Anobii beta website updates


Today we are opening up the beta of the new Anobii website worldwide.

Many of you will know that the Anobii website has been struggling to cope as it’s got bigger. We’ve been doing a lot to try to make this better, but unfortunately it’s not easy to fix these sorts of problems for a site like Anobii that’s grown over several years.

After a lot of consideration, we decided it was necessary to rebuild Anobii so that we could grow in the future. We’re running a beta of a new website alongside the existing site so that we can test and learn what we need the new site to become. The Anobii beta site has been live in the UK for a few months now but after requests from Anobii users around the world, we’ve now opened the beta up to be viewed worldwide. The beta will run alongside the existing Anobii website for the foreseeable future. The Anobii beta site is only in English right now, but we will be adding other languages.

Both the existing Anobii website and the beta website are using the same data. You can login to the beta using your existing Anobii username and password, and you should see all of your books, reviews and people. If your profile on the beta website doesn’t have the books, reviews and people you expect, please let us know and we’ll look into it for you.

Here’s my profile page on the Anobii beta…

We want Anobii to be the best place to find better books, but we also want to help you buy and read books. That’s why we’re introducing ebooks for sale (only in the UK to begin with), along with ereader apps for iPad, iPhone and Android. However, social networking, conversation and discussion about books will remain at the heart of Anobii and we’re currently working hard to introduce the right tools to facilitate this.

New features are being added over time, and we’re testing the new site with book lovers - both with existing Anobii readers and also with those who are new to online book communities. This feedback has helped us a lot in deciding which features to prioritise and how to make the site as easy to use as possible.

Some things we’ll be working on soon include:

  • Voting on reviews (similar to helpfulness points)
  • Adding a space on profile pages for you to leave messages (similar to shoutbox)
  • Commenting on topics (similar to threads on groups)
  • Better homepage
  • Suggestions of topics you’d like to follow, based upon the books you’ve read (a new compatibility tool)

Many features haven’t been added to the beta yet. In particular, there’s a lot we want to do around conversation and discussion. We’ve already had some great feedback about what’s special about the current Anobii for encouraging conversation and we’d love to hear from you about what’s important to you, what you’d hate to be without and if there’s anything you don’t like about the current Anobii that you’d like to change.

You can leave comments below, or here on Get Satisfaction, or by using the ‘feedback’ link in the footer on the beta site.

A book page on the Anobii beta…


Thank you in advance for any feedback you are able to give.


Mairead
Anobii.com