I do admit that it's fast and scales well, but I'm judging this book from the inside, from the most relevant perspective: that of a user. I didn't realize it was so new either.
What it's really missing besides preview, is some kind of threading, whether the w3t flavor or the "flat threaded" stuff that slashcode does.
Anyway, you should add a little "totals" row after the post listing like I did to w3t (my hack shows total threads and total messages on the main index).
