We have a new poll running on http://weread.com, and we want to know, “how long do you normally take to finish reading a book”? So far, 39% of our users have said they don’t put down a book until they’re finished, and 38% say they read for an hour or two each day and finish the book in a few weeks. Let us know what you think, and thanks for voting!

As any avid reader knows, libraries are an excellent resource for finding the books you want without having to spend tons of money. In fact, library memberships are 100% free and are excellent places to do research or just find that book you’ve been dying to read. To help facilitate you finding books that are recommended to you weRead recently partnered with Worldcat.org to help you find books in a library near you. Here’s the official announcement.

To make things as straight-forward as possible, we’ve put a “Find in a library near you” link on every book page.

After clicking on the link we will transfer you to Worldcat’s page for the book which will show you the libraries its database that have the book in stock, and are closest to your location.

Most of the libraries have online databases, and you can then click on them to reserve a copy of the book. Then you can go pick it up and start reading!

We have another exciting new feature to tell you about, which is the ability to link your weRead account with your Twitter account! If you’re not already familiar with Twitter, it is a site that allows you to “micro-blog”. You post updates about what you’re doing, link to interesting stuff on the web, and keep your friends (or followers as Twitter calls them) updated. The catch (and why they call it “micro”) is that you are limited to 140 characters. We have added functionality so that when you add or review a book it is updated to your Twitter account, so your friends know what you’ve been reading. Sound interesting? Here’s how to get started.

Note: This how-to assumes you have a Twitter account. If you don’t have one already, then you can start one by joining Twitter.

Step 1: Click the link on the weRead homepage to “Link twitter and weread to update your Twitter status automatically when you add or review a book.” Or you can click on “Twitter user” link at the top of the page which is next to sign-in link.

Step 2: Enter your Twitter username and password, and set how many times a day you want weRead to update your Twitter status.

Step 3: Continue adding and reviewing books on weRead, and the updates will show up on Twitter automatically!

It’s easy to set up, and another way to let your friends know what you’re up to on weRead. To disable Twitter updates from weRead, you can click “delete details” in the above settings page.

As always, we would love to hear your feedback on our new feature! Let us know how this is helping you or how we can make it better by emailing us.

One of our most commonly requested features has been the option to search for books within your own bookshelf. We have listened to your requests, and implemented this exciting new feature! Now the search in a shelf feature makes it easy for users to find books they have added to their bookshelf again. For some users this may not seem all that exciting, but it is extremely useful for our power users who have more than 50 books in their shelf. Of course, this also makes managing your bookshelf a lot easier, since you can find and edit specific book listings quickly and easily.

Another useful example of how you can use this feature is if you have 101 books on your shelf, and want to find all the books by Neil Gaiman you have on it. With search in a shelf, now you can easily find out which ones you have listed!

You can also search for books on your friends’ bookshelves or even the bookshelves of users you don’t know. This is particularly useful if you’re trying to find out whether the friend has read a particular book or not so you can recommend it to them, or even buy it for them as a gift.

The search within a shelf feature is shown on the “My Reads” page where you can see all the books on your bookshelf.

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)

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.

Books iRead - the facebook application, that we have been working on, is now a lot more.

The application is now available on most popular social networks - Orkut , Myspace, Hi5 & Bebo.

Most of these networks are yet to start promoting applications and exposing them to their users. Orkut recently made it available to all their India users & we are seeing quite a bit of traction from Orkut.

Besides distribution within social networks, which set it apart from other book community destination sites, iRead has grown a lot.
From a simplistic initial feature-set, which allowed users to search and add books, rate and review them and see their friends books, iRead has come a long way.

Some of the powerful features that we are proud:

-  Recommendations - Real-time recommendations, based on books you have added & rated.

-  Read Now - Allows users to read a lot of books online(~16k), and the set includes popular books like Alchemist, and Pride and prejudice

- Book clubs - a place for like minded people to get together, discuss books and anything else.

- Author's corner - a way for authors to connect with their readers and for the readers to get a closer look at their favourite authors.

This one is for the geeks - all the applications on the different networks work off the same code base. May not seem like a big deal to a lot of people, but as an engineer I am proud of this.

Been through a lot of tough times, and the ride has been a lot of fun. The learnings, from people to product, to business to technology …. have been tremendous.

Hope the ride continues… and iRead becomes the biggest & most used book community.