Today’s edition covers:
My 10 favorite book lists for May…
What are we building in the Book DNA app?
What am I reading?
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My 10 Favorite Book Lists For May…
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 Biology (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.
What are we building in the Book DNA app?
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.
The app is looking good :)
We’ve been improving our core features based on user feedback. We’ve got more to do there and should be finished with that stage around June 15th. We will then switch our focus to building the Goodreads and Storygraph import tool.
What have we added since we last spoke?
Adding a Reading Now page to show what you are currently reading or listening to, as well as some simple stats for what you have read so far that year.
Genre filters to the TBR and Log page so you can sort by genre.
We added numbers to the TBR pages so you can see how many books are in your TBR.
We added Smart TBR pages to keep your TBR organized. Right now, we have sections for Fiction, Nonfiction, and Reread (books you have already read at least once).
We improved the icon for the Read next queue, as the previous one caused confusion among testers.
Improvements to search quality. Especially around showing book series nicely in search.
We’ve moved the app infrastructure to its own server pool, so it isn’t sharing resources with the public website (the public website, which is getting hammered by AI bots, causing problems).
And a lot of underlying improvements and fixes 😀
What are some other things we are fixing over the next work cycles?
Add sorting so you can sort your TBR from oldest to newest (by publication date).
Creating an author’s dropdown on TBR and Log so you can sort by the authors within those two lists.
Based on user feedback, we are redoing the stats we show after users rate a book. Soon, it will display the current and previous months in a more visually appealing style.
If a user rates a book as loved/crowned, we show an optional page that lets them recommend a similar book to others who loved it. This data helps us build better recommendations for that user and other readers.
Finish integrating our book processing automation into the app.
Further improvements to search quality.
Fix some bugs 😀
What are we building after that?
Imports from Goodreads and StoryGraph
A basic welcome process to help readers get settled in the app.
Folders so users can organize how they want.
What am I working on in the coming weeks?
I’m working with readers to map out the next batch of features we will build (book series tracking, favorite authors, and alerts so you don’t miss a new book from your favorite author or series).
And, I’m working with Roman on designs for a simple mobile app. We’ve realized that it is natural for many people to log their reading after finishing it, and they want to do that on their phones.
Very early mockup as we start building mockups.
Check out our roadmap here (updated every few weeks).
What am I reading?
I finished…
There Is No Antimemetics Division by qntm: This was my pick for our family book club, and we all enjoyed it. It is as if Memento were a science-fiction movie, and it is bonkers at times. Good read!
The Longest Battle by Jeffery H. Haskell: This is book nine in one of my favorite military-sci-fi adventure series. It is a fun old-school pulp adventure novel. If you need to turn your brain off and have an adventure, this is a great series for that.
I am reading...
Fleet Elements by Walter Jon Williams: This is book two in the Praxis series. It is military science fiction with a heavy dose of hard sci-fi to achieve realism in the space battles. It has the vibe of Master & Commander with old-school British officers aboard sailing vessels that happened to be in space. This is the 2nd series in this universe, and you should start with Dream Empire’s Fall before you jump to these if they sound good 😀
How the World Really Works? by Vaclav Smil: I’m excited about this one; it was my dad’s pick for our family book club. I’m starting it tonight!
What have I been up to outside of Book DNA?
I am training for the summer bike riding season and am sore and exhausted. But it feels good to be getting back into riding shape. I’m going to spend the month of July in the mountains, and I want to be ready for a lot of long rides.
Have a great weekend,
Thanks, Ben
P.S. My son is enjoying a good book from our family vacation in Crete, Greece, earlier this year 😀
