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!

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

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.