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!

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.

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.

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!

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!