Literal is the place to keep track of what you've read and discover your next favourite book through the people you trust. We celebrate individual taste, putting trust in friends over algorithms and connecting people around what they love.
I'm a huge fan of Literal! I've been looking for a way to move off of Goodreads for years, mostly because I'm convinced it hasn't been updated since I started using it in 2007.
Literal had all the features I want - easy import of my Goodreads books, a great API, and a way to embed what I've recently read on my own website (at one pointed I'd written my own script to do this, but this was far easier).
It's also really cool to be able to see who has decided to read a book based on your recommendation.
This is amazing! Congrats on the launch. Out of curiosity - how do you make money to fund the app? Doesn't seem like there's any pricing on the website.
@bwish55 thanks a lot! The app is - and always will be - completely free. We are planning to slowly roll out book sales. The goal here is not just to make money, but support creators, authors and book stores. We will roll this out step by step on a national level. You will be able to buy the books directly through Literal while we’re splitting the revenue with the person/creator/store that the book was discovered through :)
I've been using Literal for a few months as a beta user. Such a good alternative to Goodreads is long overdue.
I am especially happy that the team quickly responded to my feature request and introduced an embeddable bookshelf widget.
Congrats on the official launch!
I really appreciate this elegant app after using the beta already for months.
Meanwhile because of the amount of the reviews and book collection, I am also using goodreads.
Here I have several wishes for the app:
- sync with goodreads latest activities (instead of always importing from scratch)
- sharing local physical libraries as community event (would be great to mark people's fav library)
- for the cozy margins, would be also cool to increase the font a bit (always feel that the cursor have to travel extra miles to reach the button e.g search field. #fitts'law)
- would be cool to also select 3rd party book review source (google, goodreas, amazon, or douban book)
Congrats for the release and good luck replacing goodreads.@pietterheyden
Hey guys! Love your work! What do you reckon are best tips for finding Literal peeps with similar taste to you? Can you upload massive GR libraries as well now too? Andddddd what is the hottest requested feature coming soon?
I am https://literal.club/Gilly!!!
@sarah_christine_gill Thank you !! Great to have you on Literal!
Firstly, book clubs and the explore page are a great way to find new interesting people to follow. Either by following conversation threads in clubs, or through personalised recommendations based on your library and network that you can find on the explore page.
Secondly, yes, massive libraries are welcome on Literal. The largest imports we've seen were more than 11,000 titles which is an absolutely impressive reading list! And completely humbling compared my current reading goal of 20 books for 2022.
Thirdly, I think we'll keep the mystery around upcoming features for now. You'll have to keep an eye on our newsletter, twitter, or instagram for updates :) Unless @pietterheyden would like to give away any teasers?
Hey everyone & thanks @ellenchisa for hunting!
One year ago, we launched Literal on Product Hunt. It’s been a wild ride since then.
Our invite-only community continued growing while we built our the foundation of our platform and worked our way down a never-ending list of features. After tens of thousands of invites sent and after one year of assiduous work, we are once again inaugurating a new stage in our development:
Today we are finally opening the doors to the public.
Here’s a quick overview of what we’ve worked on in the last year, in no particular order:
- iPhone & Android app 📱
- Book clubs 🧑🤝🧑
- Personalised book recommendations 📚
- Reading goals and reading progress 🎯
- Direct messaging 💬
- Literal Librarian 🏛️
- Barcode scanner 📷
- Public API and website widget ⚙️
- Dark mode 🌓
- and many others...
We believe that readers are non-homogenous and cannot be treated en masse: a book may be terrible for some, while at the same time incredibly great for others. And we have built a platform that celebrates this type of diversity. Rating averages are the opposite of what Literal stands for. Instead, we have built a space where you can get nerdy about the things you find exciting.
Thank you for your ongoing support and continuous ideas and feedback. Without you, Literal wouldn’t be what it is today - a home for every reader and a space for every taste, the more niche the better.
We’d love to hear what you all think and are happy to answer any questions.
Piet, co-founder of Literal
Excited to give Literal a go. I never got into Goodreads. Even after the more recent facelifts, it still looks outdated and needlessly complicated. Literal, design-wise, appears perfect.
And you even have an embeddable website widget?! What am I gonna do with my own now? 🤨
Never been more excited to discover a product! Since I started using Literal the team has continued to make significant improvements every month. At this point, it can fully replace Goodreads for me, no small feat, and it's even better and cleaner! The team is amazing and they truly listen and respond to feedback. And the Literal community is truly great.
This looks really cool. I am a Goodreads user and would consider switching. I agree with the comments below that Goodreads probably hasn't been updated or added new features in a while... but do you have a quick resource where I can see the benefits of Literal vs. Goodreads?
@pietterheyden Having never been a user of Goodreads, I did build out my own reading library in Notion. I'm very excited to check out Literal 2.0 as it ticks every box that I've been looking for!
@benjaminpolymathologistcom that's amazing! I'm happy that we've convinced you to join, whereas Goodreads hasn't. Thanks for the upvote!
PS: If you want to show off your Literal library on your own website, we have both a ready-made widget, and an API too.
Lola