Some of you have requested this; we’ve been wanting it for a long time. Now anyone can read books in the Unbound Reader without having an account – there’s no requirement to log in. This is great because we believe in open access to public domain books.

For now, you’ll still need an account to post notes or chat with other users, but your privacy-prone friends are now free to browse all the public annotations in our catalog and read to their heart’s content, account-free. Tell the world!

In the three weeks since going live we’ve had to put out relatively few fires. For this we are thankful (and knocking on wood). However, we uncovered a bug today that we should share.

Apparently our Contact Us form worked fine for those BookGlutton’s already logged in, and many of you sent us feedback to prove it. However, for those visitors just passing through, your message might not have reached us if you didn’t see the word “Success” after you submitted. Luckily this didn’t effect anyone’s reading experience. But we might have missed a few comments coming down the pipe. The problem has been resolved, so now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, Contact Us and tell us what you’re really thinking!

We’ve corrected the issue and we’re back in business. Thanks for your patience.

We’re having a little bit of a problem with the site, nothing to be alarmed about, except that it will keep everyone out for a few minutes. Naturally it happened at the worst possible time. Monday morning at 3 AM would have been so much more convenient.

Any minute we’ll be back up and running, so stay tuned.

We’ve added an RSS feed for the Catalog so you can keep track of new work we drop in. Not familiar with feeds? Just click the RSS icon pictured here (at the top of most BG pages), and the browser will let you add it to your feeds.

If you’re waiting for a particular book, or if you’re watching to see what other users upload (we should have the upload tool back in business soon), you’ll see it in your feeds. Rock on.

BookGlutton has opened up the Beta. Now anyone can come on in and check it out (please do, and feel free to invite 5000 of your closest friends). We’re ready to get this thing going!

This savvy little highlight box is here to give you a snapshot of your account and a peek at what’s been going on since you last logged in. It’s going live on the homepage later today.

BookGlutton Adds Images

We’re about to begin importing a whole slew of books with images, folks! Keep an eye out for flashier-looking titles like the fine example above.

One caveat – the Upload Tool is going to take some time catching up, so for a while user uploads will remain text-only.

At any rate, these tasty little visuals should make it into the catalog in the next week.

Some of you using the “Remember Me” button on login may have had some problems with the Reader’s Talk feature. Come back and chat – we’ve happily resolved this one (and believe me, it was a real bugger to figure out where that was coming from)! While we were at it we did a little Reader optimization, so it should pages load faster, as well.

It's important that the community have a hand in developing the BookGlutton Catalog. Not only can users influence what public-domain works are included, but writers can get great feedback showing their work in the reader. This video walks you through how to upload a document (which you'll need to convert into .rtf or .xhtml – easy to do from Word or Dreamweaver, respectively). The video also shows you how to tag your document, download an .epub version (which you can later read in Adobe Digital Editions, although we'd much rather you just keep reading it here!), and read it in The BookGlutton Unbound Reader.