Hey everyone! I’m in desperate need of a quick dopamine release. 😭 Can anyone recommend some soft spicy romance books? Standalones or short series only, please! I just want a fun, easy, no-brainer read to completely switch my brain off. Thank you! 💖

Have finished 37 books so far this year, which puts me ahead of my goal of 70. Standouts so far, in no particular order:

Victory, and Chance (two separate books), Joseph Conrad Angel Down, by Daniel Kraus Coffin Moon and Fever House by Keith Rosson Lonesome Dove, Larry McMurtry Persuasion, Jane Austen The Grand Sophy, Georgette Heyer There Is No Antimemetics Division, by qntm A Drop of Corruption, by Robert Jackson Bennett

DNFs so far:

Yesteryear Dungeon Crawler Carl (I know, I know!)

Threatening to be DNF'd:

Some Do Not, Ford Maddox Ford

Thought on upcoming reads:

The Hogfather (finally going to give Pratchett another go) The sequel to A Drop of Corruption.

Others?

The new app version, 1.1.92, is available on iOS and Android! This includes a host of bug fixes and improvements, which I will list for curious minds at the end of the post, but we have 4 major new product updates:

Audiobook rating: For any book for which you marked the format as "audiobook" or "tandem", there is a new Audiobook sub-rating, which also appears on the Book page. This is your rating for the audiobook experience, and can help you decide which books to read on audio! As we gather more audiobook rating data, we can do interesting things like suggest top audiobooks.

Add a book to the Pagebound database: The process for adding a new book to the PB database has changed due to some unexpected restrictions from Goodreads. We used to be able to add books simply by dropping in the book's Goodreads URL, but now we have a manual entry form. We always intended to have a manual entry option, as often Goodreads data isn't great and we now have the flexibility to add books that are not on Goodreads. When adding a new book, please take care to read the instructions!! This is very important to keep the integrity of our database.

Genre Tags: With this new "add book" process, we have also introduced a Tag system for books. Right now, we are collecting Main Type (fiction, non fiction), Book type (novella, novel, essay collection, etc), Audience (adult, ya, etc) and Main Genre (Fantasy, Biography, etc). These tags are already available on the book page, however we only have data for newly added books at the moment! We will be collecting this data and adding more robust tags for subgenre and themes in the coming weeks. Really excited about this!! We can do a lot of cool things once we have genre data, like show pages dedicated to each subgenre and have genre stats.

Librarian Program: With the new manual book entry system and our new ability to tag genres (and soon: series!!), we are rolling out a Librarian Program. Librarians will verify user-entered book data, help us collect genre and series data for existing books, clean up existing book entries, and help deduping efforts (where we have more than 1 listing for a single book). Soon, we will have a way for users to flag missing or incorrect book info, which Librarians will also respond to. This is a volunteer program and an integral part of building Pagebound -- if you are interested in becoming a volunteer, you can check out the application here!

Thank you for you patience and understanding as we roll out these new processes!

As for additional updates in this release:

• new image system that delivers & loads book cover images quicker
• more reliable comment posting / liking / upvoting when internet connection is weak on app
• new sorting options for follower/following lists
• Discuss page shows a review feed instead of the All Book Posts feed
• you can use markdown in List descriptions
• quite a few other small quality of life improvements, check out the Roadmap "released" section if you're curious!

Thanks everyone and happy reading, Jennifer + Lucy 💜💙

Right, it cannot just be me who goes into slumps during the summer. 😅

Summer in general is the worst time of the year for me. I hate the vibes and I most definitely hate the heat. And this season makes reading unenjoyable for me 🤣

For me, the perfect reading session has to be when it is dark outside despite it only being 6pm and you have to wrap yourself in heavy blankets for warmth. I love reading when I’m laying in bed with my blankets and pillows, with a pumpkin spice candle beside my bed. 🎃 And for this, autumn and winter are for sure my favourite reading seasons. I also prefer the vibes a whole lot more. And for me, I need to be content with my environment to be able to enjoy reading. If I’m sweaty and overheating, I will most definitely not enjoy my book as I will be too focused on the feeling of my skin heating up 😫

I’m curious to see if anyone else goes into reading slumps during certain seasons!