Bookspoke Blog

We listened to all of your questions and comments - especially those about design and interface - and we re-launched Bookspoke today. Here are some of the things that we changed:

1. We completely re-did the design, from making the pages wider to including drop-down menus to make navigating around the site easier;

2. We've started a new aggregator blog, The Hub, where you can find reviews of books from The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Times, and many more;

3. We've also made it easier to find everything about a book in one place. Just search for a book and you'll go to a page that has our review, reader reviews, Amazon's reviews, news from the Hub and much more on a book;

4. You can now buy a book from us through Amazon or rent a book through our partner, the Netflix(r) for books, Bookswim;

5. We cleaned up our forums quite a bit, making them easier to use; and

6. Finally, for those of you looking for ways to make the most of Bookspoke, we've included a how-to in our menu bar to walk you through our site.
We're not done yet, though! In the next few days, we'll be making a few more exciting changes, including:

1. Re-vamping the reader and writer profile pages to put more information at your fingertips;

2. Importing our entire 2.8 million book database (we're starting out with a few hundred today);

3. Creating a book-finder for you so that you can always find the book you're looking for;

4. Print-on-demand capabilities for writers; and

5. A re-design of our forums, which we think we can make even more intuitive.
Come visit Bookspoke, check us out and let us know what you think! We're posting lots of new reviews today, and we're back on our editorial schedule. This week's reviews include the mega-hit A Thousand Splendid Suns and a diamond in the rough, The Raw Shark Texts.

My friend Eran, who runs the Hueniverse Blog made fun of me today for saying that the new Bookspoke site will be ready "tomorrow" for the last two weeks. Well, it won't be tomorrow, but I do promise that Bookspoke's new site will be up soon. When? Ok, I won't be so bold as to predict anything today, but I'm crossing my fingers that it will be done before the weekend, complete with a slew of new features.

Well, it's been a rough week, but it looks like we're almost ready to unveil our brand new design at Bookspoke! Brian is putting the finishing touches on our new ajax header, and new addition Joe has been doing a great job implementing our redesign. Soon, we'll be able to tell you all about The Hub, our brand new blog with a book focus. Looking forward to seeing you at Bookspoke!

Thanks to all of you who have visited Bookspoke over the past few days. We've taken all of your feedback, and we're going to be making several changes to our site in the next few weeks. For starters, we're getting rid of that big header -- you guys don't like it, so we don't like it. Plus, we're going to start aggregating all book review posts from major news organizations so that you can have one stop for all your book news needs (try saying that five times fast!). Until next time...

Well, at 4 AM today, Brian and Adam pushed Bookspoke live! Come over and check it out! Register, too, so that we can keep you posted of updates.

It’s difficult, when you’re knee deep in coding (or, in my case, working with the programmers) to see the forest for the trees sometimes. On Bookspoke, we’ve been working for so long to bring you the highest quality social network for readers and writers that, sometimes, we get stuck on the details. For example, we had a minor display issue with one of our side rails, and, for weeks, I kept harping on how we needed to change that. Never mind that we’d made some fantastic progress on other issues and that we’re still on schedule for our Friday soft launch — sometimes it seems that any feature we’re missing could hurt the entire site. However, now that we’re almost there (at least for readers and reader groups), it’s gratifying to step back and enjoy our accomplishments before we make our next big push. Come and visit us on Friday, August 10th to see all the work that we’ve done!

One of the things that we're doing on Bookspoke that sets us apart from other communities is that we're offering rich editorial content to our readers. Every week, we'll review new books, books that pique our interest or books that we love and want to share with everyone. I finished writing my first two reviews earlier today -- on Ridley Pearson's new thriller, Killer Weekend (I'm a fan) and Neil Gaiman's Stardust, which is coming out as a movie on August 10th. No, I'm not telling you what I thought of Gaiman's book here -- you'll just have to come to Bookspoke and read it for yourself.

If you have any suggestions about what we should review or comments on our reviews, let us know! After all, we're your social network, too.

We've also got blogs on Xanga and Microsoft Live Spaces. So, yes, you can pick your favorite way to see Bookspoke's blogs!

I want to let you know about a new site called Bookspoke, a site dedicated to bringing readers and writers closer together. We let readers discuss, review and discover new books, as well as start book clubs. For writers, we give you turn-key solutions to start a web page and manage your audience. Curious? Come check us out! We’ll be posting here from time to time to let you know about new services we’re offering.

Want to see us elsewhere on the web?  Click one of these links:
Bookspoke Home Page
Bookspoke on WordPress
Bookspoke on Blogger
Bookspoke on MySpace