The Hardcover Blog

Surprise! Adam is on vacation so you’re getting the November report from me, Ste! In case you don’t know me, I’m on the design side of Hardcover. Since autumn is THE season to get into a thoughtful, introspective mood, I’ve been thinking about what the most challenging thing is when building a startup like we’ve […]

For spooky season we’re focusing on bugs, performance, API docs and the new dashboard/stats pages.

A long day of debugging led to a better solution: Signed URLs.

Set your edition for every book, reading journals, progress updates and more.

Book progress, stats, hardcover live, open sourcing Hardcover and more.

Huge growth, viral videos, Pride month and improved data across the site.

Massive updates to make things easier for librarians and populate even more data for books across Hardcover.

Letterbooks, new navigation and preparation for open sourcing our codebase.

A new way to find books on Hardcover.

What’s new on Hardcover, edit authors and series, navigation & dashboard plans, Letterbooks!

The State of Hardcover, income and expenses, Discord Linked Roles and updates on what we’re doing next.

One of my favorite parts of Hardcover is hearing feedback and formulating a plan from it. All feedback – no matter how difficult to hear – is helpful if it’s coming from a good place. Our 2024 State of Hardcover Survey recently wrapped up and we’ve spent the last week or two analyzing the results […]

Our monthly look at what’s happening on Hardcover and what we’ve been up to.

A technical look at how we optimized the performance of Hardcover over the last year.

A look back at 2023, The Hardcover Year in Books, Hardcover Live and a look at what’s next.

A look back at the most popular books from the last year.

2023 Year in Books, List updates and continuing work on Discussions.

Two days of Brandon Sanderson, the Cosmere and geeking out with other fans of fantasy.

Lots of bug fixes and general improvements, as well as our plan for the next few months!

Halloween book recommendations from Hardcover. This spooky season, curl up with a book, some pumpkin pie, or a latte, and let the Halloween stories send a shiver down your spine.

October’s updates: ProductHunt launch, new homepage, light mode fixes, privacy and app updates, and more.

Switching to a hosted service ended up reducing our image hosting costs to almost nothing.

So many new updates this month!

A look into what we’ve been up to in the last few months.

We, here at Hardcover, always love a good book. And when that book is written by one of our community members, that’s even better.Because the community is one of the things that pushed us to experiment, innovate, and, in the end, do better. That is the case with Britt and her book about being productive […]

Preparing for our next big release, updates to the book page, new search much more.

How great it will be to read all day long, discovering new ideas. But life isn’t fair because we have to cook, work and buy new books. Luckily, for those moments when we cannot dive into a book, we have podcasts.From light-hearted conversations, to like talks and interviews with writers, these podcasts are the perfect […]

We’re preparing for a major launch in the coming weeks! Here’s what to expect.

Our monthly recap of popular reads, upcoming book releases, featured prompts, community spotlights and product updates.

Edit books, select editions, site improvements, book page, search improvements and more.

We’re looking for the first few librarians to join! Are you up for it?

Hardcover is self-funded with a small user base, so we don’t have swathes of quantitative data at our disposal. But we still need a shared understanding of the needs, expectations, and behaviors of the readers we’re building for. We still need user personas.

Jules is here to help you find your next book and answer any book related questions you have.

How to highlight your book favorites by making the most of your public stats page.

Thinking about making the move away from Twitter? We’re a much different social network, but here’s what we’re focused on now and into the future.

We lovingly created this infographic to help you find the science fiction or fantasy book from the past decade that’s right for you.

A feature by feature comparison of Hardcover and Goodreads with screenshots.

Airlists are more than just lists: they’re a tool for you to use to find or share that perfect book from.

Match percentage is a score from 1% to 100% for how much we believe you’ll enjoy a book.

What a year! Here’s a look at everything we learned during the first year building Hardcover.

A look into how we’re organizing book data at the book and edition level with users first.

Want some nifty stickers? We got you covered.

It’s finally happening – our beta release is just around the corner.

Taking on Goodreads and Amazon isn’t something we take lightly. Here are some of the reasons why we believe it’s important.

Prompts are polls. They’re a new way to ask a question where readers can answer to find the best books.

After a bunch of discussions with users we have an idea on what the social side of Hardcover will be. Want a sneak peak?

Check out 5 Spooky Books to Read This Halloween!

We’re working out the bugs and getting ready for a public release! Join our mailing list to be notified first.

Our manifesto.

We’re trying something different on Hardcover: allow readers to create multiple goals to spark motivation.

Showing the right information about your reading habits can inspire more reading and help you find books you’ll love even more.

Book organization is a core piece of any book tracking application. This enables easily seeing books organized in a bunch of different ways. Here’s a look at some of the ways we’re tackling this at Hardcover.

This is an email that went out to the Hardcover email list on June 20, 2021. Join the list to get these when they’re sent.

Every developer has a tech stack they consider to be the best. Mine has changed over time – and is changing again for Hardcover.

I’ve always loved reading blogs and other stories that document a companies founding. We’re going to be doing just chat – sharing what we learn and our progress along the way.

Our list of potential names was… interesting.

It’s official – we have a group working together on this project! Here’s a look at how we’re kicking things off.

It started as a Tweet, moved over to a brainstorm and now it’s actually happening.