9 months out.

BookRabbit from idea to launch shares the gestation period of a human child, and, despite it sounding clichéd, I do feel quite a bit of anxiety about whether it’ll be able to hop or not. Over the next few days we’ll do all we can to make sure that it can, especially focusing on the very simplest things, search, browse, messaging etc to ensure that people can use the site. Usually helps.

But now for something completely different:

Some time ago I grew increasingly worried about the likelihood of the UK government following the lead of the US and attempting to monitor people’s reading as an indication of political views, this has historical precedents that most will be aware of, but that the current climate of fear seems to legitimise. This looks like coming true at least in part. In the US they have set up the very commendable Campaign for Reader Privacy, I think that we may well need to take a similar stand over here.

New Home

You may have noticed – depending upon how you come to this blog, that it has a new home, and will over the next few weeks have some new bloggers to. From today onwards this blog will be the ‘official’ BlogRabbit blog and being the friendly sort of business that we are – everyone in the company can post should they so wish. (That reminds me – Adam we’ll need a disclaimer!)

Okay, getting a tad overwhelmed by our own pace of development this week, tomorrow should see the addition of:

• Importing in RSS for blogs on profiles – no need to write a new blog, just suck in your old one into BookRabbit.
• New upload for any size of photo for bookcases.
• New search results – with social aspects.
• Latest users/bookcases/videos.
• New discussion linking.
• Inbox notifications.

Even more next week – then we can calm a bit to make sure it all works well for launch.

I’ve had an interesting bookcase match this week – I think I own six titles on the same shelf, it belongs to a female reader user, and I pretty much immediately added two of the remaining titles to my wish list. My wife Sharon raised an eyebrow – as if she has anything to worry about from women with a good taste in books.

It seems almost shameful to admit that when producing a paradigm breaking new book web site I didn’t ever discuss personal book interests with my boss. So it was both pleasant and surprising to get notification on BookRabbit of a bookcase match with Charles on a book by Chomsky – the very book I had as one of my books of the week last week. I suppose I shouldn’t be too surprised really to find a book by someone who challenges power and privilege on the shelf of the backer for this project.

There look!

Shows you never can tell…

I’ve roped my 5yr old son into reviewing a load of children’s books for the site too this weekend, when we weren’t playing in the snow. He chose the titles, and it was quite fun to do. My favourite is his review of the Ahlberg’s Each Peach Pear Plum

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJM7sGQEynE 

PS Glenn from our Coffee Republic won the Wii tournament – and very fraught the last rounds were too.

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!

Books I’ve bought this week & why:

1. ‘Holes’ by Louis Sachar – it kept appearing on people’s bookcases on BookRabbit and they said it was good, so I’m now two thirds of the way through it and yes it is good. It’s a ‘teen’ title and it shows but enjoyable nonetheless.

2. ‘Once Upon a Time In the North’ Philip Pullman – limited signed edition. I was a sucker for the ‘His Dark Materials’ trilogy and can’t resist a special edition so this Waterstone’s exclusive was a must, scarce already due to speculators but I think Hatchards still have some – update no they don’t.

3. Chomsky’s ‘Hegemony or Survival’ – the only Penguin Celebration title I’ve bought, I like a good polemic and Chomsky’s voice is so familiar to me now due to all those wonderful CDs AK produce he’s like an old (slightly grumpy) friend.

4. ‘Here Comes Everybody’ by Clay Shirky, I read the first chapter of this in a Penguin sampler for new non fiction and it’s a very readable and anecdote heavy approach to defining the new social space. Also a good review in the Telegraph last week which tipped me over to buying it (BTW I do not normally buy the Telegraph but I had to because of BookRabbit coverage – just so we are clear).

5. ‘The Big Switch’ by Nicholas Carr. Nicholas wrote a great piece for the Harvard Business Review a few years back called ‘IT Doesn’t Matter‘ which I once sent an anonymous copy of to the (now former) IT Director of GAME in the internal mail, although as the only person in the entire building likely to be reading the HBR it was pretty easy to work out who sent it.

Carr followed this up with a slightly more softly titled book ‘Does IT Matter?‘ but no less controversial. ‘The Big Switch‘ is his new book and I have high hopes of some good insights from him. Write up in Wired positive too (well I t-h-i-n-k it’s positive).

The Wired story is worth looking at to see the photo they have of Nicholas looking very stern in front of a bookcase – I’d like to run it through our bookcase OCR but I think it is too low res so I’ll have to make do with the human eye – and I can only make out Catch-22 which is great, but a small prize to anyone who can identify two more books!

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.

The trade launch was today at The Music Room  and seemed to go without a hitch, no one tripped over anything and Will’s precariously balanced laptop didn’t hurtle to the ground, the presentation worked and everyone there seemed receptive. Bit scary to know our kitten is now out there in the publishing world, hopefully it won’t get ravaged too much!

The event was filmed by the wonderful David from Meet the Author once he has edited it I’ll make it available on here and on BookRabbit.tv which I want to use for BR related company type video things.

If anyone reading this came along I’d be very interested in any comments now you’ve had a chance to digest our (slightly) rich message.

Unbelievable week. Absolutely tons of development done and the site has moved from nothing to something (although still quite a bit to do). Acceptances for the event have gone from a few to capacity and people asking for extra invites. Today Will and I have been up to London to meet with Publishing News and The Bookseller which is our first round of interviews before the trade launch. Difficult to judge how they went – we’ll have to just wait until the coverage next week.

We’ve only two working days (although quite a bit will be done over the weekend) now to make sure that the site does everything we want it to, and looks its very best for the presenation on Wednesday.

There are quite a few issues to be addressed between now and then, and I’m hoping we can clearly communicate on Wednesday that this is a beta release and a work in progress. We’re letting our book industry peers have access to play and make the whole thing much better.

Despite what seems like our own (somewhat scaled down) four horsemen attempting to scupper development; illness, storms, paternity leave and poor car parking (the 21st Century scourge of any office) there has been some great progress over the weekend. Which is great as we’re only seven working days away from the launch – and we have to show the trade press on Friday.

With functionality piling on every hour I’m starting to realise that actually a largely social-networking site appears, erm, somewhat empty without people – yes this isn’t the most startling of revelations, but, just a few days away it plays on my mind a bit. A lot.

We’re starting to look around at cool things to add after launch and Martin has been looking at deeper geo-locational stuff for example the Google street level pictures of bookshops in the US, which prompted a discussion and about Spimes and LongPen and that you could have an author having a virtual signing hosted in a physical store with a virtual audience. Which is quite silly, but not completely.

I’m also becoming a little bit persuaded by Plaxo which has a great ability to aggregate Twitter, Facebook, Jabber, etc etc so is a sort of MetaNetwork. Interestingly there aren’t any e-commerce players on here at the moment – bar Amazon’s wishlist.