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!

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.

iRead is on My Space now! Woo hooo…

MySpace recently opened their platform for application providers and in a limited release opened it for their users to use the applications. This is an good first step toward the promise of open social compliance from the large social networks.

iRead is excited to be part of My Space. Thanks to some fantastic support for My Space team, we were able to launch iRead on My Space on day one. So if you hang out on My Space you can now show off your favorite books on your profile. You can see what your friends are reading. And discover people who have similar reading tastes as you!

Get iRead on My Space.

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.