Afterword

The simplest personal library for readers

8 followers

The simplest personal library for readers

8 followers

Afterword is a simple personal library that makes book tracking and sharing reads with friends easier. Afterword features an activity feed, a recommendations page, and the library page to track your own books and see your friend's profiles.

Launch tags:Books

Launch Team

Viktor.comAn AI coworker that actually does the work

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Are you using open library for your book data? If not, why not?

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5yr ago

Afterword

Maker

@raymond_berger hey Ray! We're actually using Ingram for our book data https://www.ingramcontent.com/ - the rationale being that Goodreads also uses it as its primary data source and it usually has cleaner data. it seems OpenLibrary has gotten a lot better since we first started working on this, though, so maybe there's some integrations for us to do in the future!

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5yr ago

Can you comment more about how the experience is improved over Good Reads?

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5yr ago

Afterword

Maker

@lsherman my two main issues with goodreads were these: 1. confusing UI. you could write notes for your books, but you had to click through layers of multiple buttons to get there (I didn't even know this feature existed until a friend told me). going to a book details page was messy, disorganized, and filled with things that I don't want to see (Reader Q&A, lists with this book, etc). that's a theme with goodreads - nothing you expect to be able to do is easily accessible, and the website throws arbitrary buttons, links, and action items at you. a good example is the profile dropdown on the top right - it shows me _13_ items, of which i've only ever clicked on two. i could make a whole laundry list of simple actions i would expect to be very easy to do that goodreads overcomplicates or hides away. 2. lack of engagement - following my friends isn't even helpful on goodreads much of the time, because in my experience, lots of people check out of using it and never touch it again. To resolve these, we made moving around books super simple, we made creating lists super simple, and we made seeing your friends activity, writing notes, and making recommendations super simple. that's a theme of what we're building - distilling down only what really matters for readers.

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5yr ago