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!

It has been a while since I thought I should write a review of iRead.

iRead is a social book discovery application. It has been quite successful on Facebook and has a very large userbase. Currently iRead has a total install base of about 1.4 million users, mostly from Facebook.

So what do we mean by social book discovery?

iRead is not just about maintaining a bookshelf online. It tries to bring the social aspect into picture.

’social’?
iRead depends a lot on your social network. You can share your bookshelf with your friends, learn what your friends are reading and what their reading tastes are. You can discuss about books in various book clubs. You could participate in Quizzes or even add your own. You can find out how compatible your reading tastes are with other people in the network.

iRead does not require a separate registration. It is available right in your social network. (As of now the application is available in Facebook, Orkut, MySpace, Hi5 and Bebo.) So when we are talking about friends, we are talking about your friends from the network where you are using iRead. So if you use iRead in Facebook, you see your Facebook friends in iRead, while in Orkut you see your Orkut friends. Many a times, all it requires is to just add the application to your profile.

‘book discovery’?
For one, iRead provides recommendations based on your reading tastes. Then there are various other mechanisms by which you can discover new books to read.

Let’s explore some.

Several ways to browse

* You could first start off by searching for books and adding them to your bookshelf. This helps us learn about your tastes and recommend books that you may like.

* When searching, you could either enter the name of the book, or its author, or if you know the ISBN, you could enter that.

* If you want to just browse through the application you could start off by looking at what other iReaders are doing. The home page shows the most recent activity in the network.

* So let’s say you find some interesting book. Just click on the book and you are taken to the book details. Here you get to know how many readers the book has, how many reviews people have written for the book and get some instant user reviews and an editorial review. You can also find out similar other books.

* If you see that the book is interesting, just click on the ‘See All’ reviews link. This will display all the reviews for the book. Read the ones you like and you will soon learn what the book is about.

* Since there are multiple ways to reach your data, your reviews are never buried. So even if you are writing a review for a book, that already has a thousand reviews, you can expect your review to be read by other iReaders.

* If the book interests you, you might want to check out other books by the same author. Just click on the author’s name. This will show all books by the author. You could also click on the small icon next to the author’s name to search for the author in Author’s corner. This will give you other details like the profile of the author, what others think about the author, how many fans the author has etc.

* Author’s corner is a forum for readers to interact with their favorite authors. So if you are the author of a book and are looking for a forum to interact with your readers, this is where you should be. Author’s corner allows authors to maintain their profile, and also learn about their readers’ expectations.

* While reading reviews, you might find that the review from a particular user is very interesting. You might now want to look at this reader’s bookshelf. Many a times, I have found this to be a good mechanism to discover new books. You can get an assurance of how close your tastes are by looking at the number of common books amongst you. Ok, now you might want to look at other reviews by this reader.

* You could also contact the reader by leaving a wall post/scrap.

* You may also want to check out who among your friends is on iRead and what they are reading. Click on the Friends link in the header. If you want to know about your friends’ reading tastes and they are not yet on iRead you could invite them to add the application.

* For selected books, you could even browse inside the book. A lot of out of copyright books are available for free online viewing. Some other selected books are available for limited preview.

Other features worthy of mention

Take your reads with you

So what if you are in all these networks and want to use iRead everywhere?
iRead has a feature to import your bookshelf from Facebook to Orkut, MySpace and/or Hi5. Once imported, you will see the same bookshelf in all the networks. However the friends shown to you depends on the network you are currently in.

Import books from other sources

If you have been maintaining books in some other place, you may want to try importing books using the import books option. The link to this is found below the search box.

Add a book

Can’t find a book you want to add to your bookshelf? You can add it to our catalog. The link to add a book is found below the search box.

So what’s more?!

Happy iReading!

(cross posted from my blog)

iReaders‘ bookshelves will soon have more than 10 million books! When we started, about four months ago, we had no idea that we will reach the 10 million books milestone so soon. We are thrilled and we want to thank you for making iRead the most vibrant book community! To celebrate, we are giving away 10 $100 gift certificates.

So how does this work?

When we reach the 10 millionth book, we will pick 10 lucky iReaders among the ones who have 10 or more books on their shelf and 10 or more friends on iRead. The lucky iReaders will get $100 Barnes and Noble.com gift certificate to buy more books! See below for more details.

Eligibility

• Be a facebook user and have iRead installed on your profile.
• Don’t be lazy. Add books to your profile. You should add atleast 10 books to your iRead shelf.
• Don’t be alone. You should have at least 10 friends on iRead. iRead is more fun with friends!
• Start adding books now so that we can reach the 10 millionth book sooner.

Promotion

• 10 lucky iReaders (a raffle among eligible winners) will win $100 Barnes and Noble.com gift certificates.

How to Enter

• Any Facebook/iRead user who has atleast 10 books on their shelf and 10 Friends on iRead at the time when we hit 10M book adds will automatically be entered into the promotion.
• When we get the 10 millionth book added, we will do a raffle among all eligible iReaders to select 10 winners.

Notification

• We will notify the winner via the send message feature on Facebook.

Other Fine Print

• Barnes and Noble.com gift certificate fine print applies. Click here to see the terms and conditions.
• iRead terms and conditions

  This promotion is valid starting October 17, 2007 and will continue until iRead get 10 million book additions. iRead will issue electronic $100 gift certificates for Barnesandnoble.com to the 10 qualified promotion registrants. To qualify, you must follow the promotion rules. iRead will issue the gift certificates within 30 days of the end of the promotion. If you are one of the first 10 qualified entrants, you will receive a facebook email from iRead with details on how to redeem the gift certificates. iRead reserves the right to cancel this promotion at any time, and to cancel issuance of the gift to certain individuals due to suspected fraud. If you have any questions, please contact ireadsupport@socialwizards.com.

It has been less than a week since we launched a new and exciting feature on Books weRead - allowing users to form book clubs and connect with other iReaders. There are close to 300 book clubs already with more than 7000 users on them. Please take a look, start your own book club, and let us know how we can improve the book club experience.

We spend a lot of time on social networks! And we love it. We are now building cool little applications for social networks that make the community experience even more fun. We have launched some applications on facebook so far and we are just getting started.We will use this blog to share our learning in this exciting space and to announce new launches and features. If you have any questions feel free to contact us at blog@weread.com Welcome again!