Literal is the place to keep track of what you've read and discover your next favourite book through the people you trust. It's designed around the idea that trust beats algorithms when it comes to book recommendations and that we are all trusted by someone.

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.

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

@ellenchisa @pietterheyden @nljz @0xsven @stockmarr @dotmethod Nice idea ! Congratulations on the launch! 🚀

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 sounds appealing to me, seeing people interpret differently on a book. Congrats on the launch!

@min_zhou a "good book" is such a subjective experience. We like to foster personal, diverse and nuanced opinions on Literal. Thank you for the vote!

I love tracking stuff, organizing things, recording accomplishments of various sorts as a way to, somehow, make them more persistent. That goes for my reading too. Way back I abandoned Goodreads because it felt outdated, cluttered, and simply bad. Literal is the opposite of Goodreads! My reading definitely leveled up after discovering Literal - quick, clean, beautiful and easy to use. And it does exactly what I want it to - keep track of my reading, having shelves of what I want to read, and help me discover books that inspire me to read even more. Big plus that they've got a real nice open AI, making it possible to roll your own widgets, browser extensions and what not.

I joined the 2021 beta after looking for a Goodreads alternative. I mainly use this for keeping track of my reading and they have a lightweight embed widget for displaying books from your lists on a website. In early 2023 they opened up the CMS to "Librarians", select community members who want to improve the book metadata in the database. The UI is good, but I've noticed a lot of products in this category are starting to look similar. The community is good, but many of the readers I want to follow are using different apps, I find myself wishing there was a way I can subscribe to people on other platforms through something like RSS.

I use it every day, it´s amazing

Literal

Track your reading and discover your next favourite book

Literal 2.0

Literal Launches

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