Building Book DNA: Monster update as I’m back from vacation 😃

Plus: Updates on imports from Goodreads.

Every 3 weeks, I share notes on building Book DNA.

We’re building a private, personal way to track your reading and get deeply personalized book recommendations. Think Goodreads, but for readers who want a calm, private space to track what they read, keep notes, and explore books that match their Book DNA. Like Spotify or Pandora, but for books.

Want to help shape it? Apply to be a beta tester! And a huge thank you to our 750+ members! Readers and authors can join, and more perks are coming as we grow.

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I am feeling…

I had a fantastic cycling holiday. I’m physically exhausted but mentally refreshed. Over 3 weeks, I biked 1,149km and 21,789m of elevation gain through the French and Italian Alps. It was glorious 🤩.

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What is new in the app?

Folders!

You can now organize your books into folders based on how your brain works.

And on your folders page, you can click the tab to see books you have read, are reading, or are in your TBR.

Folders are pretty simple to start. And as our beta users give us feedback, we will evolve the Overview and other parts of folders.

Optional: Record the format of the book you read.

On the settings page, you can now choose to record the format of the book you read.

Soon, you'll be able to set a default format (thanks to a few beta users for requesting this).

Here is how it looks when you log a read:

In your TBR, see your history with that series or author.

Now, in your TBR, next to each book, you can see your rating for past reads in that series or by that author.

For a series:

For an author:

And of course, for details, you can click the “My series history” or “My author history” tab for that book:

For a series:

For an author:

In your TBR, smart sorting for authors you’ve read before and those that are new to you.

We added two new Smart TBR sorts so you can easily jump to authors you’ve read before and authors that are brand new to you. Once we get imports finished next month, this will be even more useful too 😃.

The author dropdown now includes your history with that author (both in TBR and reading log).

Now when you use the author filter on your TBR or reading log, you can see how you rated all those authors’ books in the past. We are looking forward to user feedback on how helpful this is.

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What are we working on this Fall?

A better book database

This is still ongoing; we have quotes from Nielsen and Ingram, but they are very expensive, and we are trying to figure out the best path forward. We have to finish this step before we can add imports.

Backstory: Right now, we use Open Library for our book data. The data is not great. We have done a fair bit of work to clean it up, but it still lacks many books. So…

We are currently testing a paid book database to improve our book coverage and the quality of our book cover database. We are testing Nielsen and Ingram’s book databases.

I wish this data were freely available, but we will likely have to pay for it 🙁. It's equally frustrating that Amazon doesn’t share any books published only within its ecosystem.

Goodreads & Storygraph imports

These look great, but we won’t ship until we've sorted the book database above.

I'm doing big import tests over the next 3 weeks. Everything looks good; we just can’t ship until we get the new book database sorted.

Simple mobile webpage to start.

We are working on this now, and it should be ready in 2 to 3 weeks.

Right now, we only have the app for desktop/tablet. We know users want to log their books without opening their laptop or walking over to their computer. So, we will add a simple mobile web page that allows you to:

• Log what you read

• Add what you are reading or listening to now

• Add a book to your TBR

• And add notes about a book

• Search for a book

This is a short-term solution until we can build a full mobile app with all the functionality.

Add individual book pages within the app

We will add individual book pages so you can click a book's title or cover image to view more details about that book.

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What is going on outside of Book DNA?

I am home from a 3-week cycling vacation and catching up on so much. I read so many good books on my trip.

What am I reading now?

I just finished…

• The Lions of Al-Rassan by Guy Gavriel Kay: What a beautiful historical fantasy book. It wasn’t heavy fantasy, no big magic system, just an imaginary kingdom based on some elements of our history. I do wish it was a series; I wanted to go deep into the story but Guy loves standalone books.

I am reading...

• God of War by Christian Cameron: One of my favorite authors, and this is his book about Alexander the Great. I love it so far, and I love the story Ptolemy is telling.

Have a fantastic week,
Ben

P.S. From my alpine cycling trip in September 😃