Don Reisinger has an article on CNet that lists his 10 picks for Facebook apps that “teach you something”. weRead is proud to be one of them. Don says

Reading books is an important part of life. But too many people aren’t reading as much as they should. That’s where WeRead comes in. When you first add it to your profile, WeRead asks you to click on the books you like from a list. Based on those choices, it automatically generates a list of books you might like to read. It even lets you search friends’ profiles to see which books they recommend. If you read a lot of books, you might want to take the WeRead “Never ending book quiz.” It asks you questions about hundreds of books to see how much you comprehend after you finish a book.

We get a lot of emails and wall posts from users saying how much they love weRead and how much fun it is to update their bookshelf and chuck books at friends. Don’s endorsement of weRead shines a rare light on our mission to improve readership of books around the world.

We’re very excited to announce that weRead is one of the first 120 apps to be officially verified by Facebook! The verification program highlights apps that strive to be transparent about how they work and respect social expectations between friends. In order to be verified, the app must meet Facebook’s criteria of being trustworthy and transparent as well as providing an excellent customer experience and ensuring the privacy of our user’s information. As such, we are very proud to have been included in the very first group of verified apps, and we are committed to continuing to provide all of our users with a first-rate experience.

Recently we launched a new feature, which allows you to choose your top 5 books and the 5 books you think are the worst to share with your friends. After selecting your picks you can then see other people’s lists, so you can compare.

To get started just go to http://apps.facebook.com/ireadit/redirect.php?next=top_lists and search for your favorite books. Once you have selected your top 5 you will be able to tell your friends about your picks and even post the results to your Facebook page if you have one. Here’s my current top 5!

You will then be able to pick your 5 worst books of all time, and share those with your friends as well. Once you’re done making your picks you will be able to see the top 5 books of all time and the worst 5 books of all time as selected by our community. You can see our current standings below, but if you create your lists now then you can influence the standings!

If you use weRead on facebook, now you have more control over what you share about your weRead-ing!  When you are logged in to weRead, you’ll see the “Settings” tab next to your name on Facebook.  Click this, and weRead Settings will be on the drop-down.  You can ask to be prompted before we publish anything to your wall, or to have stories feed automatically, only when they are short, or never.

If you have chosen to be prompted, you will get pop-ups like this one when you add a book or change the status of an existing one:

Feed away!

Recently our creative team was charged with creating the new logo for weRead. Obviously there were initial questions to be answered.

“How do we say ‘Social Network for Book Lovers’ in the form of a tiny dingbat?” With monkeys? With monkeys reading books? While wearing hats? Unfortunately that one didn’t go over too well.

Someone suggested a book. (Light bulbs going off in head). Actually a lot of people around the office suggested a lot of things. We listened to some, threw Nerf darts at the rest. After a few weeks of collaborative design (a few bottles of beer, some bourbon and a take out pizza or four, we came up with a final design).

By the way, thanks to our international team of commentators who couldn’t see the book no matter how hard they tried. (There is no book, there is only you. Or whatever that spiritual prodigy tells Neo in the Matrix.)

The weRead logo consists of 2 elements. The main element, which is the book, and the secondary element which is the speech bubble. The book is self-explanatory. If you need more explanation, email us and maybe we’ll come up with something after we finish off the rest of the bourbon.

The speech bubble represents the social aspect of weRead. It is the simplest, most common sense way we could come up with of expressing the fact that weRead connects people who want to talk about books. These days the speech bubble itself has become a symbol almost as commonplace as any letter of the alphabet. It’s consistent and easily recognizable as a symbol for communication. So put the book and the speech bubble together and these elements communicate the goal of weRead: to be a discovery platform for books.

Potential sticking points:
1. Is the speech bubble overused? Maybe. We say it has been abused, and we are officially reclaiming it.
2. Should Comedy Central and CNN really be using a speech bubble? We think not. However we do feel it is appropriate for weRead. It represents the company itself and isn’t used gratuitously (except when we need a plus one or some swag).

Conversely we have no problem in the gratuitous use of red and blue, because they
make you want to read tons and tons of books (ok, maybe not really, but it sounds good). The colors are vivid, the boldness of each provide a feeling of fun and energy, not to mention we also liked the fact that these colors looked good with the carpet in the office.

The overall cleanliness and simplicity of the logo succinctly sums up weRead. We picked the font Neutra, a mid-century font true to the international style that stands for innovation and progress. It has a unique enlarged x-height of the lowercase letters (that means that the top part of a letter like “b” is really tall) and increased contrast in its strokes for enhanced readability. Most of all it’s easy on the eyes for us old folks and those of us with ADD, which is pretty important.

- the creative kids at Lulu and weRead (Rob, Nuno, Caroline & Manny)

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!

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.

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 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.

It has been a while since I thought I should write a review of iRead.

iRead is a social book discovery application. It has been quite successful on Facebook and has a very large userbase. Currently iRead has a total install base of about 1.4 million users, mostly from Facebook.

So what do we mean by social book discovery?

iRead is not just about maintaining a bookshelf online. It tries to bring the social aspect into picture.

’social’?
iRead depends a lot on your social network. You can share your bookshelf with your friends, learn what your friends are reading and what their reading tastes are. You can discuss about books in various book clubs. You could participate in Quizzes or even add your own. You can find out how compatible your reading tastes are with other people in the network.

iRead does not require a separate registration. It is available right in your social network. (As of now the application is available in Facebook, Orkut, MySpace, Hi5 and Bebo.) So when we are talking about friends, we are talking about your friends from the network where you are using iRead. So if you use iRead in Facebook, you see your Facebook friends in iRead, while in Orkut you see your Orkut friends. Many a times, all it requires is to just add the application to your profile.

‘book discovery’?
For one, iRead provides recommendations based on your reading tastes. Then there are various other mechanisms by which you can discover new books to read.

Let’s explore some.

Several ways to browse

* You could first start off by searching for books and adding them to your bookshelf. This helps us learn about your tastes and recommend books that you may like.

* When searching, you could either enter the name of the book, or its author, or if you know the ISBN, you could enter that.

* If you want to just browse through the application you could start off by looking at what other iReaders are doing. The home page shows the most recent activity in the network.

* So let’s say you find some interesting book. Just click on the book and you are taken to the book details. Here you get to know how many readers the book has, how many reviews people have written for the book and get some instant user reviews and an editorial review. You can also find out similar other books.

* If you see that the book is interesting, just click on the ‘See All’ reviews link. This will display all the reviews for the book. Read the ones you like and you will soon learn what the book is about.

* Since there are multiple ways to reach your data, your reviews are never buried. So even if you are writing a review for a book, that already has a thousand reviews, you can expect your review to be read by other iReaders.

* If the book interests you, you might want to check out other books by the same author. Just click on the author’s name. This will show all books by the author. You could also click on the small icon next to the author’s name to search for the author in Author’s corner. This will give you other details like the profile of the author, what others think about the author, how many fans the author has etc.

* Author’s corner is a forum for readers to interact with their favorite authors. So if you are the author of a book and are looking for a forum to interact with your readers, this is where you should be. Author’s corner allows authors to maintain their profile, and also learn about their readers’ expectations.

* While reading reviews, you might find that the review from a particular user is very interesting. You might now want to look at this reader’s bookshelf. Many a times, I have found this to be a good mechanism to discover new books. You can get an assurance of how close your tastes are by looking at the number of common books amongst you. Ok, now you might want to look at other reviews by this reader.

* You could also contact the reader by leaving a wall post/scrap.

* You may also want to check out who among your friends is on iRead and what they are reading. Click on the Friends link in the header. If you want to know about your friends’ reading tastes and they are not yet on iRead you could invite them to add the application.

* For selected books, you could even browse inside the book. A lot of out of copyright books are available for free online viewing. Some other selected books are available for limited preview.

Other features worthy of mention

Take your reads with you

So what if you are in all these networks and want to use iRead everywhere?
iRead has a feature to import your bookshelf from Facebook to Orkut, MySpace and/or Hi5. Once imported, you will see the same bookshelf in all the networks. However the friends shown to you depends on the network you are currently in.

Import books from other sources

If you have been maintaining books in some other place, you may want to try importing books using the import books option. The link to this is found below the search box.

Add a book

Can’t find a book you want to add to your bookshelf? You can add it to our catalog. The link to add a book is found below the search box.

So what’s more?!

Happy iReading!

(cross posted from my blog)