BookLikes
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Type of site
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Catalog and community |
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| Available in | English, German, Polish |
| Owner | Dawid Piaskowski, Joanna Grzelak-Piaskowska |
| Created by | Dawid Piaskowski, Joanna Grzelak-Piaskowska |
| Slogan(s) | World's #1 Blog Platform designed for book bloggers, reviewers, writers - all Book Lovers. Your Reading Life. Redesigned. |
| Website | booklikes |
| Alexa rank |
 140,584 |
| Registration | Free |
| Launched | May 2013 |
| Current status | Active |
BookLikes is a "social cataloging" website founded in June 2011 by Dawid Piaskowski, a software engineer, e-business analyst and entrepreneur, and Joanna Grzelak-Piaskowska, a linguist and literary scholar. The website allows individuals to freely search BookLikes' database of books and reviews. Users can sign up and register books to generate library catalogs. They can also create their own groups of book suggestions and discussions.
Within eight months of beta testing prior to the May 14, 2013 public launch of the website in its current form, it gathered 8000 bloggers. Before its public launch in the current format, BookLikes had won an award as the most innovative small business in Greater Poland, on April 17, 2012. In July 2013, the company also won the Microsoft BizSpark People's Choice Award, at the Microsoft BizSpark Euro Summit in Berlin.
As of October 2013, the website's offices are in Poland; however, founder and CEO Dawid Piaskowski said in a June 2013 interview with the Los Angeles Times that its owners were contemplating a move of its headquarters to the United States, either to New York City or to California, before the end of 2013. Also as of October 2013, roughly 45% of the site's visitors come from the United States; other countries where the website is growing in popularity include Poland, Belgium, Canada, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Germany, and Egypt.
A first version of BookLikes was launched in June 2011 as a book recommendation engine and social network; a self-described "Facebook for book lovers with price comparison" similar to Goodreads, substantially relying on its own sophisticated book recommendation engine. In this version, the site was presented throughout 2011 at major startup and technology fairs such as Seedcamp (New York), TechCrunch Disrupt (San Francisco), and the 2011 Vienna Startup Week.
During the first months of 2012, a new CTO was hired (Daniel Szwarc), and a German version of the service was launched. The growth of Goodreads, as well as the loss of part of BookLikes's data on the servers of the company initially entrusted with hosting those data, and the discovery that the recommendation engine on which the service, until then, had chiefly relied, was not reaching the site's users in the intended way. This prompted the founders to fundamentally revisit the site's conception. They then redesigned it in the Tumblr-like interactive blog format in which it was eventually launched in May 2013, having won an award as the most innovative small company in Greater Poland already in April 2012.
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Wikipedia