Solaris books have kindly given us some copies of Kethani by Eric Brown.

If you would like a book to read, review and discuss please email adam@bookrabbit.com with your address details.

Copies are limited, so priority will be given to those of you who include a photo proving the existence of alien life.

Otherwise, it’s first come, first served.

Alastair Harper writes on the Guardian blog that in a recent meeting with fellow bloggers they bemoaned the reduction in pages given to broadsheet book reviews as a result of the expansion of blogging. He points out that there is a culture among modern newspaper reviews that prevents people writing as they would like, and a real tendency not to be too rude about anything reviewed in the papers.

He also writes that the answer isn’t to read an Amazon review that might rate a book a 1 star based on it’s cover design, and cares little for reading blog reviews since he isn’t interested in the canapé taster approach of reviews of books. He simply believes part of that experience is finding out if a book works or not.

He concludes “Reading is a personal act. It’s rare for friends to share the same bag of favourite authors; and, indeed, it would be depressing if they did so. Part of loving books is wandering shops or libraries, reading the anecdotes of other writers on books that changed their world, stalking the bookshelves of friends when they’re looking the other way, and finally coming back home, opening the book and finding it a piece of trash. Or, as the case may be, a treasure.”

Alert! Techy speak post ahead!

Still with me? Good, let’s carry on!

If you’re a regular user of BookRabbit, you may have noticed we’ve been experiencing one or two slight problems for the past couple of days (ok, that’s maybe a teeny tiny understatement). The good news is that we seem to have broken the back of it. First of all, thank you very much for persevering with us while we’ve been through this particularly challenging time.

For me personally, this has been the most stressful period in the development of BookRabbit, more than gearing up for the beta launch, even more than getting everything ready for the consumer launch! Have you ever had one of those problems to solve where everything you try seems to be a dead end? The whole development team has spent every minute scratching our heads and saying things like,

“Ooooh ooooh! What about…er…no, that’s not it either…hmmm”

So, on to the techy madness! Are you perhaps one the many people in the world that uses the anti-virus product AVG from Grisoft? It’s very popular, mainly because there’s a free edition I imagine. Now when you do a search on one of the popular search engines e.g. Google, Yahoo, MSN etc. AVG scans each of the search results, and it looks a bit like:

AVG does this to make sure you’re not inadvertantly going to go off to some site hosted in Russia posing as an investment bank or some such where they’ll steal your whole life and fund terrorism with the proceeds. A very noble cause I’m sure you’ll agree! Unfortunately for us, when AVG was scanning BookRabbit, the User Agent (techy speak for web browser) that it reports itself as was causing BookRabbit some problems. Indulge me if you will whilst I try and personify this process:

AVG: Hi there, I’m not a virus scanner, I’m really Internet Explorer…kind of…can I have a page please?

BookRabbit: Sure thing Mr Browser, let me just make sure I’m giving you dates/times etc. formatted correctly for where you are. Oops, oh no, please no, erk, argh, eek, splutter…

AVG: Erm…hello? Are you there? No? [To user] I can’t contact that site, sorry - it’s probably ok but I can’t tell.

BookRabbit (some minutes later): gurgle, dribble, drool…oh, there we go, here’s your page.

AVG: Sorry, I gave up about 5 minutes ago

BookRabbit: Oh. [sulk]

Ok, back with reality now, for a while at least. A normal BookRabbit page request should take around 0.5 seconds at most to get generated by the server, and we can take maybe 100-150 of these concurrently. This is plenty for quite a high volume web site, but when you get 200 (which is our maximum) all taking 5 minutes to load you can start to see why we’ve had some problems!

So I hope we’ve solved that minor problem now and get back to doing what we love, adding lots of lovely new features to BookRabbit to make your stay there all the more enjoyable.