I've been so good with not spending money on books. But now I'm on my way home from my second bookstore in one week, spending a total of $[redacted so I can continue to dissociate 😭].

Why did you all leave me unsupervised?! Where was my handler?! How could you let this happen to me?!

cries under my pile of books

Hi all, hope you’re doing well! I was thinking about how I see so many vintage books when I go shopping at my local second-hand book store. I personally don’t make an effort to collect older books (my probably oldest book is from the 70s) but I was curious as to how old your oldest copies are and what title. Feel free to post a picture too!!💕

I hope all of you have an amazing weekend!! We're in the middle of a heat wave here in Germany and I hate it so so much. I feel like the only good thing about it is that I can stay inside all day and read (but at what cost?) Do you guys have any plans for the weekend? Which books are you excited to read? I recently finished The housemaid by Freida McFadden (after accidentally reading the book by Sarah A. Denzil, which I am not mad about, it was good) and I really liked it! So I got copies of the second and third part of the series and I can't wait to read those!

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 💜💙