I was raised on Enid Blyton. Reading was my constant companion, and a battered Enid Blyton book became almost a permanent extension of my hand. I don’t care what the grammar police say about her, or that she was allegedly a bit of a dragon – I grew to love reading because of her books, as have millions of other children.
I read them all and was transported to the various worlds of The Famous Five, The Secret Seven, Malory Towers, St Clares, The Wishing Chair, and my favourite place to be, The Magic Faraway Tree.
I would read with a torch under the covers for hours, eventually nodding off hoping that Silky, Moonface and Saucepan Man would visit me in my sleep. Or, that the next morning Julian, Dick, Anne, George and Timmy the dog would be standing on our doorstep, desperately in need of a sixth member to return to Kirrin Island with them and asking if my bags were packed with enough homemade ginger cake for the trip.
So it was with some trepidation that I read about Hodder giving Enid Blyton’s Famous Five series a 21st-century makeover.
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The period after the launch of any website is always a busy one. We’ve been getting lots of feedback and making lots of changes to site. I hope you like where we are going. Please keep all the great feedback coming – we really do listen to it.
Over the last few weeks we’ve posted about verious mentions we’ve had in the media, press and blogs. But this one that arrived today made us all smile that little bit more. http://julietdoyle.blogspot.com/2008/05/bookrabbit-again.html Thanks Juliet.
We’ve been focusing on lots of little usability changes to make the site just that little bit easier to use. So now you dont get taken off to a login page when you want to login – you just get a nice little login popup. The same applies when you add titles to your books or your wishlist. You’ll also start to see better help appearing accross the site.
At heart we are an oline bookshop. Bookshops have real people working in them. So we’ve put a new about us page us in. Contrary to some feedback, I can confirm we’re humans, not robots.
Keep enjoying the site.
Well we launched last Monday … and have picked up a few little bits of coverage 
I’ll summarise them below, starting with the national press!
The Telegraph (17th May – Saturday – joint pre-launch double exclusive), with the Financial Times on the same day. Good coverage in both, and I thought the Telegraph gave a good overall context.
Guardian Unlimited – BookRabbit elevator pitch – so online only and [warning] big picture of me, but quite a fun piece to do, love to get in the print edition…
Shiny Shiny – wonderful web coverage from Shiny Shiny, they even uploaded a bookcase and tried it. Stuff TV, good bit of pre-launch coverage based on the event invite and a word with us.
On the more techie side we have:
TechRadar - the journalist from there was just great
Computer Active
What PC?
PC Magazine
Personal Computer World
PC Advisor
Our friends at The Bookseller, BookTrade.info
Really, really detailed write up from the guys at e-consultancy who then set a good trend for comparing us with Last.fm the GoodWebGuide love that one too TechCrunch coverage (which now means we’re a real dotcom).
Finally, but by no means least of course, a selection of blogs:
Random Distractions
The Bookling
& Satellites
Phew.
I also very much liked the editorial sign off in The Bookseller this week which discussed Amazon and then said:
“Monopolies don’t last forever. [something about Play & Tesco]… and fresh-thinking rivals such as BookRabbit.com- which combines social networking tools with low prices- are springing up. They may not make an immediate dent in Amazon, but watch this space.”
