We’ve added two great ways for you to better catalog and rate your books on weRead.   First, while five is a good number of stars, we know the devil is in the detail. Now you can choose 3.5 or 4.5 or even a half star if the book was really that bad!

Many of you have been asking for better ways to search through your books or keep them more organized.  With weRead’s new tagging system, you’ll have a much easier time keeping your fiction from your textbooks, or your classics from your pop lit.  When you are adding a book or viewing your list of reads, you can start typing in a tag.  Previously entered tags will start showing in a list you can select from, or you can enter a brand new tag by hitting Enter on your keyboard when you are finished.

When you want to access books by tags or see what you have tagged, we’ve added a tab to your weRead menu just for Tags.

This takes you to a table where you can click to see all the books you have labeled under a tab.

We’ve tried to make this as easy to use and quick a method as possible, and we definitely want your feedback on this one! Let us know how this is helping you or how we can make it better by emailing us at help@weread.com.

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!

We’ve been busy!  Here are some of the things we’ve been adding to the features available to you on weRead:

* Half star ratings - No longer bound by whole numbers, the half star is your solution for that book that is better than three, but not quite worth four stars.

* A new logo

* Facebook - we’ve introduced more options on facebook so you can post to your profile and set your feed options

* tags - Now you can categorize all the books in your bookself, making it easy to sort and find the books you want

*Discussion boards - both for authors and books, this has been live for a few weeks so you can engage in loads of debates and discussions throughout weRead.

* Authors corner - if you have claimed an author page, you can now add or remove books from your books written list, edit your pen name, photo and date of birth right from within your profile page.

Have fun using all these and more, send us your feedback, and look for even more features to arrive as we make weRead more social!

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 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.

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)

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.