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.

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!