Book Reviews

The goal of WhatsOnMyBookshelf is to link people together over a common topic of interest: books. We want to begin encouraging conversation among users by allowing those interested to submit book reviews on what they have been reading on whatsonmybookshelf or recently submitted to the site.

I have already contacted a few "heavy traders" and the response has been positive. If you are interested in writing I will be more than happy to speak with you and work out a time for your article to appear on our blog. (contact me: dan[at]whatsonmybookshelf.com)

Help us Out

There are significant development costs and hosting fees accompanied with developing WhatsOnMyBookshelf. Rather than run ads on the site which clutter up pages and are frankly annoying we are asking all members to donate a few dollars. If you love our service and trade books frequently we have a $2.00USD monthly subscription you can sign up for.

Any donation helps and please send me an email if you donate, cause I will surely develop a thank you page listing everyone's name/message of choice.

Free books may also be involved ;)

Thank you!

Musings

Alright so I've been playing around with our logo...and motto as you can see in the clouds...and decided after talking with some friends that there needed to be an animal.

Meet the new bee that will now hover over the beta flower waiting for it to blossom into good ol' version 1.0. (which may be awhile!).

Terms of Service Change

There are 2 major addition to our terms of service:

1) Previously users were required to ship books within 1-3 business days, no questions asked. Now, if a book cannot be shipped with such promptness a delay can be negotiated between the two parties. In settling any disputes, email records must be kept and submitted to the administrator (me ;) for use in determining correct credit transfers

2) Previously there was no mention of proper "receiver" etiquette. Now, users must mark a book as received within 2 days of the book's delivery.

WSJ

Check us out!


Welcome to all the new users!

Piles and Piles of Books

Up until this point, books were imported 1 at a time. I'll be the first to admit that this was really really annoying, especially if I had a text document of books, or a wishlist on amazon that I wanted to add to WhatsOnMyBookshelf.

Also, there are many book swapping sites and there was no easy way to get those books onto WhatsOnMyBookshelf.

The inconveniences are over! Currently still in testing, we have released a bulk import tool that should be able to parse most book lists on the web. When I say still in testing, I mean functional, yet sometimes problematic. By no way is it the end all book importer, but it works and is a good start. Please post any bugs or suggestions in the comments

Move all your wishlists 'n books on over....

Firefox Extension

We just created a simple firefox extension that will allow easy addition of books to your wishlist from anywhere on the web. If you are browsing amazon and see a book that you would like listed, simply highlight the title, right click and choose "add to wishlist" and you will be prompted for a confirmation.

Install Extension

Down Time

WhatsOnMyBookshelf was down today from 12:30EST to approx. 1:30EST for server upgrades.

There are still some minor problems as DNS propagates. I apologize for any inconveniences.

Trust me this is for the better!

Browse By Location

As our user base expands it is very imprtant for networking to occur via location. Therefore we have added a very simple organized list of books by city/country and state.

Please let us know what you think, we want to add features that you request!

Weekend Updates

Some minor tweaks were done over the weekend:

1) We updated the About Us page to actually say some information about us ;)

2) The API section now contains graphics which can be used for any noncommercial purpose

3) Finding books on wishlists was extremely difficult. Therefore, book urls now follow the format: http://www.whatsonmybookshelf.com/ISBN/0440237688/ and when followed, will display both wishlist and book information.

Welcome BookCrossing

We have seen a large number of books registered with us from BookCrossing and are very excited to facilitate the trading of the books that are tracked on BC. For those who are not familiar with BookCrossing, it is a free book club in which users release books "into the wild" and track their movement. Think "Where's George" for books!

Firefox Extension Programmer

If you have experience with firefox extension programming and would like to get involved with WhatsOnMyBookshelf please send me an email (dan[at]whatsonmybookself.com).

Wishlists

Wishlists are now live. All users have a feed located at http://www.whatsonmybookshelf.com/wishlist/USERNAME

The text feed for wishlists is located here: http://www.whatsonmybookshelf.com/api/all_wishlists.txt and will be linking with librarything.

I encourage everyone to browse through users' wishlists.

Please feel free to contact us if you have other ideas for features.

LibraryThing

We have been hinting at it for a while, but today LibraryThing announced our integration. The 5 million+ books on Librarything.com are now fair game to be traded on WhatsOnMyBookshelf.

You can view all the info on http://www.librarything.com/blog/2006/09/arrr-swap-books.php

Also, wish lists are coming very shortly in addition to some other cool social networking features that I have thought up.

New Profile Pages

Many of you wanted social networking components to the site.

>> We gave them to you! Check out the new profile pages. You can add friends, manage your books and view a list of books that you own. Any book that is delivered is automatically added to the list of "Book not for Trade" and you can further add these books to librarything.com

Many users are interested in the vast amounts of information provided by Librarything.com.

>>We have complete integration with Librarything. Any book you own can be added to librarything from WhatsOnMyBookshelf.

You wanted to subscribe to feeds of each subsection of books.

>>Every page of WhatsOnMyBookshelf has its own unique fee!

Let us know what you think and add me as your friend.