Hello! It's almost my birthday so my family wants to buy me a book as a birthday gift haha so they asked me to request one. I really love romantasy books but am looking for one that is standalone and preferably has a happy ending. I love any kind of romance but my favorite is slow burn. Thank you so much!

Hi everyone, we're considering making quite a big change to Pagebound and want to get the community's opinion - please leave your feedback here!

We have debated for a long while the merits of upvotes/downvotes vs a pure "like" system. We deeply believe in community moderation and community curation, and felt that an upvote/downvote system would provide the tooling for such community moderation.

In practice, we've also seen a lot of downsides with this system. While there's no guidance for how to use downvotes, many people use it as a "disagree" button which can make people with unpopular opinions feel unwelcome to share their opinion (for example, if you share that you dislike a beloved character, you may receive downvotes).

Moving to a "likes" only system would hopefully foster an environment where opinions are discussed rather than silently judged, and people are less anxious to engage in the forums.

In the past there have been some very strong opinions both for and against downvotes - let us know what you think below

The next major app release (1.2.0) is now available on iOS and Android - this one comes with a ton of updates, so make sure your apps are updated to see the latest! Web users, the majority of these updates are already on web (with a few exceptions, addressed below):

Midnight Theme (aka dark mode): very excited to share our version of dark mode! You can choose your theme in Account & Settings -> Preferences. The Midnight theme incorporates accessibility principals (high contrast, sparse use of bright color, no pure blacks/pure whites) while maintaining Pagebound's unique visual identity. We know this is highly anticipated on web as well - we're working on it! Midnight will be available on web hopefully this fall, latest this winter.

Notifications Upgrade: Notifications are split into categories so you can reference what is most important to you. You can also sort/filter your notifications, and mark them read/unread one by one by clicking the blue dot (if the dot is gray, click it to mark the notification as unread).

Browse your library when adding books: When adding a book to a list, your plan, or a shelf, you now have the option to search from "All Books" or "My Books". Tapping "My Books" lets you browse your own library, and filter by status/shelf. This is helpful if you want to browse your tbr while adding books to your plan, for example.

Library Improvements: You can now search, sort, and filter your library with additional sort/filter options (such as average rating and owned/not owned) and view your library books in list view or book cover grid view

Improved Book Status Modal: The book status modal (ie the popup where you change a book's status and add to shelves) got a major quality of life update: you can edit read dates, format, and page length in the modal when a book is in "reading" or when you move a book to "finished", you can create a new shelf in the modal, and you can search your shelves

New Preferences & Account Management options: A new feed preference was added (toggle on/off seeing posts from people you follow when the book is not in your library) as well as library management tools (library export & mass editing/deleting library options)

Discover Quests & Discover Lists upgrade: Discover Quests got new categories and will show new quests in each category on every site/app visit. The Quest card and List card shown on discover got upgrades to show more relevant info & make them more browsable

Additional tiny upgrades: Pull down to refresh your profile, browsing past plans shows in descending month order, plan performance enhancements so loading and editing is snappier, UI cleanup, and various bug fixes.

Community Updates We announced the Fall Readalong book picks last week - if you missed the announcement, head to the Seasonal Readalong page to see the picks! The Fall Readalong starts September 1st.

We also have partnered with Simon Maverick to bring a Dark Romance limited time quest - we've gotten so many requests for a Dark Romance quest, so we're very excited to have this out!

This was a long one, thank you if you made it this far 🙏 Happy reading! Jennifer + Lucy