What's new
The features and improvements we've shipped, newest first.
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The front page shows what the app tells you
Beside the tour on the front page there is now a second clip: a phone's lock screen as the app's notifications arrive, for a box you pass, a shelf you follow and a neighbour asking for a book. Both play silently on a loop and pause when you like, and both wait for you to press play if your device is set to reduce motion.
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iPhone: a page for the book you haven't added yet
The phone's book page, the one that says what a book is, how it is rated, where to buy it and who near you has a copy, only existed for books somebody had already put on a shelf. The rows where you most want it, a scanned shelf you are checking or a catalogue suggestion under a title you are typing, had nothing to open. Each of those rows carries a small (i) now, and it opens the same page the website gives those books: the synopsis and rating when the catalogue has them, the copies near you with a count and a map, and the little libraries where somebody has seen one, phrased as how long ago. If nobody near you has it, the page says so once, and there is a Want this that puts it on your reading list, so you hear when a copy turns up. Pressing it twice is safe; the second press just says it is already there.
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The front page shows the app itself
Until now the front page described the app in sketches. It now shows the real thing: a silent thirty-second tour of the app on a phone, filmed as it is, from the map to a book club, playing on a quiet loop with a line saying what it shows. Pause it whenever you like. If your device is set to reduce motion, it waits for you to press play.
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iPhone: the barcodes you pass over on the way to a photo are kept
While you line up a photo of a shelf, the camera is already reading any barcode that crosses the frame. Until now each of those reads behaved as if you had aimed at it on purpose: it looked the book up, filed it on the shelf, and if the catalogue had never heard of it, put the type-it-in card over whatever you were doing. Those reads are collected quietly now, looked up once each, and when you take the photo they sit at the top of the review, ticked and marked Read from barcode, above the books the photo itself found. A barcode is the one thing the camera cannot misread the way it misreads a spine, so those rows need no second look. A small count in the viewfinder says how many barcodes it has seen so far, and nothing lands on a shelf until you say so.
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iPhone: a club can read alongside something that isn't a book, on the phone too
The website let a club's organiser pair the current read with a podcast episode, a video or an article, since the thing a club reads alongside is not always a book. The phone showed nothing where that link should have been. It now draws a row under the current book with the title and the verb for what it is, Listen to, Watch or Read, and tapping it opens the link in your browser. Nothing is embedded and nothing is fetched behind your back. Attaching or changing the link is still done on the website for now.
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iPhone: adding a book by hand asks how you're sharing it
Typing a book in, or scanning its barcode, always put it on the shelf as free to take, and if you meant to lend it or sell it you found the four choices later, on the book's own page. Photographing a shelf has asked since the summer, and the website asks on every route. The typed card now has one collapsed row under the book's details, How do you want to share it?, with free, borrow, rent and buy behind it and free chosen to begin with. The row remembers your last answer for the rest of the session and says so on its face, so a stack of books to lend takes one decision rather than one per book. A barcode scan still adds the book at once, and the note that says Added now says how it was listed as well. A book going into a little library is free, always, and that path does not ask.
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iPhone: a reading list can tell you when a book on it turns up nearby
Reading lists on the website have had a switch for a while: tell me when a book on this list turns up nearby, on unless you say otherwise. The phone delivered the alerts but had no switch, so a list that had gone noisy could only be quieted from the site. The switch is now on the list's edit screen, with the same sentence under it the website uses. It only appears on your own reading lists, since it is nobody else's to set.
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iPhone: the Are you sure? question opens on the button you pressed
Cancelling a request on the exchange screen put its confirmation at the top of the screen, a long way from the button at the bottom that raised it, with its little pointer aimed at nothing. Ten other confirmations across the app did the same, because every one of them was attached to the screen rather than to its button. Each now opens beside the control you pressed. Four that are raised from a button in the navigation bar open as a centred alert instead, because on the current iOS a confirmation from up there loses its Cancel button, which is the way the sign-out one had already been fixed a fortnight ago. Nothing about the wording or the buttons changed.
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iPhone: share a little library, a bookshop or a library from its page
A little library's page on the phone had no way to send it to anyone, and neither did a bookshop's or a branch library's. Each now has the same share control the book page has, at the top of the page, and it hands the share sheet the place's page on this site, so whoever receives it can open it in a browser without the app. The link carries a small tag saying it came from a share, which is how we can tell whether sharing boxes does anything. Public club pages and other readers' profiles are next.
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iPhone: the first book starts with a choice, and the camera waits until you make it
A new account's first screen offered one button, Add your first book, and pressing it opened the shelf, whose only offer was the camera. The button now opens the three ways adding a book has always had: scan a barcode, photograph the shelf, or type the title. The phone asks for the camera only after you have picked one of the two that need it, and Not now leaves the question unasked for another day with the first screen still there. Typing a title never asks at all. Two smaller things came with it. Signing in with Apple used to skip the step where you choose a handle, because Apple sends your name along and the app took a name for a finished profile; it now asks for the handle like every other sign-up, with your name already filled in. And an older account that had never chosen a handle could find itself on that step with no way past it; it now has a Not now, since the site had already given the account a name of its own.
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A box's updates say when its books were last checked on
A book box's list of recent updates only ever knew about books arriving. So a box somebody stocked in June and a neighbour has checked every week since read as abandoned, with "reported 10 books, 3 months ago" sitting directly above an inventory saying those books were seen two days ago. Checking a box counts as tending it, and now it says so: "@ben confirmed 6 books inside", on its own line, on the day it happened. A visit that left something and checked the rest is one line saying both, because it was one person at the box once. Who checked is a handle and nothing else, the same as reporting, and a book a moderator has hidden leaves no trace either way.
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Say what a little library is like to stand at
A box's page knew what OpenStreetMap knew about it, which is usually a street and not much else. Now anyone signed in can tap what they saw there: covered from rain, lit at night, somewhere to sit, a kids shelf, wheelchair accessible, always stocked. The page shows how many people said so, next to the box's details, and a tap takes your own report back. Bookshops and libraries take a shorter list of their own: seating, a kids section, a restroom, Wi-Fi, wheelchair accessible. It is a count of who said so, never a verdict, and there is nothing to type, so there is nothing to moderate.
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Every book has a page, including the ones nobody here has yet
A book page says what the book is, what it is rated, where to buy one, and who near you has a copy. Until now it existed only for books somebody here had already added, so the one moment you most want it, choosing between two editions while you add a book or check a scanned shelf, was the moment it was missing. Pick a book in the add form, or open a cover in a scan review, and there is a link through to its page now, in a new tab so you do not lose what you were typing. The page shows the catalogue's rating beside the edition, and when somebody near you has a copy it will show you all of them on the map.
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Blocking someone clears what they sent you
Blocking has always stopped somebody reaching you from that moment on, but anything they had already sent stayed in your notifications, with their name on it. Now blocking clears those too, in both directions and whatever they were about: a comment they left in your club or on a book box, a request to join, a poll, a meeting, and the trail from any swap the two of you had. The swap itself stays on your exchanges page, and your message threads are untouched. If you unblock the person later the cleared notifications do not come back.
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Blocking holds on join requests at a club you moderate
Blocking somebody already took their request to join off your list at a club you host. At a club you moderate rather than own, it did not: the request still sat among the people waiting, with the note they wrote under their name and a button beside it that would have let them in. It is no longer there for you, and it is no longer yours to answer either way. The person who hosts the club still sees it and still answers it, because the club is theirs and the block is yours. The person who asked is never told that anyone blocked them, and sees the same waiting card they always did until the host answers.
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A claimed shop's page shows the clubs it runs
The page of a bookshop or a library that someone has claimed already showed the shelves and reading lists that account publishes. It now shows the book clubs they run, too, with the roster size and the cover of what the club is reading. A club that is invite-only is still named nowhere. Nothing shows when the account runs no public club.
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iPhone: a book opens from wherever you find it
A book you could see was not always a book you could open. A book on somebody else's shelf did nothing when you tapped it. Neither did the list of what is on a little library's shelf, nor the books on a club's vote for what to read next. You could read the title and the author and go no further, which is a poor place for a dead end, because the page behind a book is the one that says who near you has it. All of those rows open now, on to the same book page the map has always opened. On a vote between a pair of books, each book is its own tap, since a pair is two books and there is nothing called the option to open. Voting is still the rest of the row. A book sitting in a little library now reads as what it is, free to take with nobody to ask, rather than as a copy somebody has to agree to lend you. The pins on the map got the other half of this. Tapping the name on a little library, bookshop or library pin used to do nothing, and the only way in was the small (i) in the bubble beside it. Now the bubble itself is the door, and tapping a pin a second time opens the place as well. The (i) still works for anyone who has learnt it.
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iPhone: the first screen says what the app is for, and asks about the map
A new account on the phone landed on a card with one sentence on it, and the sentence was wrong. It promised the book you were about to add would show up on the map, while the shelf it went on was private and the app never asked to change that. The card now says what the app is for, which is lending, selling and giving books away between neighbours. Under it are three other things worth doing, and each one opens the thing it names: put a little library on the map, keep a list of the books you are after, start a book club. Then, once you have added your first book to a private shelf, the app asks what the website has always asked, which is whether to put that shelf on the map. Yes makes it public, the same as changing it from the menu later. No is the end of it, though a line under the shelf's name says it is not on the map yet and offers to put it there whenever you like. One more thing, and it was our own doing. Taking the card's advice used to delete the card, because starting a wants list or placing a book box counted as a second shelf, and the card only showed to people with one. It stays until you have a book somewhere now, which is what it was always meant to do.
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iPhone: the book page says who is paid when you buy
A book's page in the app has a row of places to buy or borrow the book elsewhere, and until now that row was two names written into the app itself. One of them was Goodreads, which our catalogue dropped when Amazon bought it. The row could not offer StoryGraph, which the catalogue added. The app now shows whatever the catalogue lists, with its labels and in its order, so the next change there arrives without an app update. The other half of this is something we should have said earlier. The Bookshop.org link pays us a commission when you buy through it, and nothing on the screen said so. A line under the link says so now. Where that commission belongs to a bookshop that has claimed its page here rather than to us, the line names the shop instead, because buying there supports them and not us. A link with no line beside it pays us nothing.
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iPhone: the card for placing a book box reads at large text sizes
If you read at the largest text sizes, the card for putting a little library on the map fell apart at the moment you needed it. With the keyboard up it read Add a little libr, then Move the map so the crosshair sits, then a button saying Add with the rest of the word gone. The instruction was the worst of the three. It told you to move the map and stopped before naming the thing to line the crosshair up with. The words in the card now scroll when there are more of them than there is room for, and the controls stay put at the bottom, so the button you are reaching for is never the part that gets cut. Cancel and Add sit side by side while both words fit and stack when they do not. At ordinary text sizes the card is the size it always was.
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iPhone: start a book club from the phone, and your clubs are on Shelves
Starting a book club meant finding a computer. The phone could open a club, join one and vote in it, but the form that makes one was on the website. Your clubs now have a section on the Shelves screen, under your own shelves: each one with its picture, its name, what it is reading at the moment and how many people are in it, and the club's page one tap away. Under the list is a tile that starts a club, and Start a book club is the third row of the New menu in the corner. Making one asks for a name, a picture if you want one, a line about what the club reads, and who can see it, which begins at invite only. When it is made, the club's page opens and the link that invites people is offered once, ready to send to whoever you had in mind. If you are in more than five clubs the section shows five and a row that opens the rest.
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Adding a book by hand looks it up as you type
Typing a book in by hand on the phone is where every scan that fails ends up: a barcode nothing knows, a spine the camera can't read, a cover with no text on it. Until now that meant typing the whole book out and watching it arrive with no cover. Now the card searches the catalogue as you type, and tapping a result fills in the title and the author. Where the catalogue has an ISBN for it, the book lands on your shelf with its real cover, publisher and year; where it doesn't, it says so rather than promising a cover it can't fetch. Editing either field afterwards drops the match and searches again, and if the catalogue is slow or unreachable the card says so in a line and still adds exactly what you typed.
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A club can read alongside something that isn't a book
The companion beside a club's current read can now be a link: a podcast episode, a video, an article. The host gives it a title and an https:// address in the same fold that pairs a second book, and the page says Listen to, Watch or Read by where the link goes. It opens off the site in a new tab and is never embedded. A club has one companion, a book or a link, and it clears with the current read as before.
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Books are picked from their covers, and signposts are chips
Six menus on the club page are gone. The current read, the book read alongside it and the list the club draws from are now rows you can see: cover, author, year, and who in the club already has a copy, counted from members' public shelves. Pairing says what it does and is cleared with a sentence rather than a blank line at the top of a menu. A list is drawn as a stack of spines with how many books are on it and whose it is. The signpost is a row of chips: in the composer, with your own mark already on, and on a comment you may re-flag. Nothing about what a club is reading, voting on or saying has changed.
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The next meeting proposes itself, and says where the idea came from
When a club has nothing on the calendar, the meeting card used to offer its host a date with no explanation. Now it reads the club's own history: three or more meetings on the same night, evenly spaced, and it proposes the next turn of that pattern, with the time and the place from last time; one or two, and it proposes a fortnight after the last; nothing yet but a schedule with a date on it, and it proposes that day and leaves the time to you. It always says which of those it did, in the same breath as the date. A club with nothing to go on gets no guess at all, and a card the height of its one button. The proposal is worked out each time the page is drawn and never posted for you: Use this date opens the form with it filled in, Start from scratch opens it empty. The form itself is now a sentence you complete, with the day, the time and the place as rows of chips, and a last line that says who will be told. Nothing about what a meeting is or does has changed.
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The club page has been tidied, and the host's tools moved up
A club page had grown four kinds of card doing the same job, and a host had to scroll past every member to answer someone asking to join. Now every section sits in its own card under one small heading, and the next meeting keeps the dark card it had. If you host or moderate a club, your tools are a single row under the club's name: how many people are waiting to join, which takes you straight to them at the top of Members, the Invite button, and, for the host, a settings link. The vote on the next book now sits inside Reading now, where the book is. A club with nobody in it yet but you shows no empty Discussion or Members block; one line at the end of the page says they will appear when there is someone to talk to. On a laptop the page keeps its phone order with the meeting, the reading list and the members in a column to the right. Nothing about what a club can do has changed.
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There is a page that explains the whole thing
If you arrived here without an account you had two things to look at: a map of other people's books and a form to sign up. Nothing in between said what asking for a book sets in motion, what putting your shelf on the map actually shows (an area of about a kilometre, never an address), what a little library is on here or what a club page does. The privacy page had some of it, and nobody reads a privacy page to learn a product. There is now a page called How it works that goes through all of it in the order you meet it: the map, your own shelf, asking for a book and what happens after, little libraries and tending one, book clubs and their votes, schedules and paired reads, and following. It says only what is built. On a laptop it sits in the top bar next to Browse map; on a phone the bar is full, so you will find it in the footer of the front page and under the log-in and sign-up forms.
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iPhone: you can tick a book off your reading list now
When the app learned about reading lists it could show you which books you had already read off one, but not move a book between the two. We said that was next, and this is it. Swipe a book on your list from the left and it offers Mark read. The book drops under the Read heading at the bottom of the list, and it stops counting as something you are hunting for, so you stop hearing about copies of it turning up near you. Swipe the same book again and it offers Mark unread, because mis-taps happen and undoing one should not mean finding a laptop. It is one list wherever you look at it, so a book you tick off on the phone is ticked off on the website the next time you open it, and a book you ticked off there arrived on the phone already ticked. The control is only on a reading list: a book on one of your shelves is a book you already have, so there is nothing to tick off.
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Book clubs can read two books together
A club sometimes wants two books at once: a novel and the history behind it, a classic and its retelling, two sides of an argument. Until now a club's next-book vote offered one book per choice, and the club page had room for one current read. Now, when the host puts a vote up, any book on the ballot can be paired with a second one from the club's list, and the pair is one choice: you vote for it together and, if it wins, the club reads both. The club page shows the two covers side by side under Reading now, and the host can set a companion by hand from the same picker that sets the current read. The reading schedule stays on the first book. One more thing while we were in there: a day before a vote closes, everyone who has not voted yet gets the same reminder the host could already send by hand, so a close nobody noticed is less likely.
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Deleting your account now takes your pictures with it
Deleting your account already erased your address, your name, your shelves and the books on them. Your pictures were the part that lagged behind. The profile photo and header on your account when you left were deleted from our image storage, and nothing else was: the photos you took of your own books, the photo of a little library you sent in, the picture you attached to a claim on a place, the picture on a club you run, and every profile photo you had ever replaced, which quietly piled up because putting up a new one never took the old one down. All of it stayed hosted at the addresses it had always had. That is what changes. Delete your account and every picture you uploaded goes with it, replaced ones included. Two things stay, and they are worth being straight about. A picture of yours that somebody else's page is showing stays where it is, because blanking out their page is not ours to do. And a profile photo you replaced before today is one we can no longer tell apart from anyone else's, since we only started recording who uploaded what today; email us and we will remove it. The rest is gone the moment you press the button, and if our image storage is down at that moment we finish the job by hand rather than hold up your deletion.
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Anyone passing a book box can confirm what is in it
A little library is tended by whoever walks past it, which is the whole point of one, and until now the app only half believed that. Each person who scanned a box got their own private list of what they had reported into it, and those lists never met. So if you reported a book into the box on the corner and a neighbour scanned the same book off the same shelf a week later, the app treated it as a second book arriving rather than as somebody seeing yours. The line telling you how often a book had been confirmed still read as though nobody had been near it since the day it was left, because the only person who could ever confirm a book was the person who had reported it. That is what changes. A scan of a book the box already holds is a confirmation whoever does it, so the count on a book's row is the neighbourhood's count rather than one person's, and a box tended by four people stops reading like four separate boxes. What you see in front of a box is the practical difference: rows saying confirmed here five times, last seen two days ago, on books nobody has touched since somebody else left them. When you scan a box, the books already in it now arrive ticked and grouped together at the top, out of your way, so what you are deciding about is the books that are new. Nothing changes about who gets the credit: the person who first brought a book to a box is still the one named beside it. One thing this does not do is tidy up after itself. Where two people had already reported the same book before today, the box goes on listing it twice, and its count on the map goes on being one too many, until we reconcile those rows.
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iPhone: add your photo the moment you pick your handle
When you make an account on the phone, the app asks for a name and a handle before it lets you in, and that was all it asked. A photo of you was possible, but you had to go looking for it later under Account and then Edit profile, and most people never did, so a neighbourhood of readers looked like a page of initials. The same screen now has your photo on it, above your name, with Add a photo beside it. Tap either and you get the same choices as everywhere else in the app: take one, or pick one from your library. Anything hidden inside the photo, where it was taken most of all, is stripped out on the phone before it is sent, as it always has been. The photo is optional and it never holds you up. The button that lets you in works whether the photo has finished uploading, failed, or was never picked, and if you skip it the app does not ask again on the next launch; it is still there under Edit profile whenever you want it. The same row is on the shorter version of that screen, the one that asks for a handle when you sign in with a password on an account that never picked one.
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iPhone: a book with nothing printed on it no longer stops you
Some books give a camera nothing to work with. A bible with a cross on the cover and no title, a rebound hardback, a paperback whose spine has worn smooth. No barcode, no lettering, nothing to read. Photograph one of those and the app used to say no books were found and tell you to try again, closer, with more light. That is advice you cannot take when there is nothing printed on the book, and at least one person we watched gave up on the spot and went off to do something else. The screen now says we could not read this one, which is what actually happened, and the first thing on it is Add it by hand. That opens the title and author form there and then, already pointed at the shelf you opened the camera from, so you finish standing where you are instead of starting the whole thing again. Taking another photo is still on the screen, underneath, for the one that really was too dark. The same button shows up at the end of a shelf photo where you have turned down every book we suggested.
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The iPhone app is out
Until now the only way onto the phone was the beta, which meant an invitation and a second app from Apple to install the first one. The app is on the App Store now, so it installs like anything else. It is the same account you have here: your shelves, your reading list and the boxes you follow are all there the moment you sign in, and anything you do on the phone shows up on the website. Point the camera at a shelf and it reads the spines rather than making you type them. The map of little libraries is in your pocket, which is where it was always meant to be, so you can check what is in the box on the corner while you are standing at it, and report what you left. If you asked us to tell you when this happened, you are owed one email about it, and your address comes off that list the moment it goes, which is what we said we would do with it. Android is still on its way.
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iPhone: you can start a reading list, and see what you have read off it
A reading list is where you keep the books you are after rather than the ones you have, and until now the phone could only look at one. You could open a list, add to it, share it, but the list itself had to be started on a computer, which is the wrong way round: the moment you decide you want a book is usually the moment you are standing in front of somebody else's shelf with your phone in your hand. The button in the corner of your Shelves tab is now a menu, and it offers a reading list as well as a shelf. A list is not a shelf and the app says which one you are making while you make it: a shelf you make public goes on the neighbourhood map, and a list you make public goes on your profile and nowhere else, because nothing on it is yours to offer. The other half of this is quieter. If you have been ticking books off your list on the website, the app was showing them to you as though you were still hunting for them. Now a list you open on the phone puts the books you are still after at the top and the ones you have read underneath, under a heading that says so, which is what the website has always done. Ticking a book off is still the website's job for the moment. That is on us to fix and it is next.
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iPhone: you can follow somebody's shelf, not only their book box
Following on the website has never been only about boxes. You can follow a neighbour's shelf, or the public list of what they are hunting for, and hear about it when a book lands on it. On the phone the only thing you could follow was a little library, so a shelf you wanted to keep an eye on had to be remembered rather than followed, and going back to it meant finding the person again. Open anyone's shelf from their profile now and there is a Follow in the corner. Follow it and it joins a new section at the bottom of your Shelves tab, under your own shelves and the boxes, saying whose it is and whether it is a collection or a list of wants. Tap the row and you are back on the shelf. Unfollow is the same button, and it always works, even for a shelf that has since gone private. Your own shelves have no button, because following yourself is not a thing, and neither does the shelf behind a little library: that one is the box, so follow the box and you get the same news with a better page behind it. Everything you were already following on the website is there the first time you look.
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Every book has a page of its own now
Until now the only page a book had here was somebody's copy of it. If a neighbour two streets over had The Overstory, there was a page about her copy: her name, her area, whether she would lend it. That is useful once you have found it, and no use at all for the question people actually arrive with, which is who near me has this book. A search engine had nowhere to send them either, because a copy is not a book, and that copy may be long gone by the time anyone looks. So every book in the catalogue has one address now, and it stays the same whoever happens to own a copy this week. On it: the copies on neighbours' shelves near you, nearest first; the little libraries it has been reported into in the last ninety days and how long ago each one was; other editions of the same book, so you are not left looking at the one printing nobody round here has; and, when nobody has it, where to buy or borrow a copy elsewhere. There is a button to put it on your reading list, which is the same want the nearby alerts read, so we can tell you when a copy turns up close by. Distances are area to area and a rough direction, never a point on a map, the same as everywhere else here. The reader rating is the catalogue's and the page says so. There are no reviews and no comments: this is a page about where a book is, not about what anyone thought of it. And a book nobody nearby has still gets its page, quietly and unlisted, so a link to it never breaks.
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A city page now says what has been seen in its little libraries
A city page lists every little library within reach and how many books are in each, which tells you where the boxes are but not whether anything is happening in them. A box with four books in it might have been filled this morning or left alone since the spring. There is now a section for what people have actually seen: the books reported into the boxes around the city, most recently seen first, each one saying how long ago it was seen and in which box, and the box's name opens its page. A book drops off after ninety days with nobody reporting or confirming it, because past that nobody here knows it is still there, and the page would rather say nothing than guess. Scanning a box and finding a book still in it counts as seeing it, so a box somebody visits keeps its books on the list. When nothing has been seen in three months the section is not there at all, instead of sitting empty. Who reported a book is not named here. The box's own page has always said that, and a city page is about the place.
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iPhone: you can run your club's vote from your phone
Everything an organizer does with a club happened on a laptop. The app let you read your clubs, join one, talk in the discussion and vote in a poll, but the moment you wanted to put books up for a vote yourself you had to go and find a computer, which is not where anybody is standing when the idea occurs to them. So the vote is on the phone now, start to finish. Pick two to six books off the club's reading list, set when it closes, and everyone in the club is told it has opened. While it is running you can see how the count is going, which members cannot, remind whoever has not voted yet, push the deadline out if the turnout is thin, or close it early if everyone has clearly made up their mind. Then you pick the winner, and it becomes the club's current read. Any of the books, not only the one in front: a tie is yours to break, and sometimes the second-place book is the right call anyway. You can also take down a comment on your own club's discussion, which until now only the website could do, and see who is waiting to be let in, with whatever they wrote about why. Three things are still the website's: making a club in the first place, letting someone in or turning them down, and replacing an invite link that has gone somewhere you did not intend. The app now says so plainly on the page rather than showing you a button that would not work. Everything here is for owners and moderators. If you are a member of a club, nothing about it has changed.
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The boxes you stock have a page of their own
Your profile said how many books you had reported into little libraries. Fourteen scans, and no way to find out which boxes those were, which is the half worth knowing. The boxes are how a neighbour finds you, and how you find whoever keeps the one on your corner full. That number is a link now. Behind it is every box you have put a book into, the one you stocked most recently first, with how many books you left there and the date you were last by, and each row opens the box's own page. The same page sits behind anyone else's count. If you would rather your boxes were not listed in one place, Settings has a switch under Public profile. Turn it off and the page stops existing for everyone, yourself included, and your scan count goes back to being a plain number. The count does not move either way, and neither does what a box page says about who reported what. Boxes that have been taken off the map are not on the list, and nor are books an admin has hidden.
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A town whose little libraries are tended gets its city page
A city only got a page here once two neighbours had set their own shelf's area to it. Towns where people are busy filling the little libraries instead, and never got round to that, had nothing: someone searching for free books in Vancouver landed nowhere. Reporting a book into a box now counts towards that box's town in exactly the same way, so once two people have put books into the boxes around a town, the town has a page, with the books on shelves near it and every little library, bookshop and library within reach. Which town a box is in comes from the public map the boxes are imported from, not from anything anyone types here, and it still takes two people, because one person's word is not a place. Nothing new is published about whoever reported the book: the page is about the box, as it has always been.
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A book's synopsis and shop links arrive the day you add it
Open a book on the day you added it and the page could be missing its synopsis, its reader rating and the links to buy it or log it. Open the same book the next day and they were there, as if they had arrived overnight. They had not: nothing went looking for them until the first time somebody opened the page, and the app only picked them up on the next open after that. The lookup now starts the moment a book goes on a shelf, so unless you open it in the same breath, the page is usually already complete. And an empty answer is often just a source having a bad hour, so we ask again within the hour instead of waiting a day.
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iPhone: the Account tab is your photo
The fourth tab along the bottom of the app was a grey outline of a person, which is the icon every app in the world uses for settings. It is your account, so it is now your face: put a photo up in Edit profile and the tab wears it, cropped to a circle the size of the other icons. Change the photo and the tab changes with it, take it down and the outline comes back. Signed out, or if you have not put one up yet, it stays the outline, because a pair of initials at that size is not something anyone can read. The unread count still sits on the same tab and still reads out the same way.
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iPhone: your shelves look like shelves again
Every shelf on the app's Shelves tab drew the same three pale grey books. Twelve books, one book, a lending pile, a want list: identical blank boards, on the first screen you see after signing in, so the page read as empty whether it was or not. A shelf now draws a row of coloured spines in the same free, borrow, rent and buy colours the rest of the app uses, as many spines as it has books up to five, and each shelf keeps its own set, so the one you know by its colours looks that way every time you open it. A want list gets the list mark instead, because there is nothing on it yet to draw. A shelf with nothing on it is faded, which is the one thing the old grey was getting right. The colours are a picture of a shelf rather than a report on one: what is actually on offer is on the shelf itself, a tap away. The website's shelf page has looked like this for a while, and this is the app catching up.
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iPhone: your name at the top of Account opens your profile now
Tapping the card with your name and photo at the top of the app's Account tab took you to the form for editing that card, which the Edit profile row two lines down already did. The one screen it did not take you to is the one people actually go looking for: your profile the way a neighbor sees it, with your public shelves, the clubs you run and your rating on it. Until now the only way to see that was to find yourself on the map or open an exchange you were part of. The card goes there now, and it carries the same arrow every other row that leads somewhere does. Editing has not moved: the Edit profile row is exactly where it was, and your own profile has an Edit button on it too. If you have not picked a handle yet there is no public profile to open, so for you the card still opens the form, which is where you pick one.
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Scanning a box no longer asks you about the books you put there
Most of what a photo of a book box reads is what you reported into it last time, and every one of those came back as a row asking you to decide something you had not been asked to decide: tick it, or leave it. Photograph a box now and the books you already reported, that the box still remembers, are pulled out of the list, ticked, and folded into one line at the top: four already here, confirmed by this scan. Open it if you want to look through them. You cannot untick them, because there is nothing to untick, telling us a book is still on the shelf is the whole point of walking past a box with a camera, and saying so adds nothing to the box. What is left underneath is the part that is actually yours to decide: the books it did not know about, and the ones somebody else reported, which still cost you a tick because listing one is you saying you saw it too. The count above the list says both numbers, fourteen found, four already here, so you can see at a glance how much of the box has not changed. When one of those confirmations saves, we say it was confirmed rather than pretending nothing happened. Your own shelves work exactly as they did.
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A card can hold up to five books
The share card was built around one book, and plenty of what people actually want to post is a set: the three you read this month, the stack by the bed, the four you keep pressing on friends. So the composer now takes up to five. Search for a book, or pull one off your shelves the way you always did, and it joins a row under the search field instead of replacing whatever you picked last. Each book in the row shows its cover and carries a button to take it back off again, and the order you pick them in is the order they sit in. Typing a new search leaves the row alone, which it did not use to. Save the card and the whole set is saved with it, so loading it back later gives you the books you chose rather than only the first one. One thing to know about long titles: a poster sets a title, not a catalogue record, so a title that runs past about fifty characters and carries a subtitle after a colon is printed without it. Braiding Sweetgrass, not Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. Everywhere else, your shelves included, still has the whole thing.
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The shelves you follow are on your shelves page now
You could follow anybody's shelf from their profile, and we would tell you every time a book landed on it, but the shelf itself was nowhere: your shelves page listed the reading lists you follow and nothing else, so a collection you followed on Tuesday sent you notifications from somewhere you could not find. There is now a Shelves you follow section under the lists, with the owner's name and how many books are on each one,, and a tap opens it on the shelf owner's page. Both sections also carry the Follow pill you tapped in the first place, so you can let one go without going back to the profile you found it on. It stays on the page until you reload, in case you did not mean it.
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Your book clubs are on your shelves page now
A club you are in was only ever one tap away if you knew the tap: it lived in the account menu, behind your avatar, and nowhere else. So a club you joined on Tuesday was a thing you had to go looking for on Thursday. Your shelves page now has a Your book clubs section, under your collections and reading lists, with a card for each club you are in: its name, the book it is on if it has picked one, and how many of you there are. The last card is always an invitation to start one, whether you are in no clubs or five, because the clubs worth being in are mostly the ones somebody bothered to start.
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Check the book before you add it
Photograph a shelf, or type a title, and the book we come back with used to be a cover the size of a postage stamp, a title and an author. That is enough to recognise a book you already know and not enough to tell one printing from another, which is what you actually want to know when you are standing in front of a box deciding whether we got it right. So the card now carries the edition underneath the author: publisher, year, and the ISBN where the catalogue has one. And the cover is something you can tap. It opens as large as we have it, which is usually big enough to read the jacket and hold it up against the copy in front of you, with those same details above it and a button to close. Nothing moves off the screen you were on: your photo, your rows and your ticks are all still there behind it.
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The map's "you're early" note no longer sits on the map
Open the map on a phone somewhere no one has put a book yet and we tell you so, and point you at the nearest books there are. That notice used to be a card in the middle of the screen, over the map it was asking you to explore, and there was no way to put it away. It is now a single line along the bottom edge, saying the same things, with an X. Close it and it stays closed for the rest of your visit. It comes back next time, because a map with nothing on it and no explanation is worse.
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"Not this one": you can now correct a book we matched wrong
Photograph a shelf and every row used to be add it or skip it, which left nowhere to put "right shelf, wrong book". A row we matched now has a Not this one button, and a row we could not match has a Find it. Either opens a search under that row, already filled in with what we read off the spine, so the book you are holding is usually a tap away rather than something you retype. Pick it and the row becomes that book, ticked and ready, and the rest of your list stays where it was. We keep a note of the swap, what the photo read, what we guessed and what you chose, because that is how the matching gets better. The photo itself is still never kept.
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A spine that only gives you the author now offers you their books
A paperback often prints the author's name huge and the title small underneath, and photographing a shelf of them used to produce rows reading "John Sandford, by John Sandford" with a warning badge and nothing you could do about it. The name is not the title, so we no longer pretend it is. A row like that now says only the author was readable, and asks the catalogue what that author wrote: up to five of their titles appear as buttons, and tapping the right one settles the row and ticks it for you. Nothing is chosen for you, and nothing arrives ticked before you answer. If the catalogue has nothing under that name, the row says so rather than offering an empty list.
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Logging in takes you to your shelves
Signing in used to put you back on the front page, the one written for people who have never been here, with the box asking for your ZIP code. You have an account, so that page has nothing left to tell you. You now land on your shelves. If you were on your way somewhere when you were asked to sign in, an exchange, a card someone sent you, a club you were about to start, you still go there instead: the sign-in is a door, not a detour.
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A misread letter on a spine no longer loses the book
Photograph a shelf and a row would sometimes come back saying we had no match, for a book our catalogue plainly has. Two reasons, both now fixed. If the read got a single letter wrong somewhere in a long title, and the author underneath it was right, we asked the catalogue for that exact wording and it answered with nothing; we now ask again more loosely and take the book if the title and the author still line up. And a spine that credits two people, an author and an illustrator say, no longer has to match a byline the catalogue writes differently. What has not changed is what it takes to be sure: a near match still arrives as a row you tick yourself, and a volume number or an A/B on a workbook is never treated as a misread letter, because those are how a series tells its own books apart.
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Your share card can wear a cover you chose, or one you photographed
The cover on a share card was whichever edition our catalogue search happened to rank first, and you had no say in it. Sometimes that is a low-resolution scan, sometimes it is a different printing from the one on your shelf. Pick a book now and, when the catalogue knows the same title in more than one edition, a row of other covers appears under the fields: tap one and the card wears that jacket. Nothing you typed moves. If none of them is the book in your hand, there is a Use my photo button. Take a picture of your own copy and it goes on the card, cropped to the shape of a jacket. It is used for that card only, we do not keep it, and it never becomes the book's cover for anyone else, so a card you save and come back to later will be wearing the catalogue cover again. And when the cover we have is too small to print well, the composer says so instead of quietly enlarging it.
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A card you made goes straight to the app you were going to post it in
Making a share card used to end with a PNG in your downloads folder and four steps still to go: find it, open Instagram, pick it out of the photo picker, write a caption. On a phone the Generate button now opens the usual share sheet instead, so the card goes to whichever app you had in mind. Beside it there is a Copy caption button: the caption you picked, the book and its author, the link back here and three tags, ready to paste. A browser that cannot hand over a file, and a carousel, still download the way they did. The band along the bottom of the card is quieter too. The wordmark sits at the left, the short link at the right, both smaller, and the QR code shrank. A story card carries no QR code at all now: nobody holds a camera up to a story, and the code was taking room the photograph should have had.
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A city page now lists every little library near it, not a dozen of them
A city page used to show twelve of the little libraries, bookshops and libraries around it and a line saying there were more. It lists all of them now, grouped by kind, nearest first, with the ones that have books in them or a photo of them at the top of each group. A box with no name of its own says which street it is on, or how far it is from the city and in which direction, so two unnamed boxes are not the same line printed twice. Each one links to its own page, and each place page links back up to the city it sits in, so you can go from one box to every box near it and back.
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Every page you would want to send someone now has a Share button
You could copy a reading list's link, and that was it. Every other public page here, a little library, a bookshop, a public library, a book club, a single book, somebody's shelves, a city, left you to fish the URL out of the address bar. All of them have a Share button now, in the row of buttons under the name. On a phone it opens the usual share sheet, so the link goes to whichever app you were going to send it in; on a desktop browser without one it copies the link and says so. An invite-only club has no Share button and never will: its address is the thing that keeps it private, and the join link the organizer hands out is the way in. Sharing a little library also sends the photo somebody took of it, so the link arrives as the box rather than as our logo.
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The front page shows each book's colour, and a book with no mode is grey
The row of covers on the front page is bigger, and each cover sits on a board in the colour of how it travels: orange for free, green for borrow, blue for rent, purple for buy, the same four colours as the pins on the map. A legend beside the row says which is which, and a cover rises under your pointer with its mode on a chip. One colour changed everywhere: a book that has not been given a mode yet used to wear the same orange as a free one, on shelves and on the front page, while the map already drew it grey. It is grey now in all three places, because grey is the honest reading of a book nobody has said anything about yet.
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Your shelf photo no longer carries your address to the AI
A phone writes a lot into a photo you never see: the GPS coordinates of the room you took it in, the camera make and model, its serial number, the second the shutter went. Every other picture you upload here has had that stripped since the day uploads shipped. Shelf scans did not, so a photo of your own shelves was going to our lookup service and on to the vision provider with the coordinates of your living room attached. It is stripped now, in the app and on the web and on the API, before the photo leaves us. Nothing you do changes: the scan reads the same, and the photo arrives the right way up. This is the one place where anything we held about where you are was precise. Everywhere else it is blurred to about a kilometre on purpose, and now this matches.
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A bookshop's own Bookshop.org link, on its own books
Every Bookshop.org buy button here used to send the commission to us, including the ones under books on a bookshop's own shelf. That was backwards: Bookshop.org pays a bookstore a much larger share than it pays us, so we were quietly taking the smaller cut out of a shop's own sale. Not any more. Put your Bookshop.org affiliate ID in Settings and every copy on your shelves and reading lists links through you instead, and the line under the button says your name rather than ours. It is free and permanent for a bookshop or a library whose page you have claimed, and it is part of Plus for everyone else. Books in a little library, or on a free shelf, still carry ours, which is what pays for the servers.
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Where AI is and is not, in five lines
A tester asked what role AI plays here, and the answer took more hunting than it should have. The privacy page now has a section called "Where AI is and is not", and the same five lines answer the question on the front page. The short of it: one machine reads the spines in a shelf photo and that is the only one on the surface. Nothing you read was written by a machine pretending to be a person, your shelves and messages are not training data and we do not sell or license them to anyone, and a person settles every hide and every claim. We also say the fifth thing out loud rather than quietly: we build the app with AI tools. The line we hold is about what you read, not how we type.
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Picking a saved pickup spot no longer costs you the book
Add books shows your saved pickup spots and a box for naming a new one at the same time. Type a name, think better of it and pick a saved spot instead, and the page refused the whole thing: "Choose a saved location or name a new one, not both", and no book added. It just decides now. Pick a saved spot and that is where the book goes, whatever is still sitting in the name box; leave the spots alone and the name you type makes a new one, as before.
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They are little libraries everywhere now, not book boxes
The map called them book boxes and the page you land on called them little libraries, for the same thing on the same street corner. One name from now on: a little library, or a box for short. Nothing about them has changed, only what we call them, so the pin you follow, the books inside it and the page it opens are all where you left them.
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You can delete your account from the iPhone app now
Deleting your account has worked on the web for a while, and the screen for it was sitting finished in the app the whole time, waiting on the part of the backend that does the actual deleting. That shipped, so the row is there now: Account, right at the bottom, past sign out. It spells out what goes and what stays before it asks you to type DELETE, and what it says now matches what actually happens, including the two things it used to leave out. Your book clubs go with you, and messages you have already sent stay in the other person's inbox under "a former neighbor".
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Our email looks like it came from us now
The mail we send has been a patchwork. The sign-in link that greets a new account was still the plain scaffolding a framework generates, rows of equals signs around a raw web address, and the rest of our notices were bare paragraphs with no shape to them. Every email now arrives the same way: our name at the top, one button to press, and a line at the bottom saying why it landed in your inbox. The sign-in and confirmation wording is ours rather than the generator's, and there is still a plain-text version of every one for anyone who reads mail that way. If our sign-in link has been going to your spam folder, this is the half of that fix that lives in the app.
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There is a terms page now, and it says what we actually do
The app has always had a Terms of service row and it went nowhere, which is a bad look on a page about trust. There is a real page there now, written the way the privacy page is: no fee and no cut on what you swap, lend, sell or rent; the one thing you have to pay for and where its limits sit; what we will hide or close an account over; and, honestly, that an exchange is between you and your neighbour rather than something we stand behind. It is short enough to read.
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Adding a club picture no longer means waiting on Save
Starting a club with a photo straight off your phone used to leave the button sitting on "Saving" for half a minute, because the whole full-size original was being pushed up at the moment you pressed it. The picture is now shrunk in your browser as soon as you choose it, a few hundred kilobytes instead of ten megabytes, and it goes up while you are still filling in the rest of the form. The picker says where it has got to rather than leaving Save to explain the wait, and pressing Save while it is still going tells you so instead of quietly saving the club without the picture. Your profile photo and header work the same way now.
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The dot on your avatar now clears when you have dealt with things
The little orange count on your avatar counted exchanges, which meant it could sit there for weeks while a book was out on loan, and nothing you looked at would clear it. Worse, it stayed dark when you did have something new. It now counts unread notifications and nothing else, so it means what it looks like it means. Reading a conversation clears its notification, and opening your exchanges clears theirs, instead of you having to open the notifications list to make the dot go away. Exchanges still in flight moved to their own quiet count next to Exchanges in the menu, where it is a tally of what is open rather than something you have failed to read.
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Being invited to a club now tells you so
An invitation to a book club used to wait on your clubs page without ever saying it was there. Unless you happened to look, you never knew. An invitation now arrives like anything else that needs you: the bell tells you who asked and which club, and takes you to your clubs page where you can accept it or turn it down. If you would rather not hear about clubs at all, the clubs switch in your settings covers this too, and the invitation still waits for you on the page.
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Books without a pickup spot were already on the map. Now the page says so
Set an area on a shelf and every book on it that has no pickup spot of its own has always shown on the map in that area. Your shelf did not say that: each of those books carried an amber "Not on the map yet", which read like twenty edits waiting for you. That line is now only for a book that really is nowhere. A book covered by its shelf's area says which area, and offers to pin the exact spot if you want one. The book's own page names the area too, so someone who found it on the map is told where to go.
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Adding a book on the iPhone app starts from the shelves screen now
The shelves screen has its own + at the bottom. Tap it and you get the three ways to put a book in, scan a barcode, photograph a shelf, or type it in by hand, over a line saying where the book is headed. That line picks the little library you tend that you are nearest to, and falls back to the last shelf you added to, so the common case is one tap from the icon to a logged book. Standing at a box that is not on the map yet? You can put it there without leaving the screen, name and pin and all, and a new shelf can be made from the same place. Picking a box that is not the nearest one asks you once first, so an armful of books does not end up logged into the library down the street.
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Your exchanges page now keeps a record of every handoff, by year
The exchanges page has been rebuilt in the same register as your profile and your settings. Incoming and outgoing now hold only the exchanges still in flight, so what needs you is at the top and nothing is buried under things that finished months ago. Everything that has finished, given, borrowed, sold, declined or called off, drops into a record underneath, both sides of the deal in one run and grouped by the year it happened in. Once that record covers more than one year, a list of years down the side jumps you to any of them.
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Asked a club for a new invite link? You can take it back
If your invite link has been replaced, the page where you ask the club for the current one now lets you withdraw that ask afterwards, the same way you can on a club's own page. Useful if you asked the wrong club, or changed your mind while waiting.
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A book you have ticked off is no longer "up next" on a share card
Building a card or a carousel off one of your reading lists offered every book on it, including the ones you had marked read. A finished book is not what you are reading next, so it no longer turns up in the picker. Cards you already made and posted stay exactly as you made them.
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A book box now says how long a book has been sitting there
Scan a box you have scanned before and the books still in it are recognised rather than listed again. That recognition is worth something to the next person: a book confirmed by a later scan now says so on the box's page, with how many times it has been confirmed and when it was last seen. Before you walk over, you can tell whether what's listed is this week's or last spring's. Books nobody has scanned twice say nothing extra.
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Scanning a shelf twice no longer lists a book twice
Photograph a shelf you have already scanned and the books already listed are recognised as the ones you have, instead of quietly appearing a second time. Two real copies of the same book are still yours to list.
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iPhone: a new app icon, in dark and tinted too
The app icon is now a sheet of paper with a folded-back corner, the bridge mark printed on the front. If you keep your home screen on the dark or tinted icon style, it has a version made for each one, so it is no longer the single bright square in a dark grid. Nothing inside the app has changed.
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A pickup spot you type while editing a book stays typed
Editing a book you have already shelved, naming a new pickup spot for it, and then touching anything else on the form emptied the name again without saying so. Save, and the book kept whatever spot it had before. The spot you type now stays where you put it, and so does the place "Use my location" finds for you. Changing your mind about a saved location hands the name back too, rather than filing the book under your whole city.
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The book preview keeps up with what you're typing
Adding a book, or editing one, shows a card of what neighbors will see. The pickup line was the one part that didn't follow along: type a spot and it appeared for a blink, then snapped back to your shelf's area, so the only way to find out what the book would really say was to save it and look. It follows every keystroke now, and the note underneath moves with it.
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Picking the wrong file no longer costs you the page
Choose a file a picker can't use, a PDF where a picture goes, and you were told so, but pressing Save reloaded the page and took everything you had typed with it. Now the save is declined, what you typed stays where it is, and the file that couldn't be used is cleared, so pressing Save again is all it takes. Club pictures and headers, your profile, photos on a book box, a claim's proof, and the condition photos on a book all work this way.
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Setting up a club now shows you what it will look like
Starting a club, or going back to change one, was a column of labels and boxes with two file pickers in the middle of it that told you nothing: not the picture the club already had, not the one you had just chosen. The club picture and the header both show what is there now, and swap to what you picked the moment you pick it. Who can open the club page is two choices that each say what they mean, rather than a dropdown with the fine print underneath. What a club is and who can open it have not changed.
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The page you tell us things on is a page now
Help & feedback was the last screen we had not gone back to: a heading, two boxes and a button, laid out the way the form happened to get written. It is one card now, in the same register as the rest of your account. Picking what kind of thing you are reporting is three choices rather than a dropdown, which also means it no longer arrives already answered as "Something is broken" if you never touched it. What we ask you and what we can see either way have not changed.
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Pick which reading lists are allowed to interrupt you
When somebody near you lists a book you are after, we tell you. That is worth an interruption for the list of books you are actively hunting for, and much less so for the someday pile of two hundred, and until now the two were the same setting: all of them, always. Open a reading list, hit Edit list, and there is a line saying whether that list may tell you. Every list you already keep is on, exactly as it has been, and turning one off leaves the rest alone.
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A postcode now finds the one in your country
Type a postcode into an area field and what came back was a world list. The same digits are a postcode in a dozen countries, so a Californian ZIP would come back as a Ukrainian one, sitting above the right answer or standing in for it, and there was nothing in a bare number for us to tell them apart by. A postcode now looks in the country you are searching from, which is the only place those digits mean anything. Place names are untouched: type London or Reykjavik and you still get London or Reykjavik, wherever you are asking from.
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Searching for a free copy now finds the book boxes
Search the map with the Free filter on and you were shown what people are giving away off their own shelves, and nothing at all out of the book boxes, which are the one place where everything is free. A book reported into a box never carried any way of saying so. They do now, the ones already in there as well as the new ones, so a box comes back in a search for a free copy alongside everybody else. Nothing else about a box has changed: its books are still there to be taken rather than asked for, and there is still no swap to arrange.
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The page you get when something breaks is ours now
Ask for a handle nobody has taken and you already got a proper page about it. It carries the mark now, it puts our icon in the tab rather than a blank sheet, and it offers you the front page as well as the map. The page we show when something genuinely breaks on our side got the bigger change: it used to be two grey words on white, Internal Server Error, which reads like the site has been abandoned rather than briefly tripped. It is the same page as the other one now, and it says the thing you actually want to know, which is that whatever you had added is still saved.
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Tick a book off your reading list once you have read it
A reading list only ever grew. There was no way to say you had got hold of a book and read it, so the list stopped being a list of what you were after and became a pile, and we kept telling you a copy had turned up nearby for books you had finished a year ago. Every book on a list now has a Mark read button next to it. What you mark drops out of the list into a Read section folded up at the bottom, and we stop watching for copies of it. If you tick the wrong one, Mark unread puts it straight back. Once you have read a book or two, your profile says how many.
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Your profile's facts now read as one thing
What a visitor reads about you before asking for a book had arrived in pieces over the last year: your counts on one line, your links on another, the places you run on a third, your rating and the notes people left under all of it. Rows that happened to sit near each other. They are one card now, the numbers set in the same face as the wordmark, your links and the places you run along the bottom of it, and the notes underneath those. A rating shows as the average out of five rather than as a row of solid stars, because the stars were rounded off and claimed a little more than the average did. Nothing new is published about you.
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The front page, rebuilt for the phone you are holding
The front page was drawn for a laptop and handed to a phone as-is. The opening paragraph ran to five lines, the box you type your ZIP code into broke in half with the button stranded beside it, and the little map went away entirely, so a phone got no picture of the thing the site is about. The paragraph now says its point and stops, the ZIP box is one thing again with the button across the bottom of it, and there is a small map you can tap to open the real one, with the running count of books and little libraries under it. The row of covers moves on a phone now too, slowly, and there is a Pause next to it if you would rather it did not.
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Confirming a swap now looks like it worked
A handover is finished when both of you say so, but pressing Confirm completion left the row exactly as it was, same button and all, so it read as a button that did nothing and people pressed it twice. Your press shows up now: the button gives way to a green "You confirmed", and the line under the title says whether the other person still owes theirs. Once a swap is done the little coloured tag says what happened rather than what was on offer, so a book you lent reads LENT and the copy you borrowed reads BORROWED.
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The bar at the top of the page stops eating a line on small phones
Signed out, the three things at the top of every page (browse the map, log in, join) would not fit on one line on a smaller phone, so they took two, and the bar grew by a line's worth on every page you opened. The two longer ones now go by their first word on a phone, so it is one line again on the narrowest handset we could find, and the top of the page gives back what it was taking.
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A message that says something worked now looks like it
Every little message that slid down from the top of the page came with a warning sign next to it, in the same orange we use when something has gone wrong. So did "Book added", and "Saved", and every other bit of good news, which made a lot of ordinary moments read as though you had broken something. Good news gets a green tick now. Anything that actually went wrong still gets the red one.
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Blocking someone clears the request they left at your club
If somebody asked to join your club and you then blocked them, their request stayed on file, out of your list and impossible to answer, while their end of it sat there saying you were still thinking it over. Blocking now takes the request with it, the way it already ended any following between you. There is nothing left for you to answer, and nothing left waiting on them. If you unblock the person later the request does not come back, so they are free to ask you again.
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The app can tell you when you walk past a book box
Book boxes are easy to walk straight past. If you turn on Nearby boxes in the app's notification settings, your phone will nudge you when you come up to one on the map, with the box's name, and a tap takes you to what is in it. Your phone does the noticing: the exact spot you are in never leaves it. The app asks us for the boxes in a rough couple of kilometres around you and works out the rest itself. It will not nag you either, once per box every couple of weeks and no more than one a day, and it stays quiet about a box you are already standing next to when you turn it on. Off by default, and turning it off clears everything the phone was watching.
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Tab to the area box and you can see you are in it
If you get around by keyboard rather than a mouse, tabbing across the front page used to lose you. Every button you landed on drew a ring around itself to say so, and then the box you type your ZIP code or town into drew nothing at all: you could type in it, you just had no way to tell you were in it. It takes a ring of its own now, in the same colour as the button next to it, so you can see where you have got to.
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We tell you when a book you want turns up near you
Reading lists have been a place to keep the books you are after, and nothing more: you still had to go and look for them. Now, when someone near you puts a copy of one on the map, you hear about it. Near you means your own area, the one on your shelf, not anywhere on earth, and it is one alert per book, so a copy that gets relisted a few times does not follow you around. If you are already arranging to pick up a copy we stay quiet. You can turn it off under Books you want in your notification settings.
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Where else to find a book, without sending you to Amazon
Under every book we list a couple of places to read more about it or buy your own, for when the copy on the map is already spoken for. One of them was Goodreads, which Amazon owns, and putting our readers in front of Amazon is not what this is for. It is StoryGraph now, alongside Bookshop.org, whose sales go to independent bookshops. The row is no longer a fixed pair either: it is whatever our catalogue knows about that book, in the order it gives them, so the day we add somewhere better it simply appears. Where a link pays us anything, it says so under the link, and where it pays us nothing it stays quiet.
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A city you typed yourself no longer waits to be confirmed
When you make a shelf, the area box comes filled in with a guess at where you are, and a book with no pickup spot of its own waits at the shelf page's confirm step before it shows on the map. That step is there because a guess nobody read is not an answer. Now, if you tapped Use my location, or typed a place we could find, you have already given one, so the shelf is placed the moment it is created and there is nothing left to confirm. Leave the guess as we filled it in, or type somewhere we cannot find, and the shelf page asks as it did before.
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The front page shows what is actually on the map
Until now the front page told you how many books were out there and left you to imagine them. There is a row of covers on it now, and they are real: books on public shelves near someone, the same ones you would find on the map or in search. Nothing private is in it, and no book appears there that a stranger could not already see. It drifts along on its own and stops when you point at it, so you can read a spine, and a tap opens that book's page. If you have asked your device for less motion it sits still, and you can push it along with a finger. When there are not many books on the map yet, the row simply is not there.
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Put your other accounts on your profile
A profile has been a name, a photo and a shelf of books, with no way to say where else you are. Settings has a Links block now: your website, and your username on Instagram, Facebook, Bluesky, X, TikTok, YouTube and Goodreads. Fill in the ones you use and leave the rest empty. They come out as small icons under your bio, and they open in a new tab. Your username on its own is enough, and pasting the link to your own profile page works too, we take the handle out of it. A link with no username in it, like a Facebook group or a Facebook profile that is only a number, we cannot read a handle out of, so it asks you for the username instead. Clear a box to take that link back off.
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Relist a book that came back
Marking a loan returned already puts the book back on your shelf. What had no way back was a book that finished an exchange before you had set how you were offering it: it went to completed and stayed there, even once you listed it to borrow or to rent. Those rows in your exchanges have a Relist button now. It puts the book back to available and leaves the finished exchange alone, so the rating on it still works. It shows only on books you lend or rent out, because one you gave away or sold is genuinely gone.
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Tell us what is broken, from inside the app
Until now, saying something had gone wrong meant finding an email address and writing one. There is a page for it now: open the account menu and pick Help & feedback. Say whether it is something broken, something you are stuck on, or something you wish this did, then write it in your own words. We record which page you came from and which browser you are in, so you do not have to describe any of that, and we read every one. If we need more from you, we will write back to the address on your account.
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Your profile counts what you have actually done
The Handoffs number on a profile has been a dash since the day the new profile shipped, because nothing was counting. It counts now, and two more things sit next to it: how many book boxes you have put on the map, and how many books you have reported into one. They are counts of things that happened, and that is all they are. Nothing unlocks at ten, nothing lapses if you stop, and a bigger number gets you no more of anything than a smaller one. A count you have not started yet is simply not shown, so a new profile is not a row of zeros.
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Your shelf counts stop mixing up books you have and books you want
A reading list holds books you are looking for, and a collection holds books you have. The line under Your shelves counted both at once, so one book on a shelf and two on a list read as three books, and the "On the map" tab counted a public reading list as though it were out there on offer. Neither was ever true: nothing on a reading list is offered to anyone. The counts now say what they mean, collections and their books on one side, reading lists counted as themselves on the other.
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You can chip in, if you want to
Listing, browsing, borrowing and lending are free, and we take no cut when a book changes hands. What that leaves is a bill for servers, maps and reading the photos you take of your shelves. If you get something out of this and want to help pay for it, the settings page on the website now has a way, monthly, in a few small amounts, and you can stop whenever you like. It buys you nothing. Every free thing stays free, every limit stays where it is, and the one paid plan is still the only thing that lifts one. If you would like your profile to say you chip in, there is a checkbox for that, and it is off unless you turn it on.
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The front page asks you to join
Everything about the front page invited you to look around, and left joining to a small button in the corner. The invitation to join now sits directly under the opening lines, above the box where you type your town, so the way in is one of the first things you see rather than something to go looking for. It is there only while you are signed out; once you have an account, the page goes back to being about the books.
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Old paperbacks come back with their names on
A book printed before the late 2000s carries a shorter code than a modern one, ten characters instead of thirteen, and we never asked the catalogue about those at all. A spine we could read the title off still found its book by searching, but it arrived without the code, so nothing tied it to the copy in your hand; a spine where the code was all we could read came back saying we couldn't match it, which was true only because we had not looked. We look now, hyphens and all, exactly as the code is printed on the page. That is most of a book box, and most of a shelf of old paperbacks.
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Say what kind of account yours is
Not every account here is a person. Some are shops, some are libraries or schools, some are reading clubs, and until now the only way to be any of those was to claim a place and wait for us to approve it. Your settings now have a line for it: a person, a shop or business, an organization or club, a library or institution. Your profile says which, and that is all it does, so picking one gets you a label and nothing else. Claiming the shop or the branch you actually run is still the thing that puts your shelves on its page and links the two together, and it is still free.
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Tap a book on the map to open it
Open a pin on the map and you get the books at that spot: cover, title, who is sharing it. Only the small link at the bottom of each one did anything, and it said Request, which made it sound like pressing it put your hand up for the book rather than opening its page. The cover and the title are now the link, so the part you were already tapping is the part that works, and the link under them says View, which is what it does. Requesting a book still happens on the book's own page, where it says so.
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Your books wait for you to say where they are
A shelf's area starts as a guess at the city your connection came from, and that guess is wrong often enough that we ask you to confirm it. Until now we asked and published anyway: a book with no pickup spot of its own went on the map at the guessed city while the question was still sitting there unanswered. Those books now wait. Open the shelf, confirm the area or correct it, and they appear straight away, and a book you gave its own pickup spot was never a guess and is not affected. If your shelf has gone quiet on the map, that is the answer, and it takes one click.
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Your shelves page sorts collections from reading lists
Your shelves page put everything you keep in one grid: the shelf by the door and the list of books you are still hunting for, told apart by a small badge and nothing else. Books you have and books you want are two different things, so they now sit under two headings, Collections first and Reading lists under it, the same split and the same order the app uses. The section of boxes you look after is now called Boxes you tend, so it reads as the pair it always was with Boxes you follow.
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A book we can't name now says so
Photograph a shelf and the odd row comes back as nothing but a number: a sticker on the spine, a barcode read wrong, a code no catalogue has ever heard of. Those rows used to say we couldn't reach the catalogue, and offered a Retry that did the same nothing every time you pressed it. They now say what actually happened, show you the code they couldn't match, and keep the retry for the rows a retry can still rescue. Anything the photo read clearly is still yours to add, exactly as before.
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Every city with books in it has a page
Someone searching for free books in their town should land somewhere real rather than on a page about us. Every city where a neighbour has confirmed their area now has one of its own: how many books are on shelves there, a few you can open straight away, and the book boxes, bookshops and libraries within reach, with a link that opens the map on the same area. It needs no account to read, so it is also the link to send anyone who asks what this is. A city only gets a page once there is something in it, and a quiet one says you would be early rather than showing an empty screen.
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One box to type into at the book box
The camera you point at a book box had two buttons for the same job. One said ISBN, one said By hand, and both of them opened a keyboard. There is one field now, under the shutter, and it takes either: type the numbers off the barcode and the book is looked up, type a title and you go straight to filling in what you know. The scanner you use for your own shelves has worked this way for a while, and the two now match, down to the shutter, which says Capture rather than Photo so it stops reading like a second way to open your photo library. The line reminding you that a book you report at a box is public, and that nobody owns it once it is there, no longer washes out against a bright shelf: it sits on a dark panel where you can actually read it, which matters, because reporting a book is not something you can take back.
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Bring your library over from Goodreads or StoryGraph
Starting from an empty shelf is the worst part of joining anything, and most people's books are already catalogued somewhere else. Export the CSV Goodreads or StoryGraph gives you, drop it into Settings, and your shelves come across: read, currently reading, want to read, and whatever custom shelves you made, each one a private reading list here. It runs in the background and tells you when it's finished, so you can close the page. Nothing is published and nothing is offered to anyone: a book that arrives this way is a want, not something a stranger can come and collect. Owning a copy is a separate question, and the page asks it at the end, with the books your export marked as owned already ticked. Rows we could not identify come back as a file you can download and add by hand.
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A box you added is yours to fix or take back
Putting a book box on the map was a one-way door: the pin landed where you were standing, and if that was the wrong corner, or the box turned out not to exist, there was nothing you could do about it. Open a box you added, choose Edit details, and the pin on the map is now yours to drag. Save stores where you dropped it, Cancel puts it back. A box nobody has touched yet can also be deleted outright, which is the answer to a test pin or a duplicate. Once other people have left a photo, a comment or a book there, deleting would take their work with it, so instead you can take the listing off the map: it disappears for everyone, everything anyone left on it survives, and you can put it back from the same page. A box whose host has claimed it is theirs to take down from then on, and an established box's pin corrects by a street rather than travels to another city.
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Adding a book to a box you tend goes to the box
Open a book box you look after from your shelves, and the buttons that add books opened the ordinary add-a-book dialog: the one that asks which of your shelves the books belong on. A box is not one of your shelves, so it was never in that list, and there was no way to report a book from that page at all. Those buttons now open the same Contribute a book screen the box's own page gives you. The box is named at the top, nothing asks you to choose, and what you leave there is a gift to whoever opens the door next rather than something listed under your name. An old bookmark pointing at that page the previous way lands in the same place.
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A neighbor's page, redrawn on the app
The page you land on when you tap someone's name has been redrawn on the phone. Their photo now breaks the banner at the left edge, with their name, their handle and the button to message them reading across one line instead of stacked down the middle of the screen, and their rating sits on a ruled line of its own. Their public shelves are cards now, each with a spine for every book on it, and a want list says plainly that it is one and offers you the link to share rather than a way to ask for a book they are still looking for themselves. New here: the book clubs somebody runs appear on their page, with what the club is reading and how many people are in it, and tapping one opens the club. A page with nothing on it yet still reads like a person rather than a broken screen.
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The name at the top of a message opens the person
A message thread is about one person, and until now it was the one screen in the app that gave you no way to reach them: their name sat at the top and did nothing. Tap it and you land on their profile, with their public shelves and their rating, and back returns you to the conversation where you left it. It works the same whether you opened the thread from your inbox, from an exchange, or from their profile in the first place. People who have not set a handle yet, and accounts that have since been closed, still read as plain text, because there is no profile to send you to.
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Your first session starts at your shelf
A new account used to open on a form and then an empty screen. It now opens on the one thing worth doing first: point your camera at a shelf you can see from where you are sitting, scan a barcode, or type a title, and your catalogue exists within minutes. The handle and city questions wait until you have something worth naming, share one screen, and one link skips them both. After that, your shelves page tells you where you actually stand: how many shelves share your area, how far the nearest one is, and a short list of the steps you skipped, which you can hide for good. Everything stays private until you say otherwise. When your shelf is big enough to matter, or you mark a spare copy you could hand on, we ask once whether to put it on the map, and take no for an answer.
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The photo upload shows its progress again
Sending a shelf photo from a phone on a slow connection used to go quiet between choosing the photo and seeing the books: the button dimmed and nothing else moved. The add-a-book dialog now shows the transfer as it happens, with the percentage climbing and the steps still to come named up front, so a big photo on a bad connection reads as working, not stuck.
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A map pin that can't say what it is now looks like it
The map colours a pin by how the books at that spot are offered: orange for free, green for borrow, blue for rent, purple for buy, with the rail above the map saying which is which. Some pins cannot answer that question. A spot holding a free book and a book for sale is not either colour, and a busy spot sends us only the first few of its books, so we cannot honestly say the rest match. Both of those were painted orange, which is the colour the rail says means free. They are grey now, which means what it looks like it means: the pin is there, and what is on offer is a question for the pin itself. Open it and every book still says for itself.
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The map's area now says where you are looking
The box above the map named the area you had typed into it, which meant it could go on naming a place you had left. Tap Use my location in Fresno and the map moved to Fresno while the box carried on saying Minneapolis, and because that name is kept on your account, the wrong one followed you to every device you signed in on. The box names the map now. Pan it, zoom it, tap Use my location, search a ZIP: whatever the map is looking at is what the box says, so the two can never disagree again. Your own area is a separate thing you keep, and wandering the map no longer touches it. Save this as my area sets it, to wherever the map is and whatever the box says, and it is the only thing that does. Back to it is a tap away underneath, and it is still where the map opens next time, on this browser and on your phone.
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Your shelves say what they are, and stop shuffling
The Shelves screen on the app ran everything you own together in one undifferentiated list, so a reading list, a book box you keep stocked and an ordinary shelf all looked exactly alike, and the order they arrived in had no reason you could see. They are grouped now: your collections first, then your reading lists, then your little libraries, newest first inside each group. The two kinds a title cannot speak for say what they are on the row itself, because each carries a promise: a reading list holds books you are looking for rather than books you are offering, and a little library shelf is your side of a box out on the street, which is why it never asks you whether it should be public. An ordinary shelf wears no label, because that is the ordinary case and marking every row would be the clutter we set out to remove; if everything you own is an ordinary shelf, you see no headings at all. There is no sort menu to fiddle with. One order, decided once, the same every time you open the tab.
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Book boxes have their own place on your shelves page
Put a book in a neighborhood box and we quietly made you a shelf for it, which then sat on your shelves page looking like one of yours: a shelf you never made, named after a box you do not own, showing a handful of books while the box itself held twice as many. Your shelves page now keeps your shelves and the boxes apart. Boxes you tend is its own section, listing every box you put on the map or have stocked, with how many books you have reported into each one, and each card opens the box's own page, which is where the whole inventory lives and always did. Your own reports are still one tap away from there, so nothing you wrote down is lost. A box is a shared thing on a street corner: you tend it, you stock it, you never own it, and the page finally reads that way.
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Your profile says which book clubs you run
A club you started is a reason for someone to look at your profile, and until now there was nothing there to find. Your profile page now has a Book clubs section listing the clubs you own or help run, with the club's picture, how many people are in it, and the cover of what it is reading, each one a link to the club itself. Only clubs set to Anyone with the link are named there. A club that is invite only stays unnamed on every page, as it always has, and clubs you are simply a member of are not listed either: joining a club is not a decision to announce it. Nothing shows at all when there is nothing to show. The app reads the same list, so a profile looks the same wherever you open it.
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The book page and the place page, redrawn on the app
The two pages the website redrew last week now look the same on the app. A book leads with its cover at a size worth looking at, and where we hold no cover art the title and author are printed on the board instead of a grey placeholder, so a shelf of unmatched books still reads as books. Whether you can actually have the copy is stated in words now, not a status word borrowed from a database, and a book on somebody's reading list makes no claim at all, because a want is not a copy in hand. What you can do with it and where to go and get it sit together in one card with the button underneath, instead of scattered down the page with the action pinned to the bottom of the screen. Whoever left it there is named with their picture and whatever note they wrote alongside it. A place is now one page whichever kind it is: a book box, a bookshop or a public library. The map is bigger and wears that kind's own pin rather than the book box's, the operator, hours, phone and the rest are laid out as facts you can scan rather than a list of labels, and Get directions hands the walk over to your phone's own maps app. The parts only a book box has, the shelf of books neighbors have reported inside and the scanner for adding to it, simply are not there on a shop. Where the design asked for numbers we do not keep, we left them out rather than invent them.
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A club can say when and where it next meets
A book club page could tell you what the club was reading and not the one thing everybody actually wants to know, which is when it meets. Organizers can now post the next meeting: a date and time, a place, and one line for the club. The place is a spot you have saved, a link for a video call, or somewhere else just this once — and if you would rather not put an address on a page, you can mark it approximate, which shows members the area on a map and leaves you to tell them the rest. Everyone in the club gets one notification when a meeting goes up, one more if you move it, and one if you call it off; changing the note is silent. Members get an Add to calendar button that hands their phone the real thing. A meeting only ever shows its place to the club: someone reading a public club's page sees the date and nothing else. When the evening has been and gone the card steps back to a quiet 'last met' line and hands the page over to setting the next one, with your usual night and time already filled in.
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Say something about a book box
A box page can tell you what is inside it, who has been keeping it stocked, and what it looks like. What it could not tell you is whether the door still latches, whether the bottom shelf is soaked after the rain, or whether it is worth the walk this week. Anyone signed in can now leave a comment on a box, and they sit on its page for everyone. Comments, not star ratings: a score for a wooden box on a corner that nobody owns and whose contents turn over weekly says nothing a sentence doesn't say better. Comments are credited by handle only, the same as the photos and the updates list, and you can take your own back at any time. Comments from an account we have hidden or disabled do not appear, and anything that does not belong on a public street corner comes down.
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Book boxes have photos now
A book box page could tell you what was inside it and who had been by lately, and nothing at all about what the thing actually looks like. Anyone signed in can now add a photo of a box, and they sit on its page for everyone: the box itself, the corner it stands on, the state of the paint. There are no captions, because a box is a thing you can see and the picture is the sentence. Photos are credited by handle only, the same as the updates list, and you can take your own back at any time if you photographed the wrong box or caught someone in the frame. Photos from an account we have hidden or disabled do not appear, and anything that does not belong on a public street corner comes down.
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Every book box now shows who has been keeping it stocked
A book box page used to show you what is inside it and nothing about how it got there. It now has a Recent updates list: each time someone reports what they found or left in a box, that visit appears, with the books they named, when it happened, and the handle of whoever it was. A whole armful of books reported in one go reads as one visit rather than six separate lines, because that is what actually happened. Above it sits a line saying how many different people have stocked the box and how long ago the last one came by, which is the quickest way to tell a box someone is looking after from one that has been quiet since spring. The list ends where the box itself starts, either with the neighbor who put it on the map or with a note that it came from OpenStreetMap. People are named by their handle only, and a report from an account we have hidden or disabled does not appear at all.
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Leaving a book in a box is the same screen as adding one
Reporting what is inside a book box used to be its own page, with its own camera and its own way of doing things. It is now the same Add a book screen you use for your own shelves, pointed at the box instead: photograph the shelf, read a barcode, or type a title, and everything you tick goes into that box's public list. The screen says which box you are contributing to, and says plainly that what you leave there leaves your shelves for good, so there is no question of whether you are lending it or giving it away. There is nothing to fill in about swapping or lending, because a book in a box is there for whoever finds it. Old links and printed codes that pointed at the old page still work; they land you on the new one.
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The book page and the place page, redrawn
The page for a single book and the page for a place on the map were the last two that still looked the way they did on day one. They have been rebuilt. A book now leads with its cover at a size worth looking at, and where we have no cover art the title and author are set on the spine instead of a grey box, so a shelf of unmatched books still reads as books. What you can do with the copy, and where to go and get it, sit together in one card instead of scattered down the page, and whoever left it there is named with a face and whatever note they wrote. A place page now works the same whether it is a book box, a bookshop or a public library: the map is bigger and wears that kind's own pin, the address, hours and phone number are laid out as facts you can scan, and there is a Get directions button. The parts that only a book box has, like the shelf of books neighbors have reported inside, simply are not there on a shop, and neither is a roadmap of box features nobody is building for one. Where the design asked for numbers we do not actually keep, we left them out rather than make them up.
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You can see the cover before you pick the book
Typing a title into Add a book brings up matching editions, and until now every one of them looked the same: a little placeholder where the cover should be. The real covers are there now, in the suggestions list, on the book you have picked, and beside every spine we read off a shelf photo, so telling two editions apart is a glance rather than a guess. The cover art comes from us rather than from whichever catalogue we found it in, so browsing the list does not quietly tell anyone else what you are looking for.
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Book clubs, on the phone
Book clubs have been a website thing until now. The app has them too: the clubs you are in, and for each one the book it is reading, the list it is reading from, who else is in it, and the discussion. You can post, and you can take back something you said, and a comment somebody removed leaves its marker where it was rather than quietly going missing, the same as on the site. If the organizer has turned commenting off, you can still read what is there. Joining is by the link an organizer sends you: paste it into Join a club and you are in. Starting a club, inviting people, choosing the current read and pointing a club at a reading list are all still jobs for the website.
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Putting a book box on the map from a phone
Adding a little library from a phone asked you to aim at something you could not see: the panel with the name field sat over the middle of the map, which is exactly where the crosshair marking your pin was. It sits along the bottom now, out of the way of the crosshair and most of the map, so you can watch where your pin will land while you move the map under it.
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A page for organizers moving a book club here
If you run a book club that lives in a Facebook group, there is now a page written for you at /for-clubs: what a club gets here that a group thread cannot give it, and the three steps to move one, which is making the club, pasting your members' email addresses, and printing the join sheet for whoever is not on email. It is a page you can send to a co-organizer who needs convincing. And on the club page itself, under the join link, there is now a short note you can copy and paste into the group you are leaving, with your club's join link already written into it. Reset the link and the note is rewritten with the new one, so what you paste is never a dead door.
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Start a club and invite everyone in one press
Starting a book club and then getting people into it used to be two jobs, and the second one was yours: copy the join link, work out where to paste it, chase whoever missed it. The page that starts a club now has a box for the members' email addresses. Paste them in, separated by commas or new lines, and everyone gets their own message with the club's name, what you said it is about, and the link that puts them in it. Nobody sees anyone else's address, and nobody needs an account first: opening the link signs them up and lands them in the club in one go. If you did not have the addresses to hand when you started, the same box is on the club page for you and your moderators, so you can send the next batch whenever they turn up. A typo comes back to you with the bad address named, rather than quietly not being asked.
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One place to add a book: camera, barcode, or just the title
Adding a book used to mean deciding first how you were going to do it, and each way had its own screen. There is one now. Open Add a book and the camera is the first thing on the screen: start it and hold a barcode up, and the book appears on its own, or press the shutter and photograph a whole shelf, and every spine we can read comes back as a list you tick before anything is saved. If you already know what it is, the field beside the camera takes a title, an author or an ISBN in the same box. Drop in a photo you took on your phone and it goes down the same path. The shelf you are adding to is stated at the top and changed by tapping another one, how you want to share each book is the same four choices you get everywhere else, and the dialog stays open as books land, with an undo beside each one, so a stack beside the keyboard is one sitting rather than one trip each.
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Share a reading list from your phone, username or not
Sharing a list from the app used to hand out a link that went the long way round: it opened your profile first and bounced from there to the list. It hands out the list's own page now, the same link the website gives, so it lands where it is meant to on the first press. And it is there for everyone: the old link had your username in it, so anyone who had skipped picking one had no link to give and no share button to press. A list needs nothing but itself to be shared, so the button is on every public list you have, whether or not you ever picked a name. Anything you sent before still opens.
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Book clubs can talk on the club page
A club page told you what the club was reading and who was in it, and gave you nowhere to say anything about either. There is a discussion on it now. Everyone in the club can post, the organizer included, and everyone in the club gets told when somebody does, unless they have turned book clubs off in their notification settings. Comments are plain text and they stay on the page, in order, oldest at the top, with a button to reach further back once there are more than fifty. If something does not belong there, the organizer and any moderator can remove it, and anyone can remove their own; a removed comment leaves a marker where it was rather than quietly vanishing, so a conversation cannot be edited out from under the people who were in it. An organizer who wants the page quiet can turn commenting off altogether, and what has already been said stays readable.
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A reading list now has a page of its own
Sharing a list used to drop whoever opened it onto your profile, somewhere down the page, next to everything else you have out. A list has its own page now: its name at the top, your note under it, the books below, and you credited underneath with a link back to your profile. The Copy link button hands out that page, wherever you press it, and every link anyone has already sent opens it too. Lists that a bookshop or a library publishes get the same page, which is the point: a list someone curated is worth arriving at directly.
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Copy a reading list's link from the page you made it on
Handing someone your reading list meant going to your own profile to find the button, which is a page you have no reason to open. The Copy link button is now on your shelves too: on each public list where it sits among your others, and at the top of the list's own page, next to Edit list. It copies the same link the profile does, so it opens on the list, by name, wherever you paste it. A list that is private has no button on any of those pages, and making one private takes the button away as you save, rather than leaving something to copy that would no longer work.
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Pick the colour your share card signs off in
Every share card ends with the same band along the bottom: the Abridgedly mark, the link, and a code someone can point a camera at. That band is the card's signature, and now you choose its colour. Paper is what you have been getting, and beside it there are three more: vermilion, a deep forest green, and near-black ink. Everything in the band moves with your pick, so the lettering and the mark stay readable whichever you take, and the code keeps its own patch of white on the darker ones so a phone can still read it off the post. The mark itself is the real one now, drawn rather than stood in for. Save a card and it remembers the colour, the same way it remembers your backdrop and caption.
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Share cards keep your cover's own shape, and the sizes say where they go
A share card sets your book down on a photographed surface, and until now it stretched whatever cover you gave it to fill the same slot: a nearly square art book came out tall, a slim paperback came out squat, and either way it had stopped being a picture of the book you own. The slot is a maximum now, not a mould. Your cover keeps its own proportions, takes the largest size that fits, and stands on the surface, so a book that is wide reads as wide and a book that is tall reads as tall. Its shadow follows the cover rather than the slot. The sizes say what they are for, too, alongside the shape and the pixel count each one comes out at: an Instagram post, an Instagram or Facebook feed post, or a story for Stories, Reels and TikTok.
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Share cards now come with backdrops and captions
Making a share card used to give you one look and one line: a plain backdrop, and the words "Currently reading" whether or not that was what you meant. Now you pick both. There are eleven photographed backdrops to choose from (a walnut desk with a black coffee, a marble table with a mug still steaming, a reading nook, a cafe table with wildflowers), and your cover is composited onto the surface in the photograph, lit and angled to sit there rather than pasted on top. The caption is yours too: currently reading, just finished, up next, found in a little library, or on my shelf. Change the size and the backdrop is re-cropped for it, so a story and a feed post are each framed for their own shape instead of one being a squeezed version of the other. Save a card and it remembers the backdrop and caption you chose, so loading it back gives you the card you made.
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Send someone your reading list
A reading list is a good thing to hand to a friend, and until now there was no way to hand it over. Any reading list you have made public now carries a Copy link button, and so does everybody else's: if you are looking at a list worth passing on, you can pass it on without asking whose it is. The link opens the profile with that one list picked out and scrolled to, and pasted into a message or a post it announces itself as the list, by its own name and note, rather than as the profile in general. If the list later goes private the link stops telling anyone anything: whoever follows it gets the profile and a line saying the list isn't public anymore, and none of what was on it. A list that was never made public has no link to copy in the first place.
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Every bookshop, library and book box on the map now has a page
Until now only book boxes had a page of their own. A bookshop or a public library was a pin you could tap and little else, which is a strange thing to be when a reader is standing outside deciding whether to go in. Every place on the map now has its own page: what it is, where it is, its hours and phone number and its own website when the public map data knows them, and a map showing exactly where it stands. Tap a pin and the popup carries a link straight to it, alongside the shop's own site rather than in place of it. If you run the shop, or work at the branch, the page asks you: tell us who you are and it comes to us to look at. Claiming is free — it confirms the place is yours to speak for, and nothing about it signs you up for anything. Old links to a book box still work; they now land on the same kind of page as everywhere else.
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The share card page now looks like the thing it makes
The page for turning a book into an image worth posting has had its own picture taken. The card you are building now sits on a stage of its own, and on a wide screen it stays in view as you scroll, so you can see what a change does the moment you make it. Each size is drawn as its own shape and says how many pixels across it comes out, so a square post, a feed post and a story are told apart at a glance. If you are signed in, your shelves, reading lists and any book box you look after come up as a proper picker, each book with its own spine, and the one you have chosen is marked. A carousel reads as a strip of slides you can pull apart rather than a list of rows. The card itself is unchanged: still made for you when you ask for it, still carrying nothing about you but the book and the small code that brings a curious friend here.
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If a book box sits on your property, it's yours to speak for
Anyone can add books to a book box's page — that is the whole point of a box, and it needs nobody's permission. The person whose garden, wall or driveway the box actually stands on is somebody else entirely, and until now the site had no way for them to say so. Every book box page now asks: is this on your property? Tell us who you are, add a photo of a dated note left in the box if you can, and it comes to us to look at. Once we've confirmed it, the page says you're the host, and you can take the listing down whenever you like. A listing you take down stays down: it leaves the map, the search results and the app, and our monthly refresh of the public map data will not quietly put it back. You can put it back yourself just as easily. If you would rather not claim it at all and simply want it gone, ask for that instead and we'll deal with it the same way.
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Rename a shelf, change your mind about who can see it, or delete it
A shelf used to be fixed the moment you made it: the name you typed, the note you wrote and the choice between public and private were all final on the website, however much the shelf itself changed afterwards. Open any shelf or reading list of yours and there is now an Edit button beside Add a book. Rename it, rewrite the note, and move it between public and private as often as you like — go private and it leaves your profile and the map straight away, go public and it is back. Deleting is there too, and it says how many books go with the shelf before you agree to it. One thing it will not do is delete a shelf holding a book somebody is in the middle of collecting: that exchange is half of somebody else's plan for the week, so finish or cancel it first and the shelf will go. A shelf stays whichever kind it started as; a collection never quietly becomes a reading list.
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Make a share card for what you're reading
There is a new page for turning a book you love into an image worth posting: a card with the cover set against a backdrop, the title and author set in type, and a small code in the corner so a curious friend can scan their way here and make their own. Search any title and it fills in as you type; if you are signed in, your own shelves and reading lists are right there to pick from. No account is needed to make one, and the card carries nothing about you — just the book, exactly as you chose to show it. Download lands as a picture sized for an Instagram post. More looks for it are on the way; this first one is deliberately quiet.
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Tell the app where you are by typing it
The app's map can now be pointed at a place by name. Tap the location button above the list, type a ZIP code or a city, and pick from the matches — no location permission needed, which matters if you turned it down or never granted it. The app remembers where you chose and opens there next time, and if you are signed in it saves to your account, so the map on your phone and the map on the website agree about where home is. Places are looked up the same way on both, so a ZIP lands on the same spot wherever you type it. As before, the app only ever works out a rough area, never your exact address.
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Keep a list of books you want, not just the ones you have
Until now every shelf meant the same thing: these are books I have, come and get them. There is now a second kind. Make a reading list from the button next to New shelf, and it holds the books you are after rather than the ones on your floor. Adding to one skips everything that only makes sense for a copy you own, so it never asks you for a price, a pickup spot or how you would like to hand it over. Nothing on a reading list goes on the map, turns up in search, or can be requested from you, because none of it is yours to give. It follows the same privacy switch as any other shelf: keep it to yourself, or make it public and it shows on your profile under your shelves, where anyone with a spare copy can see what you are hunting for. People can follow a public one the same way they follow a shelf.
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Picking a map search result opens its pin, and you can reach every result by keyboard
Searching the map and picking a result was meant to fly you there and open that pin, so you could see what else is at the same spot. It flew you there and opened nothing, for as long as the search has existed, whenever the book was kept at a book box, a bookshop or a public library. The pin now opens. Book boxes, bookshops and libraries matched by name have also been sitting in the results list doing nothing at all: they are now results like any other, so picking one takes you to it on the map and opens its pin, with everything we know about the place inside, and the arrow keys walk them along with the books instead of skipping past. A book box's own page is now the View library link in that pin rather than the row itself.
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The app says how a book is offered, and says the right thing
The four colors the website uses for free, borrow, rent and buy are now on the app as well. Your exchanges list marks each one, so a loan and a sale no longer read the same in a list of names, and the map's filter buttons carry their own color instead of all looking alike. Underneath that is a fix worth knowing about: an open exchange used to describe itself from the book's listing as it stands today, so an owner who relisted a book partway through could turn somebody's request to borrow it into a request to buy it. An exchange now says what was agreed when the request was made, and keeps saying it.
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Follow a shelf and hear about it when it changes
Every public shelf on someone's profile now has a Follow button, and it finally does something: follow one and you get a notification when a new book lands on it, in the same inbox as your exchanges and messages, and on your phone if you have the app. It is per shelf rather than per person, so you can follow the neighbor's sci-fi shelf without hearing about the rest. Unfollow with the same button. You are only followable on shelves you have made public, and on your own shelf page you can see how many people are following it. If you would rather not hear about this at all, Settings has a switch for it, for email and for your phone separately.
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The app can tell you when something happens
Until now the Aliqua app only knew about a request, a handoff or a message once you opened it. It can now send a notification to your phone as it happens, and tapping it takes you straight to the exchange or the conversation it is about rather than dropping you at the front door. The app asks for permission the first time you open your notifications, not the moment you install it, and if you say no everything still waits for you in the app exactly as before. Which kinds are allowed to buzz is the set of switches in Settings, the same ones the website uses, so turning one off quiets your phone without hiding the notification. Signing out stops that device receiving anything.
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The first page after you sign in asks you to pick a handle
A new account started life with no public name at all: no profile page to send anyone to, no link back to you on the books you list, and no QR code to print for a shelf. The only place to set one was a field partway down Settings, and nothing ever pointed you at it. Now the first page after you sign in asks, shows you the address it makes as you type (yourhost/u/yourname), and tells you whether it is still free. While you are there you can also name your area, which is used to centre your map and rank what is nearby, and is never shown on your profile. Both are optional: Not now takes you straight where you were going, and we will ask again next time you sign in.
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Changing your email in Settings answers the same way for every address
The same change we just made to the sign-up form, applied to the other form that had the same problem. Asking to move your account onto an address that already belongs to someone used to come back with "has already been taken", which told anyone willing to ask whether a given address had an Aliqua account, and on this form they could ask as often as they liked. It now says a confirmation link is on its way, which is what it says for any other address. If the address really was already in use, no link is sent and nothing about that account is given away. If nothing arrives and you think it should have, check the address and ask again.
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Signing up with an address you already used just sends you a login link
If you had an account and had forgotten, the sign-up form used to stop you with "has already been taken" and leave you to work out the rest. It now emails a login link to that address and points you at your inbox, which is what you were after anyway. There is a second reason for the change. The old message told anyone who asked whether a given email address had an Aliqua account, and since Aliqua publishes roughly where people keep their books, that is not a harmless thing to hand out. The log-in form has always been careful about it; the sign-up form now is too, and both say the same thing whether or not the address is one we know. Worth knowing: the display name you type is only kept when the account really is new.
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Choose what your phone is allowed to interrupt you for
Settings has always let you say which notifications also reach your inbox. There is now a matching set of switches for push notifications on the Aliqua app, kept separate from the email ones on purpose: plenty of people want their phone to buzz when a neighbor asks for a book but would rather the inbox stayed quiet, and plenty want the exact reverse. Turn a kind off here and your phone stays quiet for it, while the notification still waits for you in the app. This only affects the app on your devices; nothing about the website changes.
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You can pick a map search result from the keyboard
Search the map, and you can now press the down arrow to walk through the results and Enter to open the one you want, without reaching for the mouse. Escape closes the list and leaves what you typed alone. This was supposed to have worked all along and never did, which also meant screen readers were never told which result you were on.
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Scanning a photo now tells you what it's doing
Picking a photo to scan used to be a leap of faith. The Scan photo button looked the same whether or not you had chosen anything, nothing on screen changed while your photo was going up, and a photo the site would not accept, one over the size limit, sat there looking fine while the button quietly did nothing. Now the button stays greyed out until you have picked a photo it can actually use, a photo that is too big says so and says why, and once you press Scan you get a short list of what is happening: your photo going up with a progress bar, then finding the books in it, then matching them to the catalogue. Separately, uploads failed outright in a small number of browser setups, with no error shown anywhere. Those work now.
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A shelf scan no longer pre-checks books it isn't sure about
Scanning a shelf reads the spines with a camera and a fair amount of guesswork, and sometimes it guesses at a book that isn't really there. Until now most of what it guessed arrived already ticked, so tapping Add without reading the list closely could put invented books on your shelf, and on the public map, under your name. Now a book is only pre-ticked when we are confident we read the spine correctly and we also found that book in the catalogue. Everything else still appears in the list with its checkbox, waiting for you rather than assuming. There is a Select all when you have looked down the list and it is all correct. Separately, when the catalogue's best answer does not actually resemble the spine we read, we no longer quietly attach that book to the row; it stays as what the photo showed.
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"Remove from shelf" works
If you tried to take a book off one of your shelves on the website, you clicked Remove from shelf and nothing happened at all, not even the question asking whether you were sure. That button had never worked, and a reader who had books on a shelf they did not want there had no way to get rid of them. It works now: it asks, and then the book comes off the shelf and off the map. The two buttons for taking a photo off a book were broken for the same reason and work again too. Editing a book, saving it, and closing the window are all unchanged.
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Aliqua links now unfurl properly when you share them
Paste an Aliqua link into Discord, Slack, WhatsApp or a group chat and until now you got a naked URL, which is a poor way to introduce a neighbor to the thing. Links now arrive as a proper card: the page's own title, a line about what Aliqua is, and artwork rather than nothing at all. Share a profile and the card carries that person's name. Nothing changed about what's public, this is only about how a link looks once it leaves the site. Chat apps cache these hard, so a link someone posted before today may keep showing the old bare version.
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Set where the map opens by typing your ZIP or town
Until now the only way to move the map to your own neighborhood was to drag it there, or to hand over your device location. There's now a box above the results list: type a ZIP code or a town, pick from the short list of matches, and the map goes there. No permission prompt, no account needed, and if you'd rather just share your location the button underneath still does that. The area you set sticks, so the map opens on it next time. Sign in and it's kept with your account rather than with the browser you happened to use, so it's there on your next machine too.
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The map remembers where you were
The map used to open on Brooklyn every single time, wherever you live and however far you had scrolled away from it last visit. Now it opens where you left it: pan across to your own neighborhood, close the tab, come back next week, and it's still there. On a first visit, before there's anything to remember, it makes its best guess from roughly where you're connecting from rather than dropping you in New York. Links that point at a particular spot on the map still go exactly there, and they still win over everything else.
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A new front page, and a waiting list for Android
The front page has been rebuilt. It opens with a box you can type your ZIP code or your town into, which drops you straight onto the map centred where you live, no location permission and no account needed. There's a plain-English answer to the questions people actually ask first, including what costs money and what happens when a borrowed book doesn't come back, and a section about the little libraries already on the map, each of which has a public page of its own. The numbers on the page are counted rather than guessed: the book count used to quietly stop at 200 no matter how many were really out there. And the Google Play badge now sits next to the App Store one, so if you're waiting for the Android app you can put your name down for it and we'll write when it lands.
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Signing up and signing in got a lot friendlier
Creating an account is two fields and a link in your inbox, on a page that finally explains what an account is for: messaging a neighbor, putting your own shelf on the map, asking for a book. Asking for a login link now takes you to a proper "check your inbox" screen that tells you which address you typed and how long the link is good for, instead of a message that vanishes. Signing in with a password is still one tap away if you've set one, and if that password has gone out of your head, "Forgot it?" next to the box takes you straight back to the login link. The header you see when you're logged out now matches the rest of the site.
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The map's results list has room to breathe on a phone
Opening the map on your phone used to leave the list of nearby books squeezed into a sliver, often showing a single card cut in half with no sign there were dozens more behind it. The map now takes a clear slice of the screen and the results run on down the page underneath it, so you scroll the whole page the way you would anywhere else and every book in view is a scroll away. The count of what's nearby sits right above the list, so it's clear the list is showing you what the map has in view.
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Your shelves page tells you what's going on
Every shelf card now shows a strip of book spines in the free/borrow/rent/buy colors, how many books are on it, how many are out on loan, and whether someone is waiting on you. Search your shelves by name or area, or filter down to just the ones on the map (or just the private ones). Shelves that stock a little library are marked as such and link straight to the box on the map. Making a new shelf now explains what public and private actually mean, and tells you which neighborhood the books will show in before you create it — starting from the area your last shelf uses, and changeable right there.
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Free, borrow, rent and buy each have a color
On the website, every book now says how it's offered in the same four colors wherever you look: orange for free, green for borrow, blue for rent, purple for buy. The map's filter buttons wear them too, and the tag now shows on the book's own page and on your exchanges.
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A privacy page that says what we actually do
The website has a privacy page now, linked from the footer and the menu. It's written plainly: what we collect, why your shelf shows as a city-sized area instead of a pin on your door, the handful of providers we use, and what happens when you delete your account. No selling, no ad trackers, no cookies beyond keeping you signed in.
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The website behaves itself on a small screen
Opening Aliqua in your phone's browser is no longer a fight. Exchanges, messages, and the map lay themselves out for a narrow window now: exchange buttons stay on screen instead of sliding off the right edge, titles get room to breathe, and the map's filters take up less room so you see more of the map. The two notes that float over the map are smaller, they keep clear of the zoom buttons, and you can tap either one away when it's sitting in front of a pin.
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iPhone: your photo suggests the pickup spot
When you add a book photo from your library on iPhone, the app checks where the photo was taken. If it lines up with a meetup spot you've already saved, it offers that spot with one tap instead of making you pick it again. It only ever suggests places you saved yourself, never a new one from the photo, and nothing is set until you tap Set.
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Bookshops and libraries on the map
The map now shows independent bookshops and public libraries alongside the little libraries, each with its own pin. Filter to the kind you're after, search them by name, and tap a pin for the address, opening hours, and a link to their site. Place data comes from OpenStreetMap.
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Safety controls for messages
You're in control of who can reach you: block any neighbor from their profile or a thread (unblock any time), and report a message or conversation to the moderators right where you see it. Blocking stops new messages both ways while keeping the old thread readable.
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Messages and exchanges update live
No more refreshing: new messages appear in your open thread and inbox the moment they're sent, and exchange requests and status changes show up in your Exchanges page and on item pages as they happen.
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Direct messages have arrived
You can now message any neighbor directly. Tap Message on a profile or on an exchange to start the thread, and find every conversation under Messages in the account menu, with an unread count so you know when something's waiting.
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Notifications by email, on your terms
Exchange activity, messages, and system notices can now reach your inbox as well as the in-app panel. Settings has a new Email notifications section where you choose which of them email you — turn any of them off and they still show up in the app.
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Notifications have arrived
Open the account menu and you'll find a notifications panel: exchange requests, accepts, handoffs, completions, and ratings land there as they happen, with an unread count on the menu entry. Opening the panel marks everything read.
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The camera sees the shelf before you snap
On iPhone, the scanner now reads book spines live in the viewfinder — a quiet counter ticks up as titles come into view, and the shutter ring turns green when it has something. Everything happens on your device; nothing is sent anywhere until you tap.
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Snap a shelf and watch it fill in
Scanning a shelf of books no longer means staring at one long spinner. The books now appear as soon as we read their spines and fill in their covers and authors as each is found, so you can start reviewing right away. If one book can't be matched, you retry just that one instead of the whole shelf.
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Fix your shelf's area
You can now see the area your shelf uses on the map, correct it if we guessed wrong, or clear it entirely. Books without their own pickup spot follow the area you set, so a wrong guess no longer puts your books in the wrong place.
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Every account starts with a shelf
New accounts now come with a public "My First Shelf", so your very first book can go straight onto the map. And the "Add a book" buttons now take you right to a shelf you can add to.
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Your books show up on the map automatically
Books on a public shelf now appear on the map at your shelf's city, even before you pin an exact pickup spot. Add a specific spot anytime to place a book precisely; make the shelf private to take it back off the map.
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Introducing What's New
This is where we'll share what's changed in Aliqua: new features, improvements, and fixes worth knowing about. Check back anytime to see what's new.
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Aliqua for iPhone is in TestFlight
The first iOS build is out to testers. Browse the map, scan a shelf, and arrange exchanges from your phone.
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Exchanges and ratings
Request an item, arrange a handoff at a public spot, and leave a rating once the exchange is done.
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Search the map
Filter what's near you by title, author, or keyword right on the map.
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Scan a whole shelf with your camera
Point your camera at a shelf and Aliqua reads the spines, so adding your collection takes seconds instead of one book at a time.