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.

It was a chilly November morning. I picked up the Wall Street Journal from my driveway. I opened it while sipping my morning coffee to find an article on Kindle, Amazon’s wireless ebook reader. Amazon, my former employer of 7 years, had recently launched the much touted Kindle in a widely publicized event on Nov 19^th. Since then Kindle generated an enormous amount of buzz, the kind that the ebook world never saw before, the kind it badly needed.

I put the newspaper aside, fired up Firefox on my always-on laptop, and started reading reviews for Kindle. I read this bland, but comprehensive, review on CNet and this really great, mostly negative, video review from Robert Scoble, and this one from Joe Wikert, who launched Kindleville, an entire blog dedicated to Kindle, a couple of weeks later.

Most of the reviews praised Kindle for its wireless freedom, but blasted it for poor design, restrictive DRM, and an outrageous price tag. All those negative reviews did little to suppress my old loyalties to Amazon. I decided to pay up $399 + tax and get myself a Kindle, even though many of the articles I read suggested alternatives. I hop over to Amazon.com and find that they are temporarily out of stock. Bummer! I was all ready to get one and now I have to wait. Amazon doesn’t even say how long I’d have to wait.

I wasn’t going to wait. I drove down to the nearest Borders store and bought a Sony Reader for $299 + tax. The shopping experience itself was quite funny and merits a mention. None of the store reps at Borders seemed to know they stocked Sony Readers. They had to ask around and finally some store manager type knew where they were on “display”. Unfortunately, the only reader they had in stock was locked inside that display case and they couldn’t find the key. They clearly hadn’t opened it in weeks, may be even months. Anyway, they finally found the key and I got my hands on the Sony Reader. Let me point out that I was not one bit annoyed by all this. The staff was very friendly and I thought the whole thing was pretty hilarious. It just gave me a perspective on where we currently are in the evolution of ebooks into mainstream media.

As I was leaving the store, I was worried that I might have jumped the gun. I tried reading books electronically before (on my laptop and my mobile phone) and that wasn’t great. The Reader might end up in the long list of gizmos that I bought but rarely used – digital voice recorder, GPS (handheld, not the car one), digital photo frame, cordless electronic can opener, etc etc.

Getting the ebook reader turned out to be the best purchase decision I made in a long time. Ever since I bought it, my Sony Reader and I have been inseparable. It goes wherever I go - trains, planes, the DMV. I have to say it’s quite a head-turner. Of course, I have been reading a lot of books since November – the free classics promotion from Sony certainly helped. And I’m loving it. If I have to put my finger on one thing that explains why I’m loving it so much, it would be the e-Ink display. What they say is true - it really is like reading on paper. I can read for hours without any eye strain. I can definitely see myself reading news papers, blogs, just about anything I spend hours reading on my laptop today, reading on an eInk device in the future.

With the new display technologies and the enthusiasm around Kindle (will Sony be far behind on its own wireless ebook reader?), we can finally say that the eBook has arrived. It’s still very early but we are past the point where the average joe walking down the street will agree that most books in the future will be read this way.

This article was originally posted March 27th on Krishna Motukuri’s blog.

This one’s been long overdue, but better late than never I guess. So here goes: an account of one of the most exciting moments any engineer, for that matter anyone, at a startup looks forward to: You build, They come. And boy! did they come. Thousands each hour, about 200,000 in a span of 24 hours, trampling on each other (virtually of course!), jamming our servers, and complaining every time something didn’t work. Within 24 hours, we not only beefed up our systems, we went on to delight our customers and pave the way to add nearly 2 million users in the months that followed. This is the story of how we handled the unprecedented (at Ugenie) surge in traffic we got soon after we launched Harry Potter Magic Spells on the Facebook Platform in July. Here we go…

After looking at the traffic stats the previous night, we knew we had our first real viral app on Facebook. We had to scale to make sure that we could handle all the traffic and a million users - “a nice problem to have” as some people like to say at Ugenie. Being in India meant that peak-traffic hours coincided with deep-sleep hours for our engineers. But on the brighter side, it meant that we had a full working day to get our act right and be ready to face the action the next day.

By then, we had started using Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud 2 (EC2). Back then, EC2 didn’t have support for large and extra large instances. So each instance was roughly equivalent to less then half of a production server we were using otherwise (in terms of computing power). Even though this meant we needed more instances, the ease of launching a new instance is one of the great things about EC2 (more about EC2 in a later post). But EC2 doesn’t have support for hardware load balancers / VIPs. So we had to look for a software load balancer that would be simple to use and configure. Having evaluated more heavy weight solutions before, when we stumbled upon Pound, we knew we had the right tool for the job.

It is very straight forward to configure Pound to load balance between various apache servers. We decided to go with Pound fronting two apache instances, each on a separate EC2 instance. One more instance also hosted our mysql server. Pound doesn’t support assigning weights (or we haven’t figured it) yet - it has to be round-robin - and that is one feature we missed. So we couldn’t assign a slightly lower weight to the apache which shared it’s EC2 instance with Pound - not great, but workable.

The next step was to ensure that our DB had the right parameters and indexes. A few indexes and explains later, the queries started looking decent. But the best way to improve your DB performance is to not hit it at all. The easiest way to do that in PHP is to use the APC cache.(One gotcha to be aware about APC: it doesn’t handle the case where the size of the value being stored changes. If you think the size of the value you are storing changes across calls, simple delete and store again).

All this gave us a nice feeling, but we weren’t feeling warm fuzzy yet! We wanted to do be certain that we could take the load. A back-of-the-envelope calculation gave a ballpark figure for how many requests per second (peak and average) we had to handle. We ran the previous week’s logs against a few perl scripts to get into the right format, and used that to load test our system using http_load. Knowing that our system could handle the requests put us in a comfort zone.

Much as expected, we got traffic - tonnes of it. Much unexpected, we got no alerts from nagios at all - none of it. What a day!

We went on to launch several other viral applications: Pillow Fight etc with a combined user base of over 3 million but we will always fondly remember our first viral app!