Hey guys! I already posted this in a comment under the latest announcement post, but I'm posting it here as well because I think it got lost.

Regarding seasonal readalongs and special events: I noticed that for the current seasonal challenge and the pride 2025 special event we only have fiction books. I think it would be lovely if we had just one informational book to go with all the fiction. So that could for example be one informational book about the holiday Dia de los Muertos (the origins, the folklore, the traditions, etc) or one book about the significance of pride (the history, important figures, etc.).

I think adding just one non-fiction option can only be beneficial. Since you only need to read one book to get the badge, people who only read fiction can simply skip the informational book, while others might get inspired to learn about an important topic through the group event. This way we cultivate learning and growing a better educated community!

Just an idea! Let me know if you have any thoughts on this!

(note that I don't know what all the previous readalongs/events were, so I'm only speaking from limited knowledge. I've only seen two readalongs and one special event since I joined here!)

Hi everyone, a quick announcement about Seasonal + Special Event Readalongs:

For those of you that have been around since the summer, you may have participated in our first Special Event Readalong for Pride. This was a huge hit and fostered PB-wide discussion on queer characters and stories (and bonus: the badge was rad). To continue fostering discussions on more niche and diverse books & voices, we'll be hosting a Special Event readalong once a season.

Our second Special Event will run from October 15 - November 15 and will be (drumroll please...) Dia de los Muertos 2025! Head to the Discuss tab and click on the box above the feeds to check out the selections and see the new badge (and if you're new, click the purple info icon next to the Fall Readalong header on Discuss to learn more about readalongs on Pagebound).

Since we're committing to one Special Event a season, we don't want to overwhelm folks with too many Readalong books. While you only need to read 1 book in a Special Event to earn the badge (and there is no "completionist" sparkly badge), we will limit Special Event picks to 3 books. Starting with the Winter 2025 Readalong, Seasonal Readalongs will only include 4 books. This way, you still only have to read a max total of 5 books per season to earn all Readalong badges available.

As for product updates, looks like most of you have already noticed some of the bigger changes on the site but for those that missed it, the following has been updated over the past 2 weeks:

• Discover Books got a little makeover: every day, we feature a new emoji and show you books whose ratings most frequently feature that emoji. Some of the emojis in rotation will be seasonally themed :) we also show you books that were the most discussed/finished/TBR'd yesterday, so the featured books will change daily and will showcase less mega popular titles.
• the Similar Users list got an update. Before, we were showing any user with over 30 points in that list; now, we prioritize active accounts, so you can find people you're more likely to actually engage with. I'll be making further tweaks to this in the coming weeks.
• No more HTML tags in posts/comments, please use markdown instead! See the Pagebound Club post on this for more info.
• We will save your total page count and pre-populate it when you post using Pages to calculate progress.

We're still beta testing the app but are on track for and end of month release!

Happy Reading, Jennifer & Lucy

Hello!

I recently joined Pagebound and I want to replace Goodreads completely, so I wanted to request a feature.

I really think book reviews from Pagebound should be accessible through Google without signing up.

When you look up a book you get reviews from every other platform, except Pagebound (the best one!), because you're required to sign up to see them.

I feel like the reviews should be the only one feature accessible to everybody on the internet without logging in, and everything else should require people to make an account. This is how Goodreads works, and that makes the reviews on Goodreads way more valuable to the community.

I truly hope this will be a thing in the future, as I think it will benefit the book community as a whole, more people will be encouraged to ditch Goodreads completely, and overall Pagebound users will be more motivated to write good book reviews, knowing they will actually reach a decent number of people. I think this would also increase the amount of people signing up to Pagebound, because they would get a taste of the amazing UX, and the positive community spirit.

I really hope the founders consider this.

If anybody likes this idea or has any thoughts, I'd love to hear from you in the comments!

Edit: I was informed that we had an issue with crawlers and that it was the reason Pagebound was privated recently-ish. This seems like a very reasonable decision!

Hi all, wanted to give you guys a heads up without sending everyone a notification in Founder Announcements 😅

• HTML embedding is no longer allowed on Pagebound. If you try to embed HTML (so think: any of those fancy tags to post an image or do text formatting) you will get an error. There's quite a few reasons for this, but the most pressing one is that HTML does not work on apps (and we are quite close to launching the PB app!)
• Markdown is allowed on Pagebound now! We use CommonMark, guide here: https://commonmark.org/help/ . This will set us up to have inline spoiler tags in the near future
• In an effort to encourage discussion, we've changed Post & Comment points. Post and Comments are both worth 5 points now to reflect the fact that comments are just as important to discussion as posts. We encourage you to check out the book forums for other posts as you read!
• Also regarding points, we will no longer award points for commenting on activity items in your feed (so things like "jennifer earned a badge" or "jennifer joined a quest"). You will earn points for commenting on Posts and Lists only (and, for responding to comments in posts and lists ofc). We want to make sure all comments and posts on PB are authentic and not for point farming ;)
• Quality of life update: when you make a post from a certain page, we now save the total page count and autofill it next time you make a post. No more flipping to the back of your book each time you want to post!

Thanks all, Jennifer