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Each week Adam & Ste focus on a specific feature, idea or prototype in Hardcover and iterate on it together or with guests.
Adam (00:01.166)
Hey, hey, stay, how's it going?
Ste (00:03.75)
Hey Adam, going pretty good, enjoying a nice evening in London. How about you?
Adam (00:08.046)
Pretty good. Just working on some hardcover bugs and enjoying a somewhat relaxing week after a busy week last week.
Ste (00:21.222)
Yeah, how was the music festival?
Adam (00:24.014)
it was fun, but yeah, it was, it was exhausting.
Ste (00:28.326)
Nice. Yeah.
Adam (00:30.062)
Yeah. My wife was also just like, just like, I think we were both dead on our feet by the end of it. So yeah, I have a lot of respect for people who can do that for like three days or something over a weekend because it's taxing.
Ste (00:37.254)
Wow
Ste (00:44.778)
Yeah, I was... Wow, yeah, I bet. I was about to ask if you end up for like three days.
Adam (00:51.406)
We went one day.
Ste (00:53.126)
Okay. Yeah, believe me, I get you.
Adam (00:59.118)
Yeah, 10 hours one day was plenty. We were like, yeah, I think tomorrow we should just stay home and watch the Eurovision final.
Ste (01:07.11)
Yeah, I watched a bit of that. I actually watched the act that one was it was Switzerland, right? Okay, yeah. But then I had to take my son for a bath. So yeah, I just heard it. Yeah, nice. Glad to hear you've been enjoying that. I know festivals are, I mean, I really like down.
Adam (01:15.982)
Yeah. Yeah.
Ste (01:36.07)
done the rounds at festivals up to a couple of years ago, but yeah, they are taxing after a certain age. Not saying that we're old, but you know.
Adam (01:45.934)
You
Adam (01:49.902)
I started like sitting a little more than when I was 20.
Ste (01:53.382)
Yeah, exactly. Let's put it that way. Sounds great. Yeah.
Adam (01:58.254)
How about you? How's your last week been?
Ste (02:01.478)
It's been pretty good. It's been very hot in London after a pretty cold streak, so I went out on a picnic and yeah, it was pretty fun.
Adam (02:14.478)
Hmm. That sounds nice.
Ste (02:17.958)
Yeah, yeah, over here when it gets like over 20 Celsius, everybody's out in the park. So it was a park. I mean, all the parks basically, but this one's near us. And yeah, full of people. So yeah, it's kind of like an impromptu event. So that was pretty good.
Adam (02:32.11)
Nice.
Adam (02:40.078)
Yeah, just like getting out in nature for the littlest amount of time is like very refreshing.
Ste (02:48.07)
Yeah, yeah, it was pretty nice. I took my son Jonah with his bare feet on the grass, so he enjoyed that a lot. So that was basically the highlight. He was very excited.
Adam (03:01.166)
it sounds very cute.
Ste (03:03.239)
Yeah, it was pretty fun. Nice. Yeah. And with Hardcover, we had a very, very surprising week this week and over the weekend. Yeah.
Adam (03:13.646)
Yeah. Yeah. On, on Saturday morning, just as I was getting ready to leave for 10 hours at a music festival, we realized that we were getting a lot of new users that day. We had like a hundred in the morning, which like tied our all time best. And yeah, it turns out that someone made a video about YouTube on her on, on YouTube. And let me get the.
link to share it in the chat here.
Ste (03:45.446)
Yeah, shout out to both Haley and Ross for the videos. Basically, you contributed to our best days of hardcover because of the videos you posted. So I guess thank you. And it's been really fun to see so many people join and our servers holding up. That was like...
good stress test I guess. How was it on your end because you know you're basically like in charge of...
Adam (04:24.59)
I think the errors that we've had are not ones that are due to scaling. They're kind of like ones that we already had. And having so many more people using the site, we see more of the same error. So it kind of helps us prioritize what errors more people are seeing so we can fix those first. But there are normally things like in the background,
hitting the server failed and then that caused something like, or maybe something timed out because the database was processing a lot from having a whole lot of imports going at once. I think that's probably the biggest like large scale concern is like, we're right now we're doing a lot of imports. And so those are very taxing on the database. And then as more people are using the API outside of hardcover,
there's a chance that they'll find ways to hit the API in a way that is more taxing to our database than the, the routes that we've set out from the website that are kind of optimized. So if people hit the database to the API in ways that we aren't expecting, it could be taxing on the database and affect performance of the website. So as I kind of my two concerns, but so far, none of them have like taken the site down, but sometimes it does cause like the occasional.
Ste (05:49.67)
Okay.
Adam (05:52.782)
single failed request here and there.
Ste (05:56.006)
and that might translate to someone not seeing their imports gone through, right? So in this case, they should just try again because it's a temporary thing.
Adam (06:05.198)
Yeah, and the imports will usually like, it'll retry after an hour if it gets hung up. So those will eventually complete, but yeah, it might take a little longer if there's a lot of people.
Ste (06:19.59)
Yeah, I think that's happened when I imported a long while back ago, so...
Just, I mean, in case this happens, everybody should wait because, you know, it will eventually come through. But yeah, it's been good to see like, it's everything held up and we had like, I think now more than maybe it's like over 1500, we might reach like 10 K users. And it's funny because last week we talked about priorities and our priority was to get the sites.
ready as ready as possible. So instead of focusing 100 % on new features, streamline the experience, and then this happened. So I don't know if it's fate or like things working, things going in sync, but yeah, seems we should do that more often, I guess. Yeah, exactly.
Adam (07:20.078)
Yeah, it worked out. Yeah, I just looked at it and there have been 1600 new people since Saturday.
Ste (07:27.91)
1600 yeah that's amazing yeah
Adam (07:29.198)
And we're on, we're potentially on track to hit 10 ,000 today if pace continues, which is pretty cool.
Ste (07:37.094)
Yeah, that's... Yeah.
That's amazing. I mean, I still can. I mean, thinking how much effort we put into our product on launch, for example, where we had 175 or something, 65 signups. And these really talented people just mentioning us and boom, bringing in so many people on the site. It's been really good to see. I mean, I was feeling good looking at the dashboard and seeing the...
the reader number go up in real time. I've been hitting that refresh button a lot these days. Yeah.
Adam (08:19.95)
Yeah, it definitely makes me that much more like aware of how like beneficial having like a YouTuber or Tik Tok or Instagram or like post about us. Like that is like a whole nother level of like targeting compared to like the things we've like we've posted on Reddit and subreddits. We've done that kind of thing. We've posted on social media a lot, but.
Ste (08:39.302)
Mm -hmm.
Adam (08:48.59)
without our following or without the algorithm really putting it front and center for people. Then, yeah, the engagement and the number of people that will see that is gonna be so much smaller. So yeah, it makes me optimistic about like, when we do ever want to do any kind of paid ads or partnerships, doing those with book content creators seems like the way to go.
Ste (09:18.054)
yeah, definitely. And yeah, 100%. I was waiting for this to happen for the past three years, to be honest. I mean, I think we talked about this at least 10 times. So having this actually happen at some point after three full years of us basically building and trying to promote hardcover, but you know.
Adam (09:20.43)
More so than ads or anything else. Yeah.
Ste (09:48.038)
you can see the contrast in what we did, what our efforts did. I mean, they were like at their time very good, but you know, compared to what someone who has an audience in the book space can do to your website, it's a good like thing to see this actually happening. And yeah, I guess, yeah, it's good that, yeah, no, go ahead.
Adam (10:09.806)
Yeah. And it's, and it, and it's, it's just kind of also neat that, like the video by Hardy's books that went, more viral, he has like a thousand subscribers on YouTube. So like our, our email list at hardcover is bigger than like his subscriber base, but because the algorithm.
on YouTube decided to show his video to sons of people that had never heard of him. They're getting more books. They're getting more followers as well because of this. So it's just kind of cool that like two, like neither of us are huge creators in the grand scheme of things in terms of our current audiences, but we're both like benefiting from each other, which is just a nice dynamic.
Ste (10:47.302)
Yeah.
Ste (10:58.406)
Yeah.
yeah, I love that. I love that. I mean, I was waiting for this to happen and yeah, I mean, now that we know it's happening for like the whole ecosystem, I mean, I'm hoping, you know, we'll be all part of this wave of projects in the book industry that have like this fresh feeling attached to them. And that includes creators like...
Ross, yeah, like, hey, I mean, that's all part of the, it's all gotta work together and it does, I mean, yeah.
Adam (11:32.702)
Yeah.
Adam (11:40.27)
Yeah. If, if this pace continues, then we would potentially have enough paid subscribers to fund hardcover by like the end of June or July, which would be. Yeah. Like, I mean, that's exciting. Like that's one of the things we wanted to do by the end of the year. And now it's now that's realistic, like with the current trajectory. So that's, that's also really exciting.
Ste (11:51.91)
If that happens, yeah, yeah, and it's, yeah, no, you go ahead.
Ste (12:04.998)
Yep.
Ste (12:09.094)
Yeah, yeah, it's really good. And also a good moment to, you know, build this, build this momentum. And it's double funny because we not only talked about streamlining the experience, but we also talked about doing stuff to make the support plan more attractive. So if you're a reader and you believe in what we're doing, definitely, if you can try to subscribe because it helps a lot. And we'll be doing stuff to, you know, make the support plan even better.
both feature -wise and in the way it works. So that's what we're currently prioritizing. And it's been good to see that actually happen without... I mean, we barely started on that plan. And yeah, it's already moving in the right direction, not because we did some stuff to improve it, but yeah, we got a lot more in the pipeline.
Adam (12:55.634)
Yeah.
Ste (13:05.766)
Talking about hardcover, talking about our mission, talking about stuff that's happening in the industry. I had a really good chat with people on the Discord server about AI yesterday. So yeah, it's going to be really good to clarify what...
Adam (13:20.046)
Mm -hmm.
Ste (13:26.022)
our position is because we're a startup, we gotta grow, we gotta put this product which is obviously very good and...
have readers, as many readers access it as possible, but at the same time, take care of how we approach basically everything. So yeah, this was clearly a detail that hit the string. And I'm glad there was that debate because it helps us as well. And everyone coming in the Discord server and talking about features or talking about what's not working.
It's like compared to how we started, but I mean, so few people like actually on the server and props to who stuck with us from the beginning. Yeah, it's, it's something.
Adam (14:25.87)
Yeah, yeah, it's, it's, I feel like, it definitely gives me like more, like, it helps prioritize the things that are, are broken and things that are like needing assistance over like new features when people are reporting those things that are not working. Like, I feel like some of the time when things are kind of quiet, it makes me think.
It sometimes can give a false sense of security on the reliability of the site. So having more people use the site also just like helps us prioritize a lot more.
Ste (15:05.446)
yeah, definitely. I know someone was asking a couple of hours ago if we get those emails sent whenever there's an error. And yes, I mean, mainly Adam, he's on the receiving end, but don't worry, I mean, those emails help us diagnose. So whenever something's wrong, we know there's activity and activity is good. We'll fix it. I mean, we fixed so much stuff. I mean, over the past years that...
It's natural and we only got here because people kept telling us this is broken, this is broken, you worked on this and this is broken. So it's all natural at this point. I guess, I mean, I was a little freaked out at the beginning. Maybe you were too Adam, but you know, you get used to it after a while.
Adam (15:50.894)
Yeah, I feel like as long as the main things are stable and constantly stable, like if there's ever a point when you can't like add books to your library, view your library, search, I feel like those things need to be working like 100 % of the time. But like for anything else, like the farther down it goes, the more understanding people are.
Ste (16:10.918)
Mm -hmm.
Ste (16:19.494)
Yeah, yeah. And I mean, we eventually get to it. Also, you know, there's like image startup. I mean, I don't know what people know about us when they join. They certainly don't know that we're like just like a bunch of people like trying to like hold this huge thing and keeping it from breaking. And yeah, I guess it's...
much more interesting when you see the backstage of things, of us trying to fix everything and rushing whenever there's a disaster here, disaster there. But luckily we haven't had those lately, which I guess that's a good sign.
Adam (17:10.702)
Yeah. Speaking of look behind the curtain, do you want to jump into today's focus?
Ste (17:21.542)
Yeah, so today, to give a little bit of context, last time we talked about priorities, and one of the priorities was revamping stats because we're preparing a new dashboard, and in that dashboard, we're planning to integrate some stats widgets. And those stats widgets could use a lot of... We have new ideas to improve them, let's put it like that.
They, when we released that, I mean, I think they were in the industry pretty good and they're still like holding up. But as we've been using them, we got new ideas of how much better they can be. So we're now at that time when, yeah, we actually got to make them better. So yeah, wanna jump in the...
Adam (18:14.67)
Yeah. Yeah. Do you want to share your screen for this one?
Ste (18:20.71)
Yeah, let's go. So.
Adam (18:23.406)
I'm kind of amazed still that we like created these initial stats at the end of 2022 as kind of our like marketing push for the end of 22, like here, share your stats here. Here's everything. And we mostly left it on updated since then. So this will, this will be kind of the first time to really like revamp it since then.
Ste (18:48.87)
Yeah, they held up pretty good. I mean, stats are pretty hard to nail. And we know that because there are many other book platforms who are struggling with stats. I think we have some of the most complex ones, definitely. And, maybe, you know, some of them are better looking even.
Adam (19:13.19)
Yeah, there's a lot that's possible in this area for sure. So I guess at a high level, like right now, you can look at your stats overall and you can select a specific year and look at stats for that year. And this page changes to show instead of years, it shows months in that case.
Ste (19:20.646)
Yeah.
Adam (19:42.318)
And that's kind of where we, where we're at today. So in terms of like that high level, I'm wondering like, are there any other like high level changes that we want to make to stats or do we want to keep it as all in per month or per year?
Ste (20:00.326)
Well, you mentioned something, yeah. I mean, it would be neat to have that at the stat level. So when I'm looking at stats, the way I do it now is change this. So this is my life in books. I could change it to my April in books, and it would select my April 24 in books.
But I think you mentioned this last time we spoke. It would be neat to have that selector basically be at the stat level. So when you're viewing a stat, you could just select the time span you want for that stat instead of having it overall. Let me just delete these so we can have a blank canvas over here. So...
I was thinking this selector, do you think we could, how do you imagine it?
Adam (21:06.19)
Yeah. Cause I'm thinking like the, at a high level, the use cases that come to mind for me are, yeah, my overall, my last year. And then I'm thinking like custom time span. So it's like, I want to look at my last month in books or, even the first three months of this year, kind of like a start and end date range. And technically behind the scenes, that's what our.
Ste (21:32.838)
Mm -hmm.
Adam (21:35.534)
our year in stats, your yearly stats is, we're just like sending in a start date of the January 1st and end date of December 31st. So technically like from, from a technical side, we already have that functionality. We just would need to change the interface to be able to pass in. Like it be able to select a start and end date. So it's almost like maybe instead of just life and year there's range and you give it a, a range.
Ste (22:06.086)
Yeah, that would be great. I was just copying over some of the filtering from the letterbooks page. So I'm just going to put it here and you can see if it's close to what you are describing. I'm imagining it as, you know, we have this, but this is a pretty, I mean, it's a nice way to select.
everything but you have to do it you have to scroll to the top of the page you have to change it and of course you know you can select a custom date range what if we just put something like from and this is a date 14 may 2024 or 23
to.
Ste (23:13.83)
So this is one year.
Ste (23:20.838)
here and then we may later search stats.
Do you think this kind of, I mean, this is like the first iteration, but.
Adam (23:35.406)
Yeah, I think, I think something like that could work. I'm thinking like, you know, when you, when, when someone like loads their, I'm thinking about like that first visit, like someone's joined hardcover, they've imported their books. And maybe the next thing they do is they go to their stats page. And I'm thinking for that initial visit, what would be most impactful is just seeing like.
all of their stats for all time. And, but being able to filter it down from there.
And I wonder about these two.
Like only showing up if they selected like, a date range or something like, like one, one, one thing that came to mind as you were doing that was, I think in our, recent redesign, we have like those pills nav at the top for the user books. What if like the pills nav had like,
Ste (24:47.014)
Yeah.
Adam (24:52.494)
Like all, and then I don't know, that might be, I was thinking like 2024 or 2023. That might be too many links at the top though. Cause if someone's been a user for 20 years of their reading, that's going to be a lot of pills.
Ste (25:06.502)
Well, they can just scroll through them. It's just a horizontal scroll, so they can just do this. Basically, going this is... Yeah.
Adam (25:19.534)
That's what I was just thinking. And then one of those would be like custom and then custom would bring up the start end dates or something.
or.
Ste (25:33.062)
Yeah, that could work. Another idea, I mean, I put this here and I was thinking maybe we could default to the last year and maybe this calendar can have the months up top or the years. But so when you open the calendar, you know, when you're selecting,
something on sky scanner or an Airbnb, you have the dates, the exact dates, and you also can be flexible and say, I'm, you know, gonna search in March or I'm gonna search in any, on any date. I'm thinking something like that. Would that make sense? So, could have this, let me put in more years here. Let's say you're.
Adam (26:23.438)
Yeah.
Ste (26:28.902)
Importing your Goodreads and your Goodreads goes all the way back to whatever, like you've been using it for 20 years. Was it live 20 years ago? I don't know.
Adam (26:40.686)
16 years, 17 years. Yeah. I'm thinking like for the hierarchy of usage, if like the, the top usage is seeing all your stats and the secondary is probably seeing like your stats for this year or last year, or like maybe like how, how things have changed in the last year.
Ste (26:45.094)
Okay. wow.
Ste (27:07.342)
In fact, I mean, looking at this, what if, I mean, we could leave this here and based on what you choose, this could just change and you could select like a custom date if you wanted. Would that work? The problem I have is I wouldn't know where to put like the custom date in here. So you have the years, but where would you have like the custom date that brings this up?
Adam (27:23.246)
Good.
Adam (27:35.79)
Yeah, or maybe it's even another way to do this could be like.
Adam (27:46.19)
What if we keep something like this and have.
from beginning to now. And that's what shows when you first get to the page. And then you could just like.
Ste (28:03.718)
yeah.
Adam (28:13.422)
maybe like on this dropdown or like, I'm thinking like if you wanted to set it to like 2023 or something, then clicking on this and seeing a calendar component might be overwhelming if you just want to filter by the last year. Cause then you have to go back to January 1st of last year rather than like if we, if we just had this, but.
Ste (28:40.934)
so you mean just have these. If we have both this and that, and basically this change according to what you select here, that would work. And, you know, it just... What? Yeah, you gotta have both, else, you know.
You either cancel a date, so this would be like for all the books, but if you'd want to select 2023, you'd have basically January 2023 to December 2023 or something like that.
Ste (29:32.966)
change it back.
So beginning and now would just be like your first date recorded. And now would be today.
Adam (29:36.654)
Yeah.
Adam (29:48.43)
Yeah. What about, something like that, but with like this as the.
or something, I don't know. I do kind of like having this up here or some kind of familiar header, because I feel like our current stats page kind of feels like it's off in its own visual universe compared to the rest of the profile.
Ste (30:12.838)
Yeah, exactly. Well, we could have my whatever inbox, but the problem with this is when you choose the custom dates, it kind of like breaks down, right? Because you can't say my, I don't know, May 23 to June 24 inbox, right?
Adam (30:40.75)
because we're potentially gonna have something like this up at the top.
I'm assuming.
Ste (30:50.502)
yeah.
I think we should revamp that as well.
Ste (31:07.206)
I just put it in the...
Okay, there we go. So you'd have stats over here like this.
Adam (31:18.062)
Yeah, it would probably be like starting there. Yeah, that's it. Yeah, I was looking for the way to like mask it so it didn't go over the edge and you did it in like a second.
Ste (31:27.202)
Yeah, well, the frames can be confusing in Fima, but see, if you have like this and the frame and set to clip content, yeah, that's the trick. Yeah.
Adam (31:36.942)
clip content, that's what I was looking for. Cool. Yeah.
Ste (31:43.854)
I like my life in books, especially because it's with our Serif font, but I'm thinking it could be even more dramatic. I could make an illustration for the stats, or you could just have... Right now, we're just making the functional bit, but it should be...
something you'd want to definitely share on socials. So yeah.
Ste (32:22.246)
You have your profile here, so it could maybe be... Let's wind this to the left, maybe. That works better. So if you tap the Shaman here...
Ste (32:44.198)
of my life in books.
Adam (32:47.022)
What? So here's a, here's a idea inspired by the 2023 year in books. It's, it's like, if, as you're scrolling down this page, like each stat is kind of its own takeover of the entire page in mobile, but in, in desktop, it's kind of its own section. If we did that, then I could see the purpose of this first page being choose your date range and your settings for this page.
Ste (33:02.982)
Mmm, yeah.
Adam (33:14.702)
And then everything else is dynamically generating from that. So we could almost think of this first page, its entire goal is just setting the date range and the other options.
Ste (33:21.126)
Thanks.
Ste (33:27.302)
Yeah, I like that. So how would you see it?
Adam (33:32.782)
Let's see, so I guess like the questions are.
Adam (33:42.35)
date range and the options would be all time, a single year, a date range. And then the other option would be comparison range. And this is only if they selected a single year. And I think, I don't think we would need to say comparison range. Maybe it would just be comparison with previous range and it would.
Ste (33:57.03)
Yeah.
Adam (34:12.622)
That would be like a yes, no checkbox.
Ste (34:17.19)
yeah, maybe a toggle.
Ste (34:22.086)
How do I save it in the library? Toggle. Here we go.
Adam (34:33.486)
Yeah.
Adam (34:37.134)
and
Adam (34:41.998)
Yeah. Changing it from my two username seems like a good, a good step. Cause when you're looking, yeah, exactly. I've, I've noticed that too. I'm like, I'm surprised no one's really like mentioned this yet.
Ste (34:48.728)
Yeah, because when you share it, yeah.
Ste (34:57.798)
Yeah. Well, they're gonna notice it now.
Ste (35:12.838)
this.
I'm also thinking, if you would screenshot this and put it on your socials, especially if it's like you said, it takes the full height of the screen, maybe we could take the chance to make it as visual as possible. This allows me to go in and make some kind of illustration over here. Or maybe we can use the...
illustration for the most popular genre that year. That would be cool as well.
Adam (35:47.63)
Yeah, yeah, we could.
One thing we could do is we have those genre placeholders or book headers. We could potentially use those in a tiled way and show a couple of different tiles based on the genres that this reader reads. And that way it would be a little bit different for each person.
Ste (36:01.83)
Mmm, yeah.
Ste (36:15.27)
yeah.
Ste (36:21.35)
as well maybe that's nice or we could show the covers we could also do that we had the nice styled covers for the for the list i mean what do you think kind of like this
Adam (36:35.246)
I'm hesitant to do that here because it's gonna change based on their date range. And if we keep this page kind of general.
Ste (36:41.222)
Yeah.
Ste (36:46.822)
Yeah, that's true.
Adam (36:47.95)
or this, not even page, this part of the page.
Ste (36:51.558)
Yeah.
Ste (37:02.054)
here.
Ste (37:09.094)
Let's see how we can over -dial these.
Ste (37:22.438)
Okay.
Ste (37:27.814)
gradient here.
Ste (37:32.582)
Here we go. Okay.
Ste (37:39.815)
Just delete this
Adam (37:40.206)
nice job.
Ste (37:48.198)
this.
Ste (37:54.086)
okay. I know we're talking.
Ste (38:08.678)
Okay.
Adam (38:20.622)
Yeah, it's looking cool.
Ste (38:23.462)
Yeah, while you do that, yeah, okay, perfect.
Adam (38:31.15)
Yeah, this does look like it would be pretty easy to.
to just like select something really fast.
Ste (38:45.51)
Yeah, basically. I mean, you'd have the year, which is like what I'm guessing would be like the quick thing to check. Let's see how books I read in 2023 versus 2024. I seen that on many people's sites or blogs, just like the yearly comparison. You could select the dates. So it's from beginning to now. Let me keep this.
visible color and you could show comparison. Comparison would be it would bring up a whole new different thing underneath, right?
Adam (39:24.014)
I would see it as like, if we have a line graph of pages read, we would show a second line that shows your previous year's pages read in a different color. So it's like, it probably wouldn't be possible for every visualization we create, but for some visualizations that allow for comparison, it would work.
Ste (39:50.854)
Yeah, that's cool. That's going to be nice to see. OK, we can figure out how it changes when you actually toggle this afterwards. I'm thinking after this, you could maybe have the quick stats, these ones over here.
Adam (40:06.99)
Yeah. And these could probably like, as you come to the page, it would like,
increment up so it would go like 0 to 1244 real fast.
Ste (40:18.342)
Mmm.
yeah.
Adam (40:22.19)
using like a animated thing.
Ste (40:25.67)
Yeah, that would be really neat. Let me just make these. Okay, so I'll stick to some really... So this is not Books Read. This would be, let's say, 2024. Books Read. You're a really productive reader. Should we show covers in here or anything like that? I was thinking, you know, what other way? So I'm thinking if you'd share this on...
social media, what would you want there? Because my guess is that you wouldn't just want numbers, maybe you'd want some covers as well. Would that be like...
Adam (41:05.486)
yeah.
Ste (41:11.174)
We could show maybe the latest books read or let me grab something with more covers from one of our designs. Here we go.
Adam (41:23.182)
Yeah, let's see. So like, if we were to show books, there's like most popular books you read, highest rated books you read.
least popular.
Adam (41:40.622)
But yeah, like it's the one thing that's hard about books read is that.
Adam (41:48.878)
like customizing it to something that they, they, they are most, that's going to resonate with them as like, like we could do five star reads, but then I know like I'll read a comic book series. That's a hundred comics and I'll rate some of those five stars, but I don't think I'd want those because like issue 47 is going to be less impactful than seeing like Circe.
Ste (42:09.99)
Yeah, chill.
Ste (42:15.654)
Yeah, true. Okay, let's just leave it with the number then and I can maybe make an illustration or something just to have it. Or we could put the crap, this is like so old, this designs are 2022. These are ancient by our standards.
Adam (42:33.102)
You
Adam (42:39.854)
Is this going to be like a, one thing we could do is some kind of thing like you did for the loading book animation where we do some kind of SVG animation or something. That's.
Ste (42:55.462)
yeah, that could be, yeah.
Adam (42:58.222)
Yeah, that's even more work, but it's.
Ste (43:01.414)
Well, it's gonna be static and you...
Adam (43:04.014)
How did you make that by the way? I forget. Was that a Rive thing?
Ste (43:10.182)
no, it was actually just like CSS SVG. So I just, there's like some, an example I followed. So yeah, basically it's with animated SVGs. So it's just like rectangles moving. It should all be just CSS. I tried it with Drive and it was actually like more work. So.
Adam (43:14.766)
Mm.
Ste (43:39.238)
smiley face cut okay not what I wanted to do but let's put the book here okay so 2024 book strats
Yeah, we can definitely make that here. Let me make this into book sparkles. So...
I guess the idea with these would be to have a more shareable, easier to browse, and more controllable way to show the stats, right?
Adam (44:27.086)
I think one thing we, whoa, I turn it, okay.
If I do this one here.
Adam (44:46.606)
So.
Adam (44:51.47)
I was thinking this could be a neat place to do like comparison of like you to other people on the platform, like top 8 % of hardcover readers or something like that. I was thinking about changing this to like a Chevron up, but I was a Chevron up.
Ste (44:59.686)
yeah.
Ste (45:04.966)
yeah.
Ste (45:13.51)
Here we go.
We had something like that last that's, you're something like you're in the top 6 % of readers on hardcover for that period, right? We can do this. I mean, from a data point of view.
Adam (45:35.566)
Yeah.
Adam (45:46.766)
Yeah, I was even thinking like.
This could be per stat if you're like, there's one for authors, one for book referrals.
Ste (45:59.078)
yeah. Put that underneath, maybe half.
it.
Adam (46:08.942)
Yeah, one of the things I was thinking was like that.
But then again.
Ste (46:15.046)
yeah, yeah, that could work. Let me see, I was experimenting with maybe like this since that's a big number and...
Adam (46:20.59)
Yeah.
Ste (46:28.614)
red.
Ste (46:33.03)
where was yours? Top six percent. I think we can even like just put it there visible. Would you not want it visible at all times?
Adam (46:44.11)
I'd probably want it visible at all times. I think I, yeah. I think I did like this better down here.
Ste (46:47.398)
I mean if it sits like this, yeah.
Ste (46:55.462)
Okay, that's good. I mean, it can sit there. Maybe I didn't put the icon here.
Adam (47:00.558)
just a.
Adam (47:04.622)
playing with this for a second with what other colors look like.
Ste (47:07.014)
yeah. yeah. Yeah, this is kind of like the financial charts.
Adam (47:14.222)
Yeah.
Yeah, if it was like a...
Ste (47:17.99)
We could put some visualizations in the background. I really liked how we have the charts in the table view.
Ste (47:35.622)
here we go. Yeah, that's nice.
Adam (47:40.398)
I'll even make it smaller here.
Ste (47:52.422)
Yeah, we could put something in this area so it's not...
Adam (48:03.758)
There's a thin one. Yeah. that's a little too thin.
Ste (48:08.454)
Yeah, well, we'll fix it in production. That's okay.
Adam (48:15.47)
What is sharp solid? All these font awesome ones that I hardly ever use, like sharp solid versus solid. Solid has rounded edges. Sharp solid has hard corners. Yeah.
Ste (48:22.886)
haha
Ste (48:28.582)
Mm -hmm. Yeah, for me it's depending on the mood. Sometimes I really like the rounded edges. Sometimes I'm just like, crap, rounded edges again. They look so slick when they're, you know, those like blunt corners. But then the next day I'm like, soft edges, nice, smooth.
Adam (48:31.15)
or
Ste (49:00.806)
And yeah.
Would you have like more than one stat over here? So the way we have it now, these top stats, these quick stats are kind of,
like there up top but
Adam (49:20.846)
That's a good idea. I could see that. And what about as this comes in, we could put in, let's say we do find a way to do books, and maybe we just put in a handful of these that come in with some kind of animation.
Ste (49:49.51)
yeah, that is really nice. I was even...
Adam (49:50.826)
So, imagine one and then another one on top of it. So it almost looks like it's filling in over on the right side with the one on top of another until there's five of them showing here.
Ste (50:02.886)
Yeah, that'd be really cool. I mean, we could do this. Let me just like, yeah, now you can play with the margin so we can just do this. Here we go. Yeah, that's really neat. Yeah, I mean, if we do find a way to add books and they can just be like the five stars or I mean, even if you find the book.
Adam (50:11.278)
yeah.
Adam (50:15.886)
Yeah.
Ste (50:27.238)
that you didn't like over there. You still read it. I mean, if you didn't DNF it, it's still there. It's a book you read in that year. So it counts towards the stats, even if you didn't like it. I mean, if you're gonna have 100 comics that you rated, yeah, why not? I mean...
Adam (50:40.078)
Yeah.
Adam (50:47.342)
And we have a new field for book type, so we could filter for only things that qualify as a book under the book type.
Ste (50:57.478)
Yeah, true. So you wouldn't have like if you read what would count as a book over here, but it's actually a 100 series like manga or something. Yeah, you wouldn't have it wouldn't be filled with all this. Yeah. If we can find a way to do it, that's going to look like very good.
Adam (51:10.574)
Yeah.
Adam (51:21.71)
Yeah.
Ste (51:24.614)
and we could do the same for authors. My question was, I mean, if it's worth not mixing these up, so you could have these, this, so you'd have like this box, which is like the full height of the screen. And here in this model, you'd have like authors, so probably here you'd have, let me grab an avatar from the library. So you'd have...
jewels you'd have Anki Jemisin and
Sanders and all good authors and yeah they could stack the same way.
Adam (52:11.79)
Yeah.
Ste (52:14.31)
But another way it could happen, so this can just animate like this. So they can be like whoop, boom, boom, boom. But we could also have each stat. I mean, the way I like the way the Eerie Books page, because for some sections where it just featured the book, it was just about that book. Let me.
here so we don't lose it just in case the sense of looking like crap so you could have this maybe we could have the bigger covers well okay not that big
Adam (52:57.006)
I see what you mean. So, yeah, so it's like the first card is celebrating the number of books you've read. So it's not, cause that is a pretty big, a big thing. So yeah, I think I do like this. I think on mobile especially, like doing it this way makes sense.
Ste (53:00.166)
Yeah, so...
Ste (53:12.166)
huh.
Ste (53:19.718)
Yeah.
Yeah, and on last up, we could just keep this card and just maybe put two columns in, kind of like we did for the... I mean, the e -mail books page looks very good and it had a lot of blank space, but you could focus on the thing at hand and you could easily screenshot it. That could have been a social post. So I'm thinking, yeah, maybe if you have the bigger covers, it's also easier to share. So...
You could have like even more.
Ste (53:58.406)
two rows of covers because...
Yeah, let's assume you read like, and what else could we put here?
Adam (54:12.942)
Another one thing we could do is almost show it the same way we show.
the shelf view in library. Because if we did something like that, it would kind of look like.
Ste (54:23.91)
yeah.
Adam (54:36.974)
me sort by book popularity.
Ste (54:41.83)
coming like this. Yeah, this would be really neat to see our books like animate like this in two rows. yeah. And they can just animate like that.
Adam (54:46.958)
Thank you.
Adam (54:51.438)
This is what.
Adam (54:55.662)
Mmm.
Ste (55:00.262)
this could come in and this could come in as well. Yeah, and we can like replicate that animation throughout the...
Adam (55:15.854)
Yeah.
Yeah. So it's like, like, as you, as you show this card, it would animate up the two 44. And it would also almost like, it would also do maybe like this first book and then the second book and the third book on top of it. And then like the next row on top of that, maybe started, maybe these are animating at the same time, but this, this row starts like, while this like second book is starting. So, so they're not like both animating at the same.
Ste (55:35.014)
Mm -hmm. Yeah.
Ste (55:41.734)
with the delay. yeah.
Adam (55:47.982)
Left to right pace.
Ste (55:49.478)
-huh, yeah, that would be pretty, we can do it in frame of motion. So yeah, this is going to look really good if we animate them. And maybe even if we scroll snap and it triggers when you animate it, you can just browse through all of these sections or not scroll snapping, just show it as it comes into view.
Adam (56:17.23)
Yeah.
Ste (56:19.398)
Nice. And we could do like the same with authors. Let's put in some like big images over here. And even if you have, so let's say you read three authors, it wasn't like such a good year for you. Just like have like not so many.
Ste (56:45.03)
books read, we could just center these and it will still be like a nice. And maybe I was thinking, so this will then be like.
It would just be like a bottom. Or how should we put it? Should we show bottom? Yeah.
Adam (57:05.07)
Maybe we don't even show it. Yeah, maybe we don't even show it unless you're in at least the top like 25%.
Ste (57:12.39)
Yeah, that's true. We can just say three authors read stats this way will be like a really good incentive to make you read more, which I kind of like. And yeah, maybe we could put like a nice background here, which is like your favorite genre, your like the author in like that genre. And this can come in like this and yeah, you have three authors. But if you have like...
fan authors they would animate just like the books.
Adam (57:47.31)
Yeah. And what if, I think we have like a, like a badge. What about like showing the badge next to like the author to show like how many of each book they read. So it's like, you know, you would see a badge on each of these avatars for like,
Ste (58:05.094)
Yeah.
Adam (58:10.222)
Like three books by this avatar, four books by this avatar.
Ste (58:10.758)
Even.
-huh. Should it say books as well? Or just three, yeah.
Adam (58:17.742)
Maybe not. I think, well, yeah.
Ste (58:24.614)
this so it's an accent color so make it slightly bigger and yeah so you have three books by Jules where do you think it should sit you have two by N .K. Jemisin and you read all the Brando's Henderson books like how many are there 30 30 50 60 66 did I get that right?
Adam (58:53.294)
Like probably it's like, yeah, you read three authors, but it kind of shows that you read a lot by each of them.
Ste (58:55.686)
Hahaha
Ste (59:01.158)
Yeah, really big on Brandon Sanderson this year. So yeah, like this or just be like in the corner. So.
Adam (59:15.31)
Let's see.
We have, what about the green one?
Ste (59:20.774)
Yeah.
Ste (59:27.59)
Thanks.
Ste (59:32.102)
here and if they're authors maybe we don't have to like stack them on top of each other so we can do like this and put like a stroke on Jules.
Adam (59:38.318)
Yeah, true.
Ste (59:48.806)
get confusing.
Adam (59:48.814)
Yeah, our unknown avatar, we do not have an avatar on file for this author. In other words, so yeah. But it would still show when you hover over it, like hover over each of these, you'd see the author name.
Ste (59:55.366)
yeah, yeah, true, yeah.
Ste (01:00:06.022)
Yeah, the tooltip.
Adam (01:00:08.142)
But on mobile, well, you can't hover over. I guess this isn't like a deep dive into the authors. If someone has read 20 different authors, there's no way we could show a bunch of names. So this is more celebrating the number of authors. So I think it's OK to not have the names here.
Ste (01:00:18.15)
Yeah.
Ste (01:00:23.014)
Yeah.
Ste (01:00:28.614)
Yeah, definitely. And if you, I mean, we could put links on them and just like take you to the author page. If yeah, you're on, we could even do the like quick view for authors, maybe in the jar, but yeah, maybe not complicated. Maybe we could just link to their page and that's it. You just go back and yeah.
Adam (01:00:42.638)
Mm.
Adam (01:00:56.727)
Well, this seems like a good start to what's going to be a pretty big change to stats.
Ste (01:00:56.806)
Yeah.
Ste (01:01:08.454)
Yeah, yeah, this is exciting. We already like nailed some. So I'm liking this because, you know, it's way easier to share and way better. I'd share this on social at the end of the year, especially if I was in the top 25%. Yeah, this is nice. Yeah.
Adam (01:01:31.15)
Yeah. And I think one of the things we were thinking about is that for each, maybe for each stat on this page, there might be a share option that would share that thing to, like you could generate an image of just this box that you could share on Instagram reels or as an image or something.
Ste (01:01:44.23)
Mmm. Yeah.
Adam (01:02:00.526)
So maybe like it's a dropdown or a drawer and some of the options in it are like save as PNG or save as something. And then at that point, each of these could be generated as a standalone image, which would be really neat.
Ste (01:02:19.974)
Yeah, just put the share icon in there and we can figure out the options there. Yeah, this is good progress. I mean, for everyone watching, let us know how you're liking this first step into the new stats. And if you have any other ideas, definitely let us know.
Adam (01:02:25.87)
Yeah.
Ste (01:02:40.582)
they're going to look very good and they're going to be like the most complex stats over there. And yeah, I'm excited that we're like circling back to stats after two years.
Adam (01:02:52.782)
Yeah, I think my hope is that by the end of the year, we have the dashboard where you can put some stats on there if you want. Less the ones we are doing today that are general stats and more like pages read last month compared to previous month or stats like that that you might want to see every day. But also have this in a place where people could share it.
the same way people share their Spotify draft.
Ste (01:03:24.742)
Yeah, and with those animations, it's going to look like very, very cool. And I'm already liking where it goes visually. It's way easier to not just inform it, but it looks good.
Adam (01:03:37.518)
Yeah, cool. Well, that's a good chat this week. Thanks for jumping on. And yeah, I guess talk to you next week. And next week, we will have a guest on.
Ste (01:03:40.838)
Nice.
Ste (01:03:56.006)
Yeah, I was wondering, I was going to ask if we should tell people about the, we're going to tell you like in the course of this week's, but it's going to be after Jeff was like technically part of the team, our second, let's say yes on Hardcover Live. And yeah, it's going to be exciting. Should we tell them the name or?
Adam (01:04:17.728)
Yeah, it's going to be Ross from Hardee's Books who made the YouTube video. So he's up for jumping on and we'll be kind of chatting with him about kind of his experience as a book influencer, but also just his take on social book apps. And so we'll be putting together some questions for him before next week. So if you have any recommendations or questions we should ask him, feel free to shoot me an email or jump on.
Ste (01:04:41.542)
Yeah, very exciting.
Adam (01:04:47.726)
our Discord and let us know.
Ste (01:04:50.246)
Yeah, sounds great. Well, thanks everyone for joining and yeah, see you next week. Bye bye.
Adam (01:04:55.054)
See ya.