[_hzw]

To me, the GoodReads model of book reviews, where one user has one review per book, seems quite limited and obsolete. If you were truly an avid reader in the past, you probably underlined text on the pages, wrote notes in the margins, and even kept a diary of your thoughts while reading. A new GoodReads should offer these features. I was inspired by the "How to Japanese" blog, where the blogger once tried liveblogging while reading 1Q84[1]. How wonderful would it be to see what others are thinking when I am reading the same book on the same page?

[1]: https://howtojaponese.com/2009/05/29/1q84-liveblog/

[bwb]

Wow, I am surprised, to me that sounds terrible and that it would distract from the entire experience of reading/thinking. I write a bit after I read a book as I think through it, or it invades my daydreams.

Do you do this for nonfiction only, or fiction as well? Very curious to hear more about what value this gives you!

[_hzw]

For both, actually. And I realize I didn’t phrase it very well. I didn’t mean checking out what others think in real time, but only afterward, and async.

And it doesn't have to be a long and complete thought, like an after-reading review, right? Most of the time, it's just, "I like this sentence," "I've had the same thought once," or "I disagree, but I like the author's reasoning," etc. These are ephemeral thoughts that occur during reading, and most of the time, they are lost. It would be nice to have a convenient way to capture them.

StoryGraph actually offers a very close feature called "Track progress", with which one can, well, track progress and add notes correspondingly. But it's only enabled when the status is "currently reading". Ideally, it should extend to any status, one can certainly have afterthoughts much later after reading a book, or even pre-thoughts before reading it. :D

[stehardcover]

You're probably gonna like what were working on right now. It basically covers what you described. We've been wondering if it's actually a valid use case, and seeing that there are readers who'd want to do that is reassuring. Would you want those notes public? And if they're public, how would you feel about people replying to them?

[_hzw]

I will let users decide whether they want comments or not. I've also considered public/private notes, as I am working on something similar, and I've reached the conclusion that people post on a web app because they want to be seen; otherwise, they would just write in their diary. Private notes always give me a sense of false privacy, as anyone with admin access to the database can read whatever private things you've written, unless you make it clear to users that "private" means not viewable by other users but not private from the admins. An alternative is to offer an offline app, private notes never sync to the server (cross-device syncing can be done by iCloud, for example).

[bwb]

Gotcha, I can dig it :)

So like a nightly check-in in some ways, I read x much and had these thoughts. Like a little book diary.

[_hzw]

I know this is very niche, so I implemented it myself :)

https://luvdb.com/read/_hzw/checkins/

[stehardcover]

Okay, I think this partly answers my previous question. Looks great! We're looking to also let you add where you actually are in the book (page/minute) so the result can be close to an async book club. You'll also be able to set privacy, so they can be private notes or only shared with your network.