Fun size! 🦥

Two bonus ones I couldn’t fit in 😀

Also, don’t forget our bookshelves, like Iran (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.

It took a while to finish all the legal steps, but Márton is now officially a co-founder at Book DNA. 😃

Márton is the developer I hired in the early days of Book DNA to build the platform, and we’ve worked together for a long time. He is a great guy, and I can’t think of anyone better to help us move forward as we build this app!

If you want to meet our small but mighty Team, go here.

This feature is live and now shipped! Users are using it and giving us feedback 😀

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:

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

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:

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 😃.

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.

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.

(Sign up here if you want to help beta test)

We are talking to Nielsen and Ingram about licensing their book databases, but it is looking to be quite expensive. This would increase the quality of our book coverage and book cover images. We will finish testing these and decide in October on the best path forward.

Long-term, this will allow us to create book pages on BookDNA.com and cover all the books an author has, rather than only those recommended on the website. And improve our book coverage and book cover images.

This is going well but blocked by the improved book database work. We are aiming to ship this feature in October.

I’ll be doing a lot more personal and user testing this week as we work to finish this.

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:

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

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

We don’t have a date yet, but I think we're looking good for a late Fall soft launch. Maybe as late as Winter, but I’ll know more in a month or so.

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 🤩.

Have a great weekend,
Thanks, Ben

P.S. A very high-altitude military road in the Italian Alps from my September bike trip.