Today’s edition covers:
My 10 favorite book lists for March…
Cool book project: Librario
What are we working on with the full app?
What am I reading?
Want to help us beta test the new reader app? Sign up here.
What will this app help you do?
Privately log what you read and why: Track your TBR, what you’re reading, and the books you’ve finished (including your ratings and notes) in a space that’s private by default and fully yours.
Book recommendations that match your taste: Book DNA learns from what you love and dislike to suggest books that are a better match for you, rather than what happens to be popular.
Fun size! 🦥
Want to be matched with your Book Twins and see what their favorite reads have been over the last three years? Just share a favorite book or author here and get fantastic book recommendations.
Get a personalized email based on three of your favorite books/authors and three of your favorite genres/topics every 1/2/3 or 4 weeks. This is 100% human; every list on our website is made by a passionate author.
My 10 Favorite Book Lists For March…
I’m going to try a text format for a while and see what everyone thinks instead of visuals.
Also, don’t forget we have bookshelves like Space Opera (and 3,000+ other genres and topics) with the best books of all-time, trending, new, filter by Book DNA, and lists by fans/experts.
Cool book project: Librario
James had this really cool project on HN that I wanted to highlight…
It is called Librario, a book metadata API that aggregates data from Google Books, ISBNDB, and other sources. I always love seeing people work on book-related projects!
Librario, a play on the word librarian, is a simple book metadata aggregation API written in Go. It fetches information about books from multiple sources[^1], merges everything intelligently, and then saves it all to a PostgreSQL database for future lookups.
You can think of it as a data source, or a knowledgeable companion that can provide comprehensive book information for online booksellers, libraries, book-related startups, bookworms, and more.
Join the IRC channel at #librario on irc.libera.chat for end-user support and development questions.
btw, if you have a cool project, book, or something to share, just let me know.
What are we working on over the next 4 weeks?
Reminder: We’re building a smarter, more personal way to manage your reading life, with recommendations based on your Book DNA. Think Goodreads, but rebuilt for readers who want a private space to track what they read, keep notes, and get truly personalized book recommendations, like Pandora or Spotify for books.
We’ve started beta testing!!!! 😀
Beta app currently with TBR, Reading, and Log features.
I’ve done four 1-hour Zoom sessions with some awesome readers!
They have been incredibly helpful! We’ve spotted some weak spots in the UX, caught some bugs, and gotten feedback to help hone in on the features we want to add next.
I have another 5 Zoom sessions planned over the next 7 days. Once I finish those, I will collect my thoughts and start prioritizing improvements.
And I am excited to get my first users beyond myself, my brother, and a few friends, who are recording all their 2026 book data in the app. With the limited feature set, I wasn’t sure I would get many takers at this point.
What is in the next batch of features we are building?
Imports from Goodreads and StoryGraph
A basic welcome process to help readers get settled in the app.
Improvements to how search works and to the quality of our book database.
And some smaller fixes: improved support for audiobooks, adding a genre filter to TBR and your reading log, adding a log type filter to the reading log, fix some missing UX features.
After that, we want to work toward:
Public reviews
User folders
What am I working on in the coming weeks?
We are working hard to hone in on a design we like that tests well with users for the personalized book recommendation element we plan to start with (Book Twins).
Updated design as we play with approaches…
And we are doing similar for the Book Series Tracking and My Favorite authors components:
Slowly getting there 😀
What am I reading?
I finished…
The Coming of the Third Reich by Richard J. Evans: This is part of a big research project better to understand the rise of fascism in the 19th century. This book was a really good read and filled in many of the details that college classes skipped over. It was eerie to see the similarities to what is happening in the USA right now. Hopefully, with a more established democracy and institutions, something similar doesn’t happen.
I am reading...
The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America by Eric Larson: This book is riveting, and the serial killer aspect is so disturbing amid the glamor of the Chicago World's Fair. Great read and almost done with it. Thanks, Ben, for the rec!
What have I been up to outside of Shepherd?
I visited my 2.5-year-old nephew back in the USA (along with the rest of my wonderful family, but he was the star). It was a great visit, and I've finally overcome the jet lag.
Have a great week!
Thanks, Ben
P.S. The French coast at sunset.
