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!

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)

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!