So what's new? Well, the first thing you'll probably notice is that we've done a massive rehaul of your profile pages. As well as space for your book projects, picture and personal info, you now have a useful space for people to leave you personal messages - that's right, no more clogging-up of the book comments area with non-book chat! And what's more, you are now able to make friends with your fellow authonomists: simply jump onto their profile pages and click on "add friend".
Another new feature on profiles is the addition of news feeds. Combined with your friends network, the news feed makes authonomy work for you by drawing relevant information from across the site - so you'll have the inside track on who's backing what, who's commenting where and much more.
On a more technical note we have a couple of things in place now to make reading books on screen a bit easier: a high-contrast book reading mode and a nifty new slider that will allow you to increase/decrease font size as you wish.
Finally, we've tried to clear up some of the confusion that surrounds the book ranking. Many of you had trouble understanding why your books moved around so much in the chart and you couldn't easily see the bigger picture from the Editor's Desk. So from now on the rank of a book shown by default throughout the site will relate to its position in the Editor's Desk chart, a better measure of all-time popularity, not just its more recent 30 day performance. This is what you asked for and we think you were right! But we still want rising talent to have its time in the sun so we've introduced a new weekly book chart that will inevitably be much more dynamic and help more new books reach the attention of the community.
But that's not all for authonomy. We have more features and improvements in the pipeline that we hope to bring to you soon. In the meantime, we'd love to hear what you think of this latest round of changes, so leave us a comment here or get on over to the forum to give us your feedback and suggestions.
3 comments:
I loved the new features, Authonomy! The changes that are most useful to me are the text contrast, and the font size option.
Like other users of this site, I spend a lot of my online time, reading the books uploaded here. After a while, even with my spanking new glasses (I'll have to show you a picture of them soon), my eyes hurt.
This morning I was able to read (parts of) 3 manuscripts by using these new features. I found it way better on my eyes. I enjoyed playing with the little tab which makes the text bigger (so easy!).
Thank you for this, and I look forward to the other features you have in store.
Warm regards (you are not someone in particular, so maybe 'regards' is not appropriate. Regards, anyway)
Anne
Fantastic improvements: all round. White text on dark background far easier on the eyes, which a famous Internet reader zone gnooks.com adopted years ago.
Great improvement re new books feature, too!
Sincere congrats, you deserve it.
suzySomerset.
Nice work.
Here's a link to a review in the NYT that is relevant to the site. If I were to put it into a forum posting it would sink away within seconds. Thus, here it is:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/16/books/review/Queenan-t.html?8bu&emc=bub1
It starts:
"A few years ago, in these very pages, Bruce McCall wrote a flattering review of my book “My Goodness: A Cynic’s Short-Lived Search for Sainthood.” I was grateful for the praise, particularly coming from someone I admired and envied. But toward the end of the review, McCall said something that caught me completely off guard...."
And, getting to the main idea:
"This brings us to the least-discussed subject in the world of belles-lettres: book reviews that any author worth his salt knows are unjustifiably enthusiastic...."
Post a Comment