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Books of the week
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!
Filed under: BookRabbit, Bookselling, OCR, Random book Recommends | 1 Comment
Back into the groove
Over the last couple of weeks – whilst we’ve struggled with getting the site up, the rest of my family were pretty ill, my wife had pneumonia and my daughter was in hospital with a mystery bug (which now looks like it was Scarlet Fever), which all added a certain amount of pressure on the beta launch.
The good news is that they’re all on the road to recovery and Constanze (Tanzie for short) is certainly back on top form, which is why I’d like to show her getting down (literally at the end) to the Freemasons 
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A big long list
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.
Filed under: Beta, BookRabbit, Bookselling, Media | Leave a Comment
Trade launch
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.
Filed under: BookRabbit | Leave a Comment
What a week
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.
Filed under: BookRabbit, Media | Leave a Comment
Progress
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.
Filed under: BookRabbit, Development | Leave a Comment
Jangling nerves
We’re on to single digit number of days before we launch and at the moment its rather like two teams with one Lego set, but something big – like erm the Death Star one, not one of those six piece cars.
Redberry are doing a sterling job – it’s just that stage when we’re counting down and we’ve promised rather a lot of people this will be finished.
Everyone in the team is head down and focused in getting the best out we can which is fantastic and I’m sure we’ll produce a fantastic BookRabbit.
More (non coding progress) this week has included getting our message clear (things like the boilerplate that goes on the bottom of press releases) helpful for our presentations next week, interviews booked in for next Friday and loads of people accepting the event invites…
on that note – if you’re a publisher/bookseller/author and haven’t had an invite and feel you really should have done, and can make a W1 venue in the middle of the day on the 19th March get in touch we may be able to get you in – I’m sure we’ve missed people and it’s first come first served!
Filed under: BookRabbit | 1 Comment
Yes okay it’s about 1000% smaller – but still, it’s not the size that counts. Our distribution manager Sid has done a fantastic job of getting us ready for handling orders, he used to work at GAME with me and is used to processing quite a few orders every day!
Basically this is below the office and behind the shop so we can pick their stock too. Steve who has joined us from Bertrams THE is now looking at stock holding profile for us to hold. We pick from here first and then cascade to the usual suspects. Which looking at other setups is actually quite sophisticated and allows us to manage margin and availability pretty well.
The first picture below shows the two offices that were there before – then them being knocked down, cleared out, lovely racking and the flat screen PCs and packing benches. All very state of the art.
Filed under: Bookselling, Distribution, Hardware | Leave a Comment
The office
In the last few weeks our surrounding space has evolved quite rapidly – and as my short term memory isn’t great I thought it might be good to get some of it recorded here.
When I first arrived on September 10th there was pretty much nothing here at all. The building was, at some point before being a carpet shop some sort of weird supermarket with small units upstairs – not sure how you’d get to them though as there is just a small set of stairs at the back. As a consequence there has been quite a bit of knocking down walls and rebuilding to get it into a decent shape to work in. I still have the occasional pang of desire for daylight but that passes.
Where the Retail8 team works started out like this:
(you’ll be pleased to see the books made it in from day one!)
Then lots of furniture was ordered and we spent hours and hours recruiting exceptional staff to sit at these new tables.
Finance sit a room away – although all my ‘office stuff’ I move around with can be seen in the next photo. What an exciting update this is proving to be.
One more photo of things being unpacked and I’ll post some smaller ones of the office and mini distribution hub tomorrow.
The picture with the part assembled furniture also gives a glimpse of one of our glass walled meeting rooms, 221b, (problem solving room).
Filed under: Hardware | Leave a Comment
The visit to the venue for the launch was good – great space, very central (I always get lost and it only took me a minute to find it) and the layout etc has all been planned. I quite like the idea of carrot something on offer, cake, juice – but could be somewhat of a distraction.
After that I wandered into some sort of Bermuda Triangle of dates. First off I see that it is the CFOs birthday on Facebook, and being a sociable sort I organise a card some wine and blue cheese, get the office to sign it and then present it to him demanding cakes from him for the office. I’m dumbstruck then when he announces that it isn’t his birthday just that he put a fake date into Facebook to stop identity theft. Which wasn’t at all funny, and he took the wine home.
Then whilst I’m reeling from that I have an e-mail from Simon at O’Reilly asking me if the event is on Wednesday 19th March or Thursday 20th as the invite says Thursday 19th. I then want to crawl under my desk and never come out.
Cringing over, the PR guys mailed around a correction and are calling everyone tomorrow. You wouldn’t believe how many times we checked every word for spelling. Just-not-if-the-right-words-were-there.
Getting some interesting people sign up for the beta, I’ll have to really stay on my toes to exclude all those spies from Waterstone’s – yes I can see you.
We have a very nice new Retail8.com site up which Kwen has done a grand job on, and reflects our ‘Different Views’ that we take on the retail experience. Retail8 is, as George Walkley, so eloquently described a sort of retail skunk works, and we’re taking on books first. Let me know what you think of the site. We also have new business cards with the 8 Views on the back – but now we realise we’ll also need some for the BookRabbit launch as the two brands/names could be confusing.
Filed under: BookRabbit, Finance, PR, Problems, Retail8 | Leave a Comment
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