WorldCat partners with popular social book community, weRead

OCLC has partnered with weRead, a social reading site and community for book lovers, to provide valuable content on WorldCat.org. weRead helps people find readers with similar interests and provides title recommendations. It is the latest organization to join the list of more than 25 WorldCat partners.

With one of the largest and most popular social book discovery applications on Facebook, MySpace, bebo, Hi5 and Orkut, weRead is a natural fit to partner with OCLC to enhance the social networking and user-discovery aspects of WorldCat.org.

WorldCat.org now features weRead customer reviews alongside Amazon, EMRO and original user review submissions. In addition, WorldCat.org also uses the weRead recommendation engine to make "Read By Others" recommendations for additional titles of interest on a WorldCat.org detailed record page.

"The weRead partnership is a natural fit," explains Cindy Cunningham, Director of Partner Programs for OCLC. "The mission of weRead—the social discovery of books—extends and further enhances the WorldCat.org goal to connect users with their local libraries. With weRead  being a Lulu  company and the corresponding support for self-publishing, OCLC can offer its users access to an entirely new reading experience."

Lulu.com is changing the world of publishing by enabling creators to publish their work themselves for free, with complete editorial and copyright control. Lulu is the marketplace for digital content on the Internet with over 820,000 recently published titles and more than 5,000 new titles added each week. All of these titles are accessible through weRead.

The WorldCat.org and weRead sites link back and forth to support the user experience.

(2009 03 25)