I’ve been talking about a full redesign on both Twitter and Facebook lately, and even published the first screenshots of the new design.
It’s time to explain why we’re working on a new design: to make Feedbooks easier to use through a simple and consistent layout.
The first thing that you’ll notice about our new global navigation is that we renamed the sections. “Discover” is renamed into “Public Domain” and “Share” into “Original Books”. While the books published in the “Public Domain” section are author-centric (points to a specific page with various metadata), the books published in “Original Books” are user-centric, and will point out directly to the profile of the user.
We’ll gradually introduce new interactions between readers and authors to make the promotion of a book much easier. You’ll notice that compared to the current design, comments, favorites and downloads are now highlighted a lot more to serve this purpose and new links to automatically post a book on Twitter/Facebook are now available.
Tags: redesign
Doesn’t this mean the “Public Domain” section will contain works which are not in fact in the public domain?
Correct, some works will be Creative Commons, but the vast majority will be public domain. Moving these few works to the “original books” section doesn’t make much sense though as they don’t have an active user behind them.
[...] Source : Feedbooks [...]
I am unhappy with the thumbnails of the books suggested. It use to be it showed the thumbnail and the title and the author. Now if you put your cursor over a thumbnail it shows the name but not the title and it takes much longer to check each one out to see if it is something I am interested in.
That’s something that might actually change and that I’ve kept in mind, although displaying the name of the book and the author below each cover has its own problems too.
oops! I meant that now it shows the title of the thumbnails but not the author and it only shows them when the cursor is over it. I can’t see at a glance if any of them are of interest to me. I need to know the author more than the title.
Please go back to the way you used to have the suggested books thumbnails.
Can I no longer create my own lists? I can’t find a link to let me do it now.
It’s in the upper right corner on the page of a book if you’re logged in.
how do we publish new public domain books since the redesign? i can’t find a link to it. the “publish” link in the main nav goes only to “new original book”.
On an author’s page, you can add a new book. If the author isn’t available on Feedbooks, add the author first: http://www.feedbooks.com/author/add
Is it possible for the end user to somehow bundle books for download? eg search all books by Jane Austen and then tag multiple ones (preferably not all) for download without having to enter each book’s page.
It would be nice to have the equivalent of an Amazon booklist, where one user collects book recommendations and the bundle could be downloaded in a single click. Maybe that function is already there but I haven’t found it.
You can create a list but we don’t have a button to queue all the books in the list for download. Some reading systems (Stanza on the iPhone) offer this feature when browsing our titles.
I don’t think we’ll offer a way to zip all these files together for download, but we might offer a download page in the future for authors or lists, where it’ll be easy to grab all the books without visiting the page for each book.