf in your blog? It’s simple! Go to your profile page and then click on ‘Take weRead with you’, get the code and put it in your blog. You also have some customization that you can do before you get the code. Check out a demo here.
• The Facebook Wall application allows you to post information about books, write reviews etc directly from the Facebook Wall.
  You can now chuck a book at your friends directly from the Facebook wall. Go to your Facebook profile page: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php. Under the Wall tab, you should see the Books iRead option. Clicking this opens a dialog that allows you to pick a book from your shelf or search for a book and chuck this at your friend.

  

• Similar authors
  Under every book detail page, we show similar authors that will help you discover authors who write books similar to the one that you are viewing.
• Mis-spelt searches
  weRead now has builtin suggestions in case you make a misspell some work while typing your query.
• See more like this
  We have launched some kind of a ‘Stumble upon’ feature. When you are viewing a book in weRead, you will see a button ‘See more like this’, clicking which, takes you to a random but related book.
• External integration with OCLC
  We now power the OCLC related books and reviews.
• We have also moved to bigger and more powerful servers, which means a better user experience for all our readers.

As you see, we have been busy! We have tons of new and exciting features lined up and we promise to provide feature updates as frequently as possible. A lot of these features revolve around making weRead a truly social application.

By the way, you can get some quick updates on weRead in our Twitter page.

Happy reading!

PS: Features and feature names are subject to change.

(cross posted from my blog)

Many of you have asked us that everytime you search for a book we throw all the editions of the book along with the search result. So for instance if you were to search for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows we would show the softcover, the hardcover, the CD and many other editions. You told us that it not only creates for a confusing search interface but also spreads out the reviews for a book across its editions. However, some of you on the other hand said - I really want to put the edition that I have read on my bookshelf. So we had two very competing yet equally compelling requests. The good news is that we have solved both of them now! We recently launched merging of editions as a feature.  So it works like

Now when you search for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows we do not show you all the editions of the book. We show you the most popular one with a little link below the cover of the book “All Editions”. The reviews and ratings of the books are aggregated under this super product.

Harry Potter and Deathly Hallows Search Results

For those of you who want to add the specific edition to your bookshelf among the 40 editions of this book - yes we have 40 editions of this book you can click on the All Editions link and see the all the editions.

Harry Potter and Deathly Hallows Expanded Editions

We hope this feature will help us create a better experience on weRead. Let us know you comments.

Here is a picture of the bookshelf we have in our Bangalore Office. Most of weRead’s engineering including design, development, deployment and management happens from the Bangalore Office. No surprise that the top shelf is books for Java, Hibernate, Lucene, Databases, Scalable Websites and many other open source technologies.

Books we Read

The second shelf has lot of Harry Potter books and some classics such as “The Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” and “Good to Great”. From coding to fiction to philosophy to business we have got it all covered in our little bookshelf.

There are many many more books that are lying around the office that we need to organize. We will do that and give you all a better picture of what we Read.

It’s been one year since we launched iRead and what an amazing year it’s been – we have now over 2 million users and over 40 million books cataloged. Your feature requests and brutally honest feedback (we love your feedback) have helped make iRead the most vibrant social book community of its kind. Thank you!

In many of your feature requests (some of which are still pending), there is a common theme. You asked us to give you details about what your friends were reading, you chucked books by the thousands to tell your friends what to read, and you told us you care more about how your friends rate a book than how it was rated by other users. In other words, you asked us to make online book discovery the way it should be – SOCIAL.

In order to better deliver on your request we have made a few changes. First, to reflect the next exciting phase of iRead, we feel it’s only appropriate to change our name from iRead to weRead. To us, this was a natural progression from i to you to we, as “we” reflects the spirit of your ideas, suggestions and the true social nature of book discovery. It also helps us unify our identity across the internet.

Secondly, we have formed an alliance with Lulu.com, the world’s largest marketplace for self-published authors, to bring more independent authors to your bookshelf. Over next 8-12 weeks look for even more changes as we give weRead a fresh new design and add features that will make weRead the social book discovery tool you asked for.

We are excited about these changes and hope you are too. Thank you again for your continued support and ideas!

As so many of you have requested that you would like to see what your friends are reading on the home page of iRead (weRead). We had this feature in the first release of iRead but we had to pull this back because it was turning out to be an expensive call for our databases. Well that has been fixed as the engineers have designed a more scalable and fast solution for showing your friend activities. You will start to see many new social features in next 9 weeks.

Friend Activities on weRead (iRead)

So stay tuned…and as always let us know of any suggestions that you have.

We just launched a brand new header for weRead.com - we hope this makes the navigation easier. We will be making many tweaks to this as we learn more about the user data and your comments about the new header.

New Header for weRead.com

Let us know your comments.

We recently launched a feature “See More Like This” to help you discover interesting books. You will now see a orange button on every (almost every) book detail page on the right hand side. A click on that button will take you to another book that our similarity engine thinks is similar to the book you are looking at. However to add some fun to the discovery process we randomly choose 1 book among a set of similar books and take you there. When you are on the next book you can continue this discovery by clicking on See More Like This button.

I have personally found this to be fascinating way to discover new books. You can start from philosophy books and see where you land up! business/romance/science fiction…

So start discovering new books by clicking on “Start reading like this…”

Let us know any comments/suggestions you have.

BooksiRead the product that we started to build at Ugenie as a facebook application, and then took it to Hi5, Bebo, Myspace & Orkut is now also available outside of all social networks at http://BooksiRead.org

This enables us to do a few more things that were a little difficult so far.
Firstly, to those who love BooksiRead ( and said they used to log on to facebook only for BooksiRead) - you no longer have to depend on a social network. ( Yes, thankfully & luckily we have a few such users).

Now you can “take your reads” with you to your blog, to your website & showcase your shelf/reading profile.

With larger real estate available, we should be able to provide a richer experience.

A much richer profile page, that you can customize quite a bit.

Hope you like the product.

Do send me your thoughts, comments, brickbats … and more

p.s: You will be able to link all your accounts - across all networks, we'll roll this out this week, so if you have created your bookshelf, at any network, you don't have to duplicate the effort.

The book industry’s biggest show of the year in North America starts today in Los Angeles. Harish and I will be at the expo Thursday, Friday and Saturday. If you’d like to say hi and tell us how much you like or don’t like iRead, please find us in white polos with iRead logo :-), or simply email us at harish at booksiread dot org / krishna at booksiread at org and we’d be happy to setup a time to meet and chat.

- Krishna