Shelfari

Turning the lights on

Shelfari community -- Today we announced funding by Amazon.com along with a great bunch of strategic investors.  We can now start heating our office and using the overhead lights during daylight hours! (j/k)

We are all super-excited about the advisory board we have been able to put together.  Our advisers include:

• Alex Algard - founder of WhitePages.com & CarDomain.com
• Geoff Entress - an experienced entrepreneur and venture investor
• Brad Feld - managing director at Foundry Group, and HUGE book lover
• Eric Klein - One of the best product & design people on the planet
• Andy Sack - co-founder of Judy's Book
• Kelly Smith - partner of Curious Office

All of us here at Shelfari worked very hard on Shelfari to reach this critical milestone.  Kevins B and D have continued churning out site improvements over the last few months while I focused on the financing.  Stay tuned, as we have some VERY exciting plans for using our new capital to expand and improve Shelfari.

Just to be clear -- We are NOT a subsidiary of Amazon after this investment.  We are completely independent with exciting plans for using this new capital to accelerate our growth.  Exciting-enough plans that Amazon.com and a bunch of highly-respected investors wanted to help us achieve these plans.

Happy Reading,

Josh

Host your book group on Shelfari!

We have officially taken the covers off Shelfari's brand new book groups feature!

Book groups have been on our feature list since the idea for Shelfari first came to our minds.  Over  recent months we have thought long and hard about what makes a book group different from a normal discussion forum.  In the end, though, we realized this to be a silly question -- book groups are all about the books!   To further this goal, every book group in our system has its own shelf.  Members of the book group can add books to the shelf.  When looking at a book you can always click "Show on..." to add the book to groups you belong to.

Go ahead, try it out!  Create a group for your current book club.  It's simple to invite members to your group and show the books you have read and the books you are thinking about reading.  Another idea is to simply create an open book group around your favorite genre.  Or you can invite all your college friends to join a group and use the group to stay on top of what your friends are reading.  We are going to let our users drive the content and character of the groups they create.

We can't wait to hear your feedback and suggestions on how to make our groups better.  We have even created a new group for site feedback!  All of us at Shelfari hope you're enjoying the features we've added recently and we look forward to reading your feedback and suggestions for improvements.

Happy Reading!