Recently, weRead launched a new feature on our homepage, polls! We want to hear what you all think, and so we will be regularly asking questions for your feedback. Sometimes this will be on things you might like to see on the site, or something similar, but sometimes it will be a little more fun. Currently, we want to know “If Shakespeare were alive today, he would be…”? We’ve gotten a lot of interesting responses, but so far 40% of you think he would be a struggling author.

What does this tell us about the state of the industry when we think that the playwright we all read in high school would have to struggle to get anything published if he were alive today? Maybe he would be on weRead trying to promote his books, or publish them for free on a self-publishing site like Lulu.com? Regardless, this is exactly why we started weRead in the first place. We want to help struggling writers find new avenues for reaching their fans, and to help book lovers to find books they might not have ever heard of, and share their love of books with their friends. It’s a tall order to be sure, but maybe we can help the next William Shakespeare connect with his or her fans.

If you’ve got an opinion, we’ve got a way for you to share it on weRead. Take a look at the new Quick Poll feature we launched on our home page. This week, we are celebrating the 445th anniversary of the Bard. Our poll seeks to find out what weReaders think William Shakespeare would be, if he were alive today. We have received hundreds of responses within the first twelve hours; proving that, no matter what people think Shakespeare would be if he were alive, he is very popular.

If you want more Shakespeare, check out the reader-contributed Shakespeare Quiz, or go to his profile on Author’s Corner and start reading his classics for free.

Our last week’s poll was on the power of books as agents of change. We asked whether weReaders thought Barack Obama’s book, Audacity of Hope helped his presidential campaign. 69% of weReaders felt that the book did help!

Please email us, or tweet to us if you have suggestions for polls we should be conducting. If your suggestion gets picked, we will feature your weRead profile on the home page!

Recently we added a new feature that we’re very excited about and we hope you will be too! The new feature allows you to build a custom Bookshelf widget for your blog and share your ratings and reviews with your audience.

To create a custom widget, you just have to follow three simple steps:

Step 1: Select Your Widget

Since you can create multiple widgets, your first step is to name your widget. You can name it whatever you want, but it might help to name it something that relates to the purpose of the widget. I named my first one “My Favorite Manga” since I was planning to post it to my manga review site, Hobotaku.

Step 2: Customize Your Widget

This is where you get to set all kinds of preferences like the layout, image size, how many books to display, and what information you want to displayed about each book. Once you’re happy with your selections just hit the save button, and you’ll be ready for step 3.

Step 3: Copy & Paste Code To Your Blog

After you have clicked Save, then scroll down a bit and you should see the “Copy & paste code to your blog” section. Follow the instructions, and then go to your blog. Most blogs will give you the ability to add html to your blog, so all you have to do is copy & paste the code weRead generates for you into your blog and hit save. Your custom widget should show up on your blog and you should be all set!

Here’s what my widget looks like on my blog!

We would love to hear your feedback on our new widget! Let us know how this is helping you or how we can make it better by emailing us at help@weread.com.

Note: The new widget should work on most blogs, but unfortunately there is one exception. If you are running a blog on wordpress.com (i.e. you don’t host your wordpress blog on your own site) then the code won’t work. We are working on a solution, and will let you know as soon as the issue is resolved.

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!

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.

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.

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.