I spent far too long doubling up and using Pagebound alongside GoodReads but I realised this weekend that I absolutely do not need to do that. It is a waste of my time and it still gives clicks/engagements to Bezos.

Pagebound has delivered a far more enjoyable platform with nary an evil billionaire in sight! Thank you for all your hard work.

first off all I want to say, that the aesthetics of this app are 100% me, and as someone who made their own gameified reading tracker in notion, I love the direction this app is taking + I think it has amazing potential. but, sadly, it loses me in the actual execution of its UI & features. here's some constructive feedback to the devs 💕

UI:

• Homepage is too focused on your social feed and not enough focused on your reading. I know that this is a social reading tracker, but it is still a book tracker. We have the ability to make TBRs, plan our reading, and our yearly goals, join quests (all amazing features) but the information is hidden behind menus, and not visible anywhere else on the app. This makes the features, at least imo, fall short in execution. The homepage should give me an overview of my activity, as well as my social feed, and not only the book I'm currently reading. Suggestion: Show yearly goal, let us select if we want to see our yearly or monthly planned books, and how much of these we've read (and cherry on top would be how many pages/ day I would need to read in order to achieve my goal of reading my planned books). Optionally you could let the user choose what information is being displayed on their Homepage, so everyone gets a tailored experience to their needs.

• Quests: one of the features that made me download the app, sadly the one I'm most dissapointed with. a) as a free user I can't make my own quests. sucks, but ok. b) no filter function! this makes it basically unusable, sorry. This is such a basic functionality - I should be able to filter quests by: a specific book/ genre/ books on my TBR/ books on my interested shelf. c) the algo doesn't show me relevant quests either, so I'm left with doomscrolling until I find something that could potentially sound like something I'd be happy to engage with

• Library: planning function is cool, but I wish the UI was better here. Instead of going to plan > to month > and see your monthly plans I would suggest 2 buttons on top (+ monthly plan; + yearly plan), and then underneath show a visual of your planned books (similarly of how the homepage shows all your current reads)

• Discover: similar users are NOT shown by order of % similarity. how can it be that my first suggested person has 6% compatibility, and I need to scroll 10 users down to see someone whos reading tastes are 30% similar. please, I beg, make a sort function.

Misc. Features:

• Readalongs: cool, but wish we had community driven readalongs, and an ability to make our own.
• Profile: a) again, I dont see my planned books anywhere here either. b) let us choose our own profile pictures c) if on the profile of someone else it makes sense to see 'my taste' first, and the currently reading list second. but if I click on my own profile, I think those two should be switched.
• Library: I don't think 'reading' and TBR should be exclusive shelves. Let me see if I read a book that already was on my TBR.
• I don't think this app needs a daily reading tracker or whatnot, but I do think it would be nice to have a yearly breakdown of books/ month and genre distribution.
• The downvote feature is, I think, a bad decision. With how incredibly biased people are about some of their favourite books/ series I do think that it will silence a lot of nuanced discourse about said very hyped series/ books from authors that have huge fanbases. I can see this feature being abused very easily to shut down negative discourse.

anyway, that was all, I wish the devs all the best, and am interested to see how this app will improve in the future ✨

wish we could display all of our badges. it doesn't feel super great to have completed quests if your badges dont display like dat u know

Hi, can someone explain the social norms around lists and downvotes for me? I thought lists were for sharing curated book collections around a theme. One of mine got two downvotes right off the bat. No comments, just downvotes. I don’t get why people would downvote someone else’s reading habits. I’d always assumed downvotes were for bad behavior. Am I missing a social cue? Is this normal around here?

this might be dumb, but can someone explain the level badges. like how do they work. for example, i'm on level 3 and i have 250 points. if i have 350 points, am i going to be on level 4??? i ask because i have seen people with 5000 points and on level 7.... thanks!

wish we could display all of our badges. it doesn't feel super great to have completed quests if your badges dont display like dat u know

hi all! sorry to add another book rec request to the club. 🙈 i want to get in the holiday spirit (i know, i know, it's only the first week of november) but i haven't seen any lists, quests, or posts in forums about sapphic christmas romances. hell, i'll take any sapphic christmas book as long as it's good. do y'all have any good recs?