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!

It was a chilly November morning. I picked up the Wall Street Journal from my driveway. I opened it while sipping my morning coffee to find an article on Kindle, Amazon’s wireless ebook reader. Amazon, my former employer of 7 years, had recently launched the much touted Kindle in a widely publicized event on Nov 19^th. Since then Kindle generated an enormous amount of buzz, the kind that the ebook world never saw before, the kind it badly needed.

I put the newspaper aside, fired up Firefox on my always-on laptop, and started reading reviews for Kindle. I read this bland, but comprehensive, review on CNet and this really great, mostly negative, video review from Robert Scoble, and this one from Joe Wikert, who launched Kindleville, an entire blog dedicated to Kindle, a couple of weeks later.

Most of the reviews praised Kindle for its wireless freedom, but blasted it for poor design, restrictive DRM, and an outrageous price tag. All those negative reviews did little to suppress my old loyalties to Amazon. I decided to pay up $399 + tax and get myself a Kindle, even though many of the articles I read suggested alternatives. I hop over to Amazon.com and find that they are temporarily out of stock. Bummer! I was all ready to get one and now I have to wait. Amazon doesn’t even say how long I’d have to wait.

I wasn’t going to wait. I drove down to the nearest Borders store and bought a Sony Reader for $299 + tax. The shopping experience itself was quite funny and merits a mention. None of the store reps at Borders seemed to know they stocked Sony Readers. They had to ask around and finally some store manager type knew where they were on “display”. Unfortunately, the only reader they had in stock was locked inside that display case and they couldn’t find the key. They clearly hadn’t opened it in weeks, may be even months. Anyway, they finally found the key and I got my hands on the Sony Reader. Let me point out that I was not one bit annoyed by all this. The staff was very friendly and I thought the whole thing was pretty hilarious. It just gave me a perspective on where we currently are in the evolution of ebooks into mainstream media.

As I was leaving the store, I was worried that I might have jumped the gun. I tried reading books electronically before (on my laptop and my mobile phone) and that wasn’t great. The Reader might end up in the long list of gizmos that I bought but rarely used – digital voice recorder, GPS (handheld, not the car one), digital photo frame, cordless electronic can opener, etc etc.

Getting the ebook reader turned out to be the best purchase decision I made in a long time. Ever since I bought it, my Sony Reader and I have been inseparable. It goes wherever I go - trains, planes, the DMV. I have to say it’s quite a head-turner. Of course, I have been reading a lot of books since November – the free classics promotion from Sony certainly helped. And I’m loving it. If I have to put my finger on one thing that explains why I’m loving it so much, it would be the e-Ink display. What they say is true - it really is like reading on paper. I can read for hours without any eye strain. I can definitely see myself reading news papers, blogs, just about anything I spend hours reading on my laptop today, reading on an eInk device in the future.

With the new display technologies and the enthusiasm around Kindle (will Sony be far behind on its own wireless ebook reader?), we can finally say that the eBook has arrived. It’s still very early but we are past the point where the average joe walking down the street will agree that most books in the future will be read this way.

This article was originally posted March 27th on Krishna Motukuri’s blog.

Last week we launched the countdown to 10 millionth book on our users’ bookshelves. We hit that milestone on the morning of October 29th. As promised, we raffled off 10 $100 gift certificates from Barnes & Noble and announced the names of the winners. You can view the list of the lucky winners and congratulate them here.

iReaders‘ bookshelves will soon have more than 10 million books! When we started, about four months ago, we had no idea that we will reach the 10 million books milestone so soon. We are thrilled and we want to thank you for making iRead the most vibrant book community! To celebrate, we are giving away 10 $100 gift certificates.

So how does this work?

When we reach the 10 millionth book, we will pick 10 lucky iReaders among the ones who have 10 or more books on their shelf and 10 or more friends on iRead. The lucky iReaders will get $100 Barnes and Noble.com gift certificate to buy more books! See below for more details.

Eligibility

• Be a facebook user and have iRead installed on your profile.
• Don’t be lazy. Add books to your profile. You should add atleast 10 books to your iRead shelf.
• Don’t be alone. You should have at least 10 friends on iRead. iRead is more fun with friends!
• Start adding books now so that we can reach the 10 millionth book sooner.

Promotion

• 10 lucky iReaders (a raffle among eligible winners) will win $100 Barnes and Noble.com gift certificates.

How to Enter

• Any Facebook/iRead user who has atleast 10 books on their shelf and 10 Friends on iRead at the time when we hit 10M book adds will automatically be entered into the promotion.
• When we get the 10 millionth book added, we will do a raffle among all eligible iReaders to select 10 winners.

Notification

• We will notify the winner via the send message feature on Facebook.

Other Fine Print

• Barnes and Noble.com gift certificate fine print applies. Click here to see the terms and conditions.
• iRead terms and conditions

  This promotion is valid starting October 17, 2007 and will continue until iRead get 10 million book additions. iRead will issue electronic $100 gift certificates for Barnesandnoble.com to the 10 qualified promotion registrants. To qualify, you must follow the promotion rules. iRead will issue the gift certificates within 30 days of the end of the promotion. If you are one of the first 10 qualified entrants, you will receive a facebook email from iRead with details on how to redeem the gift certificates. iRead reserves the right to cancel this promotion at any time, and to cancel issuance of the gift to certain individuals due to suspected fraud. If you have any questions, please contact ireadsupport@socialwizards.com.

It has been less than a week since we launched a new and exciting feature on Books weRead - allowing users to form book clubs and connect with other iReaders. There are close to 300 book clubs already with more than 7000 users on them. Please take a look, start your own book club, and let us know how we can improve the book club experience.

On June 6th I had posted about iRead. Developing this facebook app has been a wonderful experience - high competition, pressure, thrill, viral growth, users shouting to get features - threatening to go away otherwise. Incredible stuff! Never in my last 5 years of professional career have I interacted this closely with my users - responding to their messages pacifying them, making them understand limitations & getting requirements & ideas for the next feature to build.

We have had a fair share of mishaps - with our production server going down & not getting rebooted for 5 hours! (yes we were running off a single server - and we had about 100 users then)
A Mysql crash, disk corruption, internet connection going off in the middle of setting up mysql replication…

Truly an exhilrating ride.

I cant thank facebook enough for providing this opportunity to application developers to try out their ideas .

I believe that facebook has now moved to a completely different league - myspace, orkut seem non-competitive.
More about facebook later. Here is a good analysis of facebook platform.

Right now, I am soaking in the fact that a few thousand users have adopted an app that I built with 1 great developer, in just a week’s time.

The ride only gets better from now on.

iRead - is an application that I built with

jyothirmayee

over the last 5 days.

Its been an incredible experience. Getting something decent & usable up in a short while, and then to see user adoption, get reviews, work on features that users request….  Absolutely fantastic experience

iRead is a simple idea. Mark your books. See what your friends are reading. Share books that you really like.
The applications beyond this are immense & we are just scratching the surface.
Ratings & tags come 1st to mind.
biggest book-o-phile’s, Most read books by your friends, users like you (based on the books you have read) …  I can go on ..

Facebook has done a wonderful thing by opening up their api & create a massive platform.
I have always believed that social networks are a platform, you need to have a lot more activity built around it except for adding a friend & messaging a friend.
Classifieds, reviews about any & everything, suggestions, lending stuff, all of these work much better in a social network.
I’ll post about Facebook - and why I believe they are onto something massive.

For now, let me spread the word about my baby - iRead
Please do try it guys, and share it with your friends on facebook.

And do send me all feedback ( good & bad )