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!

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)

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.

Here is a picture of the bookshelf we have in our Bangalore Office. Most of weRead’s engineering including design, development, deployment and management happens from the Bangalore Office. No surprise that the top shelf is books for Java, Hibernate, Lucene, Databases, Scalable Websites and many other open source technologies.

Books we Read

The second shelf has lot of Harry Potter books and some classics such as “The Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” and “Good to Great”. From coding to fiction to philosophy to business we have got it all covered in our little bookshelf.

There are many many more books that are lying around the office that we need to organize. We will do that and give you all a better picture of what we Read.

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!

As so many of you have requested that you would like to see what your friends are reading on the home page of iRead (weRead). We had this feature in the first release of iRead but we had to pull this back because it was turning out to be an expensive call for our databases. Well that has been fixed as the engineers have designed a more scalable and fast solution for showing your friend activities. You will start to see many new social features in next 9 weeks.

Friend Activities on weRead (iRead)

So stay tuned…and as always let us know of any suggestions that you have.