NRC Handelsblad is one of Hollands major newspapers, well known for their weekly section about books with book news, interviews and a lot of reviews.
NRC Handelsblad decided to open up all these book reviews to the general public, for free: 11.000 high quality reviews that appeared in the newspaper since 1991, with links to +35.000 authors and +110.000 books. All referring to each other.
There is a connection with the newspapers back-end system, so new reviews or articles are published on the site with minimum user interaction after being published in the newspaper. The latest news is published in real-time.
Daily updates of the latest book-information (changes in publishing dates, new books that come into circulation, etc) are automatically processed.
The site also contains a special section where visitors can discuss certain selected books.
The content types for the articles, book reviews, author resumés and book information are defined with maximum flexibility in mind: all of them can be linked to each other; multiple images (including copyright information and a title) can be added and several ways to visualize them on the different parts of the site (front page, top article of a certain page, all details, etc) are provided.
The site is build by Belgian Drupal company Krimson; and is all Drupal (the e-commerce site to buy the books, is reusing a non-drupal site that was already in use by NRC).
Heavy caching is used to keep the site running smoothly on a small web-server and a separate database-server.