We are excited to  announce today that we are one of the first online retailers to integrate the newly launched Google Book Search API into bookrabbit.com.

These features include linking directly with  Google customers’ library system of reviews and ratings, as well as  harnessing the power of the Google Book Preview - an ambitious project to scan every book in the world. Ultimately Google’s API will allow BookRabbit users to search the entire contents of books rather than just the title and author of works. 

Check out any product details page now to see this in action!

Alive & Hopping

There have been many changes at Bookrabbit.com and now that the dust has settled, what are Bookrabbit’s plans ?

After various adjustments to the e-commerce model, including the move to becoming an Amazon affiliate, the Bookrabbit site should become financially sustainable.

Some of the new features that Bookrabbit users can expect to see in the very near future are: 

• Bookrabbit Calendar

An event calendar that will allow users to add historical events, famous battles, author’s birthdays, book events and the like. You will be able to start discussions about these events and link a book or book category to them. 

• Bookrabbit Groups

Members will be able to create groups in Bookrabbit. Not just a reading group but any kind of social group. You will be able to create private or public groups and have your own threaded discussions as well as add group events to the calendar system. Independent Booksellers will even be able to link this to their bookseller profile where they can display their stock. 

• Bookrabbit Map

Integrating with the Google Map system, members will be able to place map pins on the global map that are linked to books, categories, events, profiles etc. This could be a whole new way of looking for relevant books – for example if you go off travelling around South East Asia, you would be able to look at the Bookrabbit map and find books that are related to the region. The possibilities are endless, you could link a famous battle from the Bookrabbit Calendar to the actual site of the battle itself on the map… perhaps you run an archaeological society and you plot on the map sites you have been involved with and create book categories that are about those very sites ! 

• Community Recommends

Now that Bookrabbit has been running for a few months, we have enough data to generate book recommendations based on books that have been reviewed and rated by the community itself ( as opposed to just what books have been sold or books we would like you to buy ). 

• Top 10 Lists

Bookrabbit will have a dedicated section showing statistics of every nature… from users with most bookshelves to books most talked about… 

• Community Empowering

Bookrabbit will be appointing a team of community moderators and super moderators. As well as to acknowledge their valuable contributions to the community so far, this is to give them more power to help the Bookrabbit community grow.

• Bookrabbit Games

We have several games in design which we intend to release on the bookrabbit site. One of them will be a book quiz engine, those of you familiar with the ‘Neverending Movie Quiz’ on Facebook will immediately know how that will work. The other 3 games are ‘top secret’ at the moment but they will be ‘multi player’ in nature and will involve creating poems and short stories co-operatively. 

• Delivery Charge & Going Green

Okay, so we have removed free delivery for all books. However we are offering free delivery still on orders over £10. Reasons are fairly obvious, in that despatching books that cost £1.99 means we are selling the books at a loss… too many of these and there would be no more Bookrabbit site… But you can look at this another way – it does mean a reduction in paper wastage: packaging, despatch notes etc. Incidentally, Bookrabbit are ‘green’ conscious, for every server that we use to host the Bookrabbit site, a tree was planted to help towards neutralising the carbon emissions created by the server. 

• Last but not least…

Obviously we would like the Bookrabbit community to grow and to help us to do this we are going to be running a scheme whereby users getting 5 or more friends to register on Bookrabbit using the Friend Inviter facility will be sent a free book ! ( Terms & Conditions will apply )

The author of The Gulag Archipelago and One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich, who returned to Russia in 1994, died of either a stroke or heart failure.

The Nobel laureate had suffered from high blood pressure in recent years.

 From 9^th August 2008, you will be able to gather your own impression of Orwell’s face from reading his most strongly individual piece of writing: his diaries. The Orwell Prize is delighted to announce that, to mark the 70^th anniversary of the diaries, each diary entry will be published on this blog exactly seventy years after it was written, allowing you to follow Orwell’s recuperation in Morocco, his return to the UK, and his opinions on the descent of Europe into war in real time. The diaries end in 1942, three years into the conflict.

What impression of Orwell will emerge? From his domestic diaries (which start on 9^th August), it may be a largely unknown Orwell, whose great curiosity is focused on plants, animals, woodwork, and – above all – how many eggs his chickens have laid. From his political diaries (from 7^th September), it may be the Orwell whose political observations and critical thinking have enthralled and inspired generations since his death in 1950. Whether writing about the Spanish Civil War or sloe gin, geraniums or Germany, Orwell’s perceptive eye and rebellion against the ‘gramophone mind’ he so despised are obvious.

Orwell wrote of what he saw in Dickens: ‘He is laughing, with a touch of anger in his laughter, but no triumph, no malignity. It is the face of a man who is always fighting against something, but who fights in the open and is not frightened, the face of a man who is generously angry— in other words, of a nineteenth-century liberal, a free intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls.’

What will you see in the Orwell diaries?

The Booker Prize Longlist has been announced. 

http://www.bookrabbit.com/catalogue/browsecategory/categoryid/1360/Man-Booker-Fiction-Longlist-2008

The judges for the 2008 Man Booker Prize for Fiction have announced the longlist for this year’s prize.

The longlist of 13 books, often referred to as the ‘Man Booker Dozen’, was chosen from 112 entries; 103 were submitted for the prize and nine were called in by the judges.

The titles are:

Aravind Adiga The White Tiger 

Michelle De Kretser The Lost Dog

Gaynor Arnold Girl in a Blue Dress 
Sebastian Barry The Secret Scripture 
John Berger From A to X 
Amitav Ghosh Sea of Poppies 
Linda Grant The Clothes on Their Backs 
Mohammed Hanif A Case of Exploding Mangoes 
Philip Hensher The Northern Clemency 
Joseph O’Neill Netherland 
Salman Rushdie The Enchantress of Florence 
Tom Rob Smith Child 44 
Steve Toltz A Fraction of the Whole

Chair of judges, Michael Portillo, commented:

“With a notable degree of consensus, the five Man Booker judges decided on their longlist of 13 books. The judges are pleased with the geographical balance of the longlist with writers from Pakistan, India, Australia, Ireland and UK. We also are happy with the interesting mix of books, five first novels and two novels by former winners. The list covers an extraordinary variety of writing. Still two qualities emerge this year: large scale narrative and the striking use of humour.”

What do you think of it? Take part in our discussions here:
http://www.bookrabbit.com/topics/showposts/topicid/325

About the Booker Prize

The Man Booker Prize for Fiction, also known in short as the Booker Prize, is a literary prize awarded each year for the best original full-length novel, written in the English language, by a citizen of either the Commonwealth of Nations or the Republic of Ireland.

The winner of the Booker Prize is generally assured of international renown and success. It is also a mark of distinction for authors to be nominated for the Booker longlist or selected for inclusion in the shortlist. In 1993, the Booker of Bookers Prize was awarded to Salman Rushdie for Midnight’s Children (the 1981 winner), as the best novel to win the award in the first 25 years of its existence. A similar prize known as The Best of the Booker was awarded in 2008 to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the prize - this was also won by Midnight’s Children.

The prize was originally known as the Booker-McConnell Prize after the company Booker-McConnell began sponsoring the event in 1968, and became commonly known as the “Booker Prize” or simply “the Booker”. When administration of the prize was transferred to the Booker Prize Foundation in 2002, the title sponsor became the investment company Man Group, which opted to retain “Booker” as part of the official title of the prize. The prize money awarded with the Booker Prize was originally £21,000, and was subsequently raised to £50,000 in 2002 under the sponsorship of the Man Group

Links

Official Site

List of Previous Winners

So this week Rob and Nick have implemented a new search engine that now operates all the book, author, user and content searches on the site.

So searching should now be blisteringly fast and bookcase tagging should be much easier.

It is also a more intelligent search, so you should now get better search result. Give it a try.

“Just because we learn differently, that does not mean that we are not incredibly smart human beings. That’s something I need every child to understand.”

His books are amusingingly titled Hank Zipzer: I Got a “D” in Salami and Hank Zipzer: Niagara Falls - or Does It?

…apparently these books ‘rock!’ very much like the Fonz.

• Free UK Delivery

‘With Andy, the sky’s the limit…’ - John McEnroe. At Wimbledon in 2005, a young, brash Andy Murray came out of nowhere and thrashed star pros Georges Bastl and Radek Stepanek. His dramatic winning run came to an end against David Nalbandian, but a legend was born, and Britain had a new sporting hero. Henman Hill was renamed Murray Mound, and Henmania became Andymonium. In 2006, Murray went stellar. He won his first ATP trophy at San Jose, California, where he beat former world number 1s Andy Roddick and Lleyton Hewitt en route to the title. In the same month he became the British Number 1. By the end of a wonderful year in which he became one of only two players to beat Roger Federer, Murray was number 17 in the world. But Murray is much more than a truly gifted tennis player and potential world champion.He has changed the face of the game, blowing away the Middle England cobwebs of the All England Club, and dividing opinion with his brash, straight-talking style, anti-establishment rhetoric and on-court anger and passion. A whole new generation of kids are now officially tennis fans. Andy has made tennis cool again, for the first time since the days of McEnroe, Borg and Nastase. Here, in his own words for the first time, Andy Murray will talk about the long, testing, and sometimes difficult path to superstardom. The boy from Dunblane will talk about having to deal with the constant limelight and attention from a media and a general public desperate for a genuine British tennis star, and he’ll give the exclusive lowdown on Wimbledon 2007 as he prepares to go all-out guns blazing for grass-court glory. Tempermental, gifted, passionate, fiery: Murray is the dazzling new face of tennis, and a role model to a whole generation. Andy’s story will enthrall and excite the entire country.