I would like the community's thoughts on a possible new feature --

Two ideas to keep in mind:

For a time, we've restricted how many poems members can post. The key idea behind this: we're a workshop and a place for poets to post work that they are actively editing. Neopoet isn't a place to broadcast work, but rather a place to work collaboratively to improve it. So, some time ago, we restricted poets to posting only one work a day, and more recently, asked members not to post poems to their blog.

We've, since the very beginning, tried to keep Neopoet as non-commercial as possible. We've asked members not to post commercial solicitations on the site, though have allowed members to reference, in their own profiles, the work that they have published elsewhere.

We're thinking about launching a feature called "bookshelf". The idea is that a profile already contains a lot of information about a poet, but what is missing is the books many of our poets have published, or the "finished" (i.e. not suitable for workshop) poetry a poet has produced. Members (initially premium members, since we roll out new features to them first, so we can encourage people to support Neopoet, but potentially all members later on) will be able to post work to their "bookshelf". If the work is available through a publisher, they can include an ISBN, and we'll (automatically) pull the title and a picture. We'd even link to Amazon or other booksellers so browsers can buy the book.

My question -- what do you think about this?

I think poets that want to promote their books, or post works that aren't suitable for workshop, will be thrilled, but this is a departure (perhaps small) from some values we've held in the past.

A further question --

If we implement this, "bookshelf" entries would be displayed 1) under the "my works" section of the profile, 2) potentially as a sidebar in the profile, and 3) perhaps (though we can see potential drawbacks to this) as a sidebar (like "other recent work") on every poem a member has on Neopoet.

Any thoughts on option #3 above?

For a demo of how this would look, you can look at the demo profile: http://new.neopoet.com/neopoet-0
A demo of how this would look if added as a sidebar to every poem:
http://new.neopoet.com/node/test-poem