The book industry’s biggest show of the year in North America starts today in Los Angeles. Harish and I will be at the expo Thursday, Friday and Saturday. If you’d like to say hi and tell us how much you like or don’t like iRead, please find us in white polos with iRead logo :-), or simply email us at harish at booksiread dot org / krishna at booksiread at org and we’d be happy to setup a time to meet and chat.
- Krishna
It was a chilly November morning. I picked up the Wall Street Journal from my driveway. I opened it while sipping my morning coffee to find an article on Kindle, Amazon’s wireless ebook reader. Amazon, my former employer of 7 years, had recently launched the much touted Kindle in a widely publicized event on Nov 19th. Since then Kindle generated an enormous amount of buzz, the kind that the ebook world never saw before, the kind it badly needed.
I put the newspaper aside, fired up Firefox on my always-on laptop, and started reading reviews for Kindle. I read this bland, but comprehensive, review on CNet and this really great, mostly negative, video review from Robert Scoble, and this one from Joe Wikert, who launched Kindleville, an entire blog dedicated to Kindle, a couple of weeks later.
Most of the reviews praised Kindle for its wireless freedom, but blasted it for poor design, restrictive DRM, and an outrageous price tag. All those negative reviews did little to suppress my old loyalties to Amazon. I decided to pay up $399 + tax and get myself a Kindle, even though many of the articles I read suggested alternatives. I hop over to Amazon.com and find that they are temporarily out of stock. Bummer! I was all ready to get one and now I have to wait. Amazon doesn’t even say how long I’d have to wait.
I wasn’t going to wait. I drove down to the nearest Borders store and bought a Sony Reader for $299 + tax. The shopping experience itself was quite funny and merits a mention. None of the store reps at Borders seemed to know they stocked Sony Readers. They had to ask around and finally some store manager type knew where they were on “display”. Unfortunately, the only reader they had in stock was locked inside that display case and they couldn’t find the key. They clearly hadn’t opened it in weeks, may be even months. Anyway, they finally found the key and I got my hands on the Sony Reader. Let me point out that I was not one bit annoyed by all this. The staff was very friendly and I thought the whole thing was pretty hilarious. It just gave me a perspective on where we currently are in the evolution of ebooks into mainstream media.
As I was leaving the store, I was worried that I might have jumped the gun. I tried reading books electronically before (on my laptop and my mobile phone) and that wasn’t great. The Reader might end up in the long list of gizmos that I bought but rarely used – digital voice recorder, GPS (handheld, not the car one), digital photo frame, cordless electronic can opener, etc etc.
Getting the ebook reader turned out to be the best purchase decision I made in a long time. Ever since I bought it, my Sony Reader and I have been inseparable. It goes wherever I go - trains, planes, the DMV. I have to say it’s quite a head-turner. Of course, I have been reading a lot of books since November – the free classics promotion from Sony certainly helped. And I’m loving it. If I have to put my finger on one thing that explains why I’m loving it so much, it would be the e-Ink display. What they say is true - it really is like reading on paper. I can read for hours without any eye strain. I can definitely see myself reading news papers, blogs, just about anything I spend hours reading on my laptop today, reading on an eInk device in the future.
With the new display technologies and the enthusiasm around Kindle (will Sony be far behind on its own wireless ebook reader?), we can finally say that the eBook has arrived. It’s still very early but we are past the point where the average joe walking down the street will agree that most books in the future will be read this way.
This article was originally posted March 27th on Krishna Motukuri’s blog.
iRead is on My Space now! Woo hooo…
MySpace recently opened their platform for application providers and in a limited release opened it for their users to use the applications. This is an good first step toward the promise of open social compliance from the large social networks.
iRead is excited to be part of My Space. Thanks to some fantastic support for My Space team, we were able to launch iRead on My Space on day one. So if you hang out on My Space you can now show off your favorite books on your profile. You can see what your friends are reading. And discover people who have similar reading tastes as you!
This one’s been long overdue, but better late than never I guess. So here goes: an account of one of the most exciting moments any engineer, for that matter anyone, at a startup looks forward to: You build, They come. And boy! did they come. Thousands each hour, about 200,000 in a span of 24 hours, trampling on each other (virtually of course!), jamming our servers, and complaining every time something didn’t work. Within 24 hours, we not only beefed up our systems, we went on to delight our customers and pave the way to add nearly 2 million users in the months that followed. This is the story of how we handled the unprecedented (at Ugenie) surge in traffic we got soon after we launched Harry Potter Magic Spells on the Facebook Platform in July. Here we go…
After looking at the traffic stats the previous night, we knew we had our first real viral app on Facebook. We had to scale to make sure that we could handle all the traffic and a million users - “a nice problem to have” as some people like to say at Ugenie. Being in India meant that peak-traffic hours coincided with deep-sleep hours for our engineers. But on the brighter side, it meant that we had a full working day to get our act right and be ready to face the action the next day.
By then, we had started using Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud 2 (EC2). Back then, EC2 didn’t have support for large and extra large instances. So each instance was roughly equivalent to less then half of a production server we were using otherwise (in terms of computing power). Even though this meant we needed more instances, the ease of launching a new instance is one of the great things about EC2 (more about EC2 in a later post). But EC2 doesn’t have support for hardware load balancers / VIPs. So we had to look for a software load balancer that would be simple to use and configure. Having evaluated more heavy weight solutions before, when we stumbled upon Pound, we knew we had the right tool for the job.
It is very straight forward to configure Pound to load balance between various apache servers. We decided to go with Pound fronting two apache instances, each on a separate EC2 instance. One more instance also hosted our mysql server. Pound doesn’t support assigning weights (or we haven’t figured it) yet - it has to be round-robin - and that is one feature we missed. So we couldn’t assign a slightly lower weight to the apache which shared it’s EC2 instance with Pound - not great, but workable.
The next step was to ensure that our DB had the right parameters and indexes. A few indexes and explains later, the queries started looking decent. But the best way to improve your DB performance is to not hit it at all. The easiest way to do that in PHP is to use the APC cache.(One gotcha to be aware about APC: it doesn’t handle the case where the size of the value being stored changes. If you think the size of the value you are storing changes across calls, simple delete and store again).
All this gave us a nice feeling, but we weren’t feeling warm fuzzy yet! We wanted to do be certain that we could take the load. A back-of-the-envelope calculation gave a ballpark figure for how many requests per second (peak and average) we had to handle. We ran the previous week’s logs against a few perl scripts to get into the right format, and used that to load test our system using http_load. Knowing that our system could handle the requests put us in a comfort zone.
Much as expected, we got traffic - tonnes of it. Much unexpected, we got no alerts from nagios at all - none of it. What a day!
We went on to launch several other viral applications: Pillow Fight etc with a combined user base of over 3 million but we will always fondly remember our first viral app!
Last week we launched the countdown to 10 millionth book on our users’ bookshelves. We hit that milestone on the morning of October 29th. As promised, we raffled off 10 $100 gift certificates from Barnes & Noble and announced the names of the winners. You can view the list of the lucky winners and congratulate them here.
iReaders‘ bookshelves will soon have more than 10 million books! When we started, about four months ago, we had no idea that we will reach the 10 million books milestone so soon. We are thrilled and we want to thank you for making iRead the most vibrant book community! To celebrate, we are giving away 10 $100 gift certificates.
When we reach the 10 millionth book, we will pick 10 lucky iReaders among the ones who have 10 or more books on their shelf and 10 or more friends on iRead. The lucky iReaders will get $100 Barnes and Noble.com gift certificate to buy more books! See below for more details.
This promotion is valid starting October 17, 2007 and will continue until iRead get 10 million book additions. iRead will issue electronic $100 gift certificates for Barnesandnoble.com to the 10 qualified promotion registrants. To qualify, you must follow the promotion rules. iRead will issue the gift certificates within 30 days of the end of the promotion. If you are one of the first 10 qualified entrants, you will receive a facebook email from iRead with details on how to redeem the gift certificates. iRead reserves the right to cancel this promotion at any time, and to cancel issuance of the gift to certain individuals due to suspected fraud. If you have any questions, please contact ireadsupport@socialwizards.com.
….and shows no signs of slowing down. It has barely been 100 days since we launched our first Facebook application, Books iRead. But we are already the largest online book community in the world with more than 400 thousand users. We’d like to thank the fantastic facebook community for supporting and encouraging us. That encouragement has led us to build on our initial success and create a feature-rich application at an incredible pace. iRead has book clubs, personal book recommendations, fun quizzes, iReaders like you, and lots more innovative and unique features.
Right from day one, our focus was on creating a vibrant community of book lovers, not a staid book shelf application. Community and the inter-connections between community members enfold every aspect of iRead. On a book page, a user can see all the members of the community that have added that book. When a user marks a book as a wanna read, he/she can see the friends that own a copy of that book. A books’ rating is split to show how a user’s friends rated it different from the rest of the community.
We are on our way to launching many more engaging and fun social features on iRead. Almost all of the ideas have come from our iReaders. If we haven’t heard from you yet, please go ahead and tell us how you’d like iRead to shape up.
It has been less than a week since we launched a new and exciting feature on Books iRead - allowing users to form book clubs and connect with other iReaders. There are close to 300 book clubs already with more than 7000 users on them. Please take a look, start your own book club, and let us know how we can improve the book club experience.
We spend a lot of time on social networks! And we love it. We are now building cool little applications for social networks that make the community experience even more fun. We have launched some applications on facebook so far and we are just getting started.We will use this blog to share our learning in this exciting space and to announce new launches and features. If you have any questions feel free to contact us at krishna@booksiread.orgWelcome again!
