iRead becomes weRead and teams up with Lulu.com
It’s been one year since we launched iRead and what an amazing year it’s been – we have now over 2 million users and over 40 million books cataloged. Your feature requests and brutally honest feedback (we love your feedback) have helped make iRead the most vibrant social book community of its kind. Thank you!
In many of your feature requests (some of which are still pending), there is a common theme. You asked us to give you details about what your friends were reading, you chucked books by the thousands to tell your friends what to read, and you told us you care more about how your friends rate a book than how it was rated by other users. In other words, you asked us to make online book discovery the way it should be – SOCIAL.
In order to better deliver on your request we have made a few changes. First, to reflect the next exciting phase of iRead, we feel it’s only appropriate to change our name from iRead to weRead. To us, this was a natural progression from i to you to we, as “we” reflects the spirit of your ideas, suggestions and the true social nature of book discovery. It also helps us unify our identity across the internet.
Secondly, we have formed an alliance with Lulu.com, the world’s largest marketplace for self-published authors, to bring more independent authors to your bookshelf. Over next 8-12 weeks look for even more changes as we give weRead a fresh new design and add features that will make weRead the social book discovery tool you asked for.
We are excited about these changes and hope you are too. Thank you again for your continued support and ideas!
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Hey Krishna - congrats! That’s awesome news!
Hemant
5 Aug 08 at 5:28 pm
Great news.
One problem that I have found that will become more important now is the fact that books are duplicated on your database. I don’t really care which edition of a book I have read. What I care about is whether my friends have read the same book. What would be really great is if you can link all entries of what is essentially the same book. That way I can see all the reviews, I can see how many people have really read the book and, most importantly, I can see which books are common between my friends and I.
I realise that this is a pretty major job and would require some additional features related to adding and selecting books (particularly if you retain the ability to reference a particular edition - important to some), but it is possible and I think would be an important enhancement.
Rob Campbell
8 Aug 08 at 2:03 am
Rob,
Thanks for your message. Yes I totally agree that solving the de-duplication of books is an important problem for us to solve. We are working on that now but as you correctly pointed out it is a hard one to solve. We are looking at many algorithmic solutions to the problems and then also a user aided solution. We should have an update for you and others on this soon.
harish
11 Aug 08 at 1:50 am
Great news. Congrats Krishna & Harish.
Sumit
13 Aug 08 at 10:32 am
I am a bit confused here. I was kind of hoping here that some company in India provides the delivery service of lulu in India(printing,publishing,shipping). Seems your partnership is based on your existing profile.
Any plans to go beyond social book reading and helping self-publish,printing, selling?
Thanks,
Sandip
Sandip Bhattacharya
10 Nov 08 at 11:29 am