We were very excited to learn of AppEnthusiast’s positive review of our Book Club apps. If you are on the fence about buying our app the site does a great job of summarizing what the uses for the product are. We are grateful to this site for taking the time to write such an in-depth article. We especially love the 5 out of 5 rating! Check it out here: http://bit.ly/jDnvtM

BCL is happy to welcome Hyperion Books to the growing family.  In recent weeks, we have added dozens of titles from this prestigious imprint.  Included in these titles are their most recent published works and choice titles from Mitch Albom.  Recently published works, and those soon to be released, include A Tiger in the Kitchen by Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan, Beautiful Maria of My Soul by Oscar Hijuelos, Best Staged Plans by Claire Cook, Breaking Night by Liz Murray, Growing Up Laughing by Marlo Thomas, Making Rounds with Oscar by David Dosa and Minding Ben by Victoria Brown.  The new guides for these books offer our readers a breadth of reading options, including non-fiction titles, Christian inspiration, fantasy, historical fiction and memoirs.  In the coming weeks, Hyperion has given us exclusive access to Q&A sessions with many of these outstanding authors.  We will be posting these in the coming weeks.  Enjoy!

April showed heavy usage of the guides.  Must be the unseasonably cool air and abundance of rain.  Keep getting those clubs together as summer strikes those of us in the Northern Hemisphere.  Beach and pool-side reads allow time to check the progress of your kids or the flowers easily.  Need suggestions, check our featured section.  Several newly-added Hyperion titles would make great summer time discussion.  For now, browse the top 5 for both iPhone and iPad versions.  Interesting there no repeats in the two lists, and Secret Daughter returns to its top spot (fifth straight month in the top five).

iPhone/iPod Touch
1. Secret Daughter: A Novel by Shilipi Somaya
2. Still Alice by Lisa Genova
3. The Host by Stephanie Meyer
4. For One More Day by Mitch Albom
5. Middlemarch by George Eliot

iPad
1. Freedom by Jonathan Franzen
2. Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese
3. Wench by Dolen Perkins Valdez
4. Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson
5. Cleopatra by Stacy Schiff

After months of hard work our iPhone app is now officially available in the app store. We are extremely proud of how it turned out and think you will like the features. In addition, we have a lot of features scheduled to roll out in the near future for this app. For now please keep your ideas and book suggestions coming. We want to make this app be a part of your daily app browsing. You can check out app in iTunes.

Our first full month saw thousands of views of our book guides. The top five most-used discussion questions in order were:

1. Secret Daughter: A Novel by Shilpi Somaya Gowda
2. Cutting For Stone by Abraham Verghese
3. Wildwater Walking Club by Claire Cook
4. Sarah’s Key by Tatiana de Rosnay
5. Cleopatra by Stacy Schiff

We are so grateful to all of our fans and users and glad that so many of them are using them in their book club settings.

We would love to hear feedback from our hundreds of users that have purchased the app so far. Fill out the form below to let us know what you would like to see in future versions. We are constantly making changes to make your experience better but would love to know what else we can do to improve it. Thanks!

We are thrilled that Verizon has finally jumped on the Apple bandwagon and will soon be offering iPhones. The best news out of today’s announcement though was that Verizon will allow their phones to tether to up to five devices, including iPads. This will hopefully give our users more access than ever to Book Club Leader. We are excited by the announcement and hope that it will bring many of you a better user experience. By the way, sounds like these phones will be available starting Feb. 10.

Book Group Buzz did a quick review on our app, including our forthcoming iPhone version.  They had this to say:

Check out the post here

For the first month of its existence, Book Club Leader has seen some outstanding traffic on a variety of books. This month, the most popular reading guides searched and viewed were a varied bunch covering historical fiction, memoir, mystery and thriller. Our BCL users must be a well-rounded bunch.

The top four guides for December are:

1. Claude & Camille: A Novel of Monet by Stephanie Cowell
2. The Confession by John Grisham
3. Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia by Elizabeth Gilbert
4. A Reliable Wife by Robert Goolrick

Which guides have you been using?  Which ones do you wish we’d add?

Jeff Bezos on reports that the new Kindle broke all Amazon sales records.

It is now the top selling item in Amazon history. Did you get one for Christmas?