Building Book DNA: We added a reading now page, genre filters, and 3 smart TBR pages.
Plus: What are we building from now through mid June?
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.
I am feeling…
I didn’t get much sleep this week, so I’m a bit out of it 🤣
The app is looking amazing as we’ve shipped some key features over the last few weeks. I’ll show that off below and show you where we are going next.
My main focus this week is on 5x 1-hour Zoom sessions with new beta testers to evaluate our UX for Goodreads and StoryGraph imports. I’m using the second half of the interviews to gauge excitement for what we are looking to build over the rest of 2026 and how mobile apps factor into that.
Right now, I’m thinking a lot about:
We might need to build a simple mobile app soon so that readers can easily log a read, mark what they are reading, and save a book to their TBR. I had hoped to wait a while before we built a mobile app, but feedback from some beta testers suggests that not having one is disrupting the normal flow for recording the book once you finish reading it (and my own experience mirrors that).
Which features get readers most excited about switching to our app? Especially our target audience, who are readers already logging their reads and reading 24+ books a year.
We shipped a reading now page, genre filters, and new smart TBR pages for our beta testers.
The new reading now page is live, along with some basic but beautiful stats.
And, we added a genre filter to the TBR and reading log pages:
The genres are pulled from the American publishing standard (BISAC), so they are not perfect (publishers screw them up pretty badly). Some books don’t have them if they are Amazon-only. It is a good start, though, and we will improve this system as we grow.
We also added Smart TBR pages to sort by Fiction, Nonfiction, and Rereads (rereads being books in your TBR you have already read at least once):
And we added a crowned page under My Log, so you can easily see all the books you have crowned:
And finally, I gave the Building Book DNA page a big makeover. It is now much easier to navigate, and I updated all the pages to help authors and readers see what we are building. I’ve got more to do, but that was nice to finish.
What are we aiming to add from now through June 15th?
Small things:
Add a sorting option to sort your TBR books from oldest to newest (and vice versa).
Add a filter to the TBR and Log page (similar to the genre filter, you can sort to see only books from a specific author).
Add a log type filter option to the My Log page so readers can see which books they didn’t finish, reread, etc.
Add an optional ISBN/ASIN field to the “add missing book” function.
And some smaller bugs.
Bigger things:
Integrate the app with our internal book-processing system.
Fix stats on page two of the ratings process based on reader feedback. Plus, we will collect an optional book recommendation if someone rates a book as loved/crowned.
Improve the weighting of famous authors/books in search. And generally improve our overall search results. We’ve done a first round of work, but we have more planned.
Once we finish this work, we will focus on adding an import feature to pull in readers’ historical data from Goodreads and StoryGraph.
More info on our roadmap page: https://building.bookdna.com/roadmap/
What is going on outside of Book DNA?
Training for summer biking is in full swing, and I am physically tired. I’ve got a few more weeks, and then I will have a slow week to let my body rest.
What am I reading now?
I just finished…
The Longest Battle by Jeffery H. Haskell (book 9 in the Grimm’s War series). This is fun military science fiction with a very pulpy feel. I love turning my brain off and enjoying a space adventure, and these are perfect for that. The war is winding down, and I’m curious where the next book goes.
I am reading...
The Sundering by Jon Williams: This is a really grand military science fiction series (and maybe a bit more hard sci-fi now that I think about it). I’m on book #2 and enjoying it so far; it has a mid-century British sailing feel, like Master & Commander.
How the World Really Works by Vaclav Smil. This was my dad’s pick for the family book club, and I am super excited to read it. It looks interesting, and many people at Book DNA have recommended it, which is a good sign.
Have a good week,
Ben
P.S. Our trip to Crete, Greece 😃
