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Hardcover — Discover, track and read life-changing books
Hardcover is a social network for people to track what they read and want to read, make lasting connections with other readers and find life-changing books. We're anti-Amazon, pro-author, actively pursuing feedback and just getting started. 📚
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@nastassia_k Thanks so much for the support!
That sounds like an amazing job. In the next updates, we have lots of plans for tools that make the job of authors and publishers easier. Would be very interesting to hear about the ins and outs of what being a literary scout means.
Let us know if you bump into anything and send any feedback you have our way 🫡
@stelofo congrats! this is a genuine product. beatiful branding and very nice idea. the pricing model is a bit strange though. have you guys decided about this model based on any user data?
@stelofo @ardalan_pouyabahar Pricing has been a tough one for us. All of our competitors, including the big name in the space, all are mostly free with potential premium features. We went that route as well, but I think we're still trying to figure out what the top draw would be that someone would pay enough to support us. We have some longer-term plans to generate revenue from authors and publishers. The Supporter plan we have now is mostly around helping us get there.
👋 Hi Book Friends!
I'm Adam, the founder of Hardcover, and I'm excited to share our newest version after over two years of building a community, a website, and iOS & Android apps!
During that time, we've talked to hundreds of readers about what they want in a book tracking and social platform. We've listened to their feedback, tested and iterated constantly.
We believe we've created a book space that feels as warm as a familiar library but as exciting as a midnight book launch party. 🥳
Here are a few of my favorite things you can do on Hardcover:
🔍 Find books - Search for books you know of, check out trending books, explore lists and prompts to find hidden gems, review your recommendations, stumble on friends reads in your feed, or browse all book by genre, mood or tag.
📘 Decide what to read - Besides all the book facts you'd expect to see, we show you a personalized Match Score from 0% to 100% for each book based on your reading history. You'll also see ratings & reviews from readers you follow and readers most similar to you.
📚 Track your reading - One place for every book you want to read, have read and more. You can set your privacy level to public, private (for a 🌶️ book?) or friends only. Use Airlists (our version of Airtable for Books) to further organize your library.
⭐ Log your reads - Rate and review books on a 5-star scale with half-star increments. Showcase your favorite books on your profile at hardcover.app/@username
🏁 Read even more - Set reading goals and explore your reading stats through charts and data visualizations to help keep you consistent and understand your own reading habits and tastes.
♾ AI librarian, Bookle game, referral program, Goodreads/StoryGraph importer, GraphQL API, light/dark modes, an active Discord and so much more!
This is a bootstrapped passion project by a small but dedicated team working in public with the book community. We absolutely love this space and will be around in the comments. We'd love to hear what you think! 🙌 Join our community and be part of Hardcover's journey!
Congratulations team, I've been following for a little while now and it's so exciting to see this launch finally happening!!
@cassidoo That means so much, thank you Cassidy! Especially from someone who's made me smile so much with your content. Thanks for following us along on this journey. 🙌
I love Hardcover!!! I’ve been using it and prefer it over goodreads. The Hardcover team is so thoughtful and focused on building the right thing, and the community is great! So much love for hardcover!!
First impressions are great!
I noticed some issues. Mainly that:
1. when I search for a book, the search results include a lot of duplicates, and it doesn't seem like the different additions of the same book, but rather separate books when they're not.
2. when I add a review, I get a toast message on the top right saying that my review was posted, but it still keeps me on the edit screen. When I manually go to the reviews of that book, my review is often nowhere to be seen (even though the review count has increased to include mine).
3. The reading goal doesn't seem to work. I made an account just now and said it go for 12 books this year. I added four books that I already read earlier this year and now, in my profile, it says “Goal 0/12 books / 0% / You're 9 books behind schedule." The math ain’t mathing here.
I like that if a book is missing a cover, you can upload one yourself.
Honestly, I would have liked more of a focus on, you know, books in user profiles. It's like all the books are cramped in a tiny section with tabs and I don't understand why. It seems quite well made though, so I remain hopeful that I'm gonna love it in the future. Until then, I think I'll keep tracking the books. I've read on my personal website.
My profile: https://hardcover.app/@an
I have actually been having the problems that you guys are trying to solve, having a bunch of books on Kindle's library and not knowing which one to read and then basically stopping it.
I think I am going to use this!
@rosekamallove thanks for checking us out!
Yeah, deciding to read a book is a decision that's more complex than people realize.
We've been busy talking to readers to see how we can improve that, and with recent updates on the book page and search, I think we're getting close to optimizing that process.
@rosekamallove I have a couple of ideas there, one that focuses on the entire site at once and one that focuses on your library specifically. Join us on the site and specifically on our discord channel and you can see where I'm talking about it. :D
The team has already done some great work in this space, I happen to bring a couple of "outside the box" ideas that I've been using personally for several years now. :D
SWEET! As an avid book reader this is going to be super helpful for me. I'm sharing it with my team as well. Thanks for making this Ste and Adam, this is amazing! (And as a marketer, I loved loved loved the branding and design, too...)
@tomorbach sweet, thanks Tom! Love to hear what’s most helpful for you as you try us out. @stelofo has brought Jules (our mascot) alive. It’s been fun to have a character we can mold into any situation. It reminds me of all the characters I saw everywhere in Japan (even little street markets have their own character!).
@bwb thanks Ben! Love to see your work in the book space too. It’s a fun time to be a creator. 🙌
Congratulations on the launch! 🎉
The platform is absolutely phenomenal, making it a top place for readers on the internet!
Love the ongoing improvements. Keep going! 🙏
Congrats on the launch, team! I’ve been using Hardcover for a while now as a way to recommend books to my friends and newsletter subscribers. It’s a great product and has been growing by absolute leaps and bounds!
@irreverentmike1 thanks so much Mike! Whenever I see a referral in our stats from your site I’m like “man, Mikes awesome” 😂
I've been using Hardcover to find new books to read and it's been working out great! Congrats to the makers on the launch 👏
Congrats on the launch! Will be giving it a try as I’ve been interested in finding an alternative to Goodreads for a while now.
@lou_attal Yay, thanks! I just added "The Productivity Project" to my reading list which you mentioned. Hardcover says I'll rate about 4⭐ and it's right up my alley.
@frantzlight Thanks! It took a good 2 years before our discovery felt natural on Hardcover. Between trending books and Prompts things have started to finally click 😂
This is the first Goodreads alternative that actually feels sustainable as a replacement. I've been using it now for a few months, have tried a lot of the other book social and reading log apps out there, but Hardcover is the first where I've felt they're releasing features (and for a bootstrapped app they have incredible momentum releasing new features and improvements) that actually improve on what Goodreads offers, instead of just being "less bloated" than GR. Adam and Ste are dogfooding the app like crazy, and their obvious love of reading and books shows in every decision and aspect of the product. I have a lot of confidence in this app getting better and better as they continue to build it out.
Also a lot of revenue potential, when you consider that authors, publishers and bookstores all have a financial interest in getting their books in front of a targeted reading audience. (I trust the creators' ability to find the beneficial balance there and not just bomb the app with ads.)
Since I know they're reading, I will offer 1 piece of feedback: this concept of the "Airlist," I really don't get what it's for, or why that's its name. Is it, like, built on Airtable under the hood, and the name is playing off that? If so, non-tech readers won't get that and it's confusing. Can it have a more book-relevant name? Is there a function to it existing? I dunno.
@eb555 Wow, thanks so much for the kind words and being an early adopter Eric! Would it be OK for us to use this in a testimonial sometime? (not something we currently do, but want to eventually 😂).
Awesome feedback on Airlists. That's a tricky one. We wanted something to convey that our lists are more than just a list static list. Since you can change the view (table, shelf, card), sort, filter and change the columns that are shown, etc, just "lists" didn't seem to differentiate us from Goodreads. "Airlists" as a name might not be the right answer to that though. 🤔 Maybe we will just go back to "Lists" though. Clarity is more important than anything else. Thanks for the feedback! 🙌
@adamfortuna Sure you can! And okay, if Airlist is just a more user-adjustable UI for the basic book list on, say, https://hardcover.app/@adam/books/read..., why not just "Airlist"-ify that list (why is it an extra click to "Open in Airlist")? If it's a performance issue, maybe changing the link to "Explore this List" or "Curate this List" would demystify it. Just trying to help, not nitpick. Cheers!
@eb555 Respect for offering a genuine perspective with actionable feedback. Refreshing to see comments other than "congrats" or "awesome website".
@eb555 Yeah, having both of these on the same page makes sense to me. Right now we want the page to load ASAP, and for that we don't load everything that makes it an Airlist. I think we could do something where we still show all the airlist features, but we don't load the functionality until someone tries to use those features. That would probably offer the best of both worlds.
I really love this concept and I'm excited to see if they add integrations for Audible and Libby soon!
@nolan_makatche This is something on my personal wish list. There are two features I dream of having:
1. Show availability of books in my local library (audio, physical & ebooks w/the ability to set what you'd want.
2. Automatically manage requesting books from my library for me for books with long waits. This would be tricky, but I love the idea that I always have the "next book" I want to read available after I finish my current book - but without needing to micromanage schedules.
Is there an Audible or Libby feature you'd like to see?
Hi everyone!
I've been involved with Hardcover as a user and supporter for over a year now, and I also joined its Librarian corps when the team first opened it up. I'm a mega-reader, averaging over 200 books per year for the last 4 years, and I'll still get near that number this year even when I was *trying* to go slower. BookSirens.com ranks me among the Top 1% in both reading diversity and readers helped among all those who have submitted data for their analysis.
Hardcover has been great in so many areas already, and we're really just getting started. We've already got one of the best AI tools in the game, if not *the* best. We've already got some of the most granular statistics of any book library system I've found to date - and I've found a lot of them over the years. Our social feed system is already one of the better ones out there, easily allowing you to see feeds of just those you follow or even all activity on the system with just a single click, as well as the sometimes-infamous-in-other-systems "For You" feed, which combines the two and tailors them to your interests.
As @stelofo and @adamfortuna have said, we're all about making this site the go-to place for *every* reader and *everyone* involved in making books happen. We don't care if you're reading the first book you've read since high school or if you read hundreds of books per year, we want to be the place where you come to find and talk about books. And yes, we even want to be the place that authors, publishers, and everyone else in the industry can come to find the tools they need for their various functions as well - and while we have some ideas there, we'd love to hear what *you* think so that we can try to be the first to make those ideas a reality.
So come join us, and let's make revolutionize this game in ways it never has been before.
@jsxtn83 I love how your passion and ambition in the book space matches our own. 🙌 I can’t wait to work more with you.
Awesome concept! I just added Pachinko By Min Jin Lee as a book I'm currently reading. Really love your support for authors. F'ck Amazon and viva indi book stores.
@patilganesh1010 thanks! We just redesigned the homepage 2 days ago. 😅 it was a bit of a risk, but I think it ended up awesome. It helps its in Next.js, so we can make it as dynamic as we want.
@derkolstad thanks Derek! I wasn’t much of a reader myself until my mid 20s. For me it was audiobooks that were the gateway.
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