Very, very scary seeing yourself on film, the presentations from the trade launch are up on BookRabbit.tv I can’t look at it. I look very cross indeed which isn’t great either.
We sent out about 400 invites today to the beta so I’m bracing myself.
We have a Facebook fan page so sign yourself up! It’ll make your profile page all that more hip.
New blog post on The Bookseller from me, running through the basic approach we’re taking, we need to do a load of work to make sure it all works for booksellers signing up.
Great article highlighted by Book2book this morning from the NYT about couple’s books . Currently on mine and Sharon’s bedside is my H P Lovecraft’s ‘Selected Letters’ and Sharon’s ‘Things I want my Daughters to Know’ by Elizabeth Noble. Not sure what this says about us!
Interestingly one of the things people say about BookRabbit is how great it would be for dating. I’ll be interested to see if that actually is the case. I can see that bookcases are a rather unique window into someone’s interests - there are some real questions to be asked about what people mightlook for though.
We’ve been working on an easier to use bookcase application for the last week and this will go live tomorrow morning we’re hoping that it will be a whole lot easier to use and identify different editions of the same title. You can see a screen shot below.
This is still prior to our launch of Automatic Bookcase which is still being frantically developed.
I’ve just added a new book to the BookRabbit database which I’m rather pleased with, my copy arrived from California this morning, and I’ve been coveting a copy for some years, ever since it was mentioned in the now defunct Lovecraftian ‘zine Dagon. The book is called ‘The Book of Jade’ and 600 copies were printed at the turn of the century by a bookseller in New York, it was an anonymous book of ‘decadent poetry’ which was later revealed to be by a writer called David Park Barnitz (1878-1901) who died under mysterious circumstances later the year of publication (presumed suicide). It was mentioned in H P Lovecraft’s letters, hence my bedtime reading. The copy I’ve bought is in great condition - which is lucky as there were no pictures available, and it wasn’t cheap.
Anyone can add books (and supporting graphics) to the BookRabbit site on the fly - picture on the right included. So even wired titles like this can have a product page and connect with other bookcases, I’d be fascinated to know how many more exist out there!
Now we have the beta up - it’s doing the trick - I want to change loads of stuff. Nothing fundamental, just need to fine tune the bookcase application, it’s too tough to use, make the social networking more focused on the interact page, make bookcases more obvious, add tree structure to classification etc etc most of which is do-able before the consumer launch, and is a real benefit of trying it out first, knowing, that we will actually make changes.
The team have been great and are a constant source of fantastic ideas and solutions, I really don’t think we could have a better group of people.
Two news stories for us today - as a result of the interviews we did Friday, The Bookseller one I was a little disappointed with as I was hoping that our pretty unique approach could be used to question all of bookselling a little, we are trying to directly challenge some of the received wisdom within bookselling on and offline. Publishing News however I was very pleased with, I felt they really got it. Not that the Bookseller one wasn’t bad… just meh.
