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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 (00:01.211)
Hey hey stay, how's it going?
Ste (00:03.999)
Hi Adam, it's going well here for our cover number 35. How about you? All good?
Adam (00:11.442)
Yeah, pretty good. Last week, I was volunteering at Sundance and just watching a bunch of Sundance movies. So it was probably the most I've been out of the apartment since like before like March, 2020, in terms of like number of times I left and came back.
Ste (00:30.608)
Oh wow.
Ste (00:34.127)
Nice! How was it? I must have been crowded.
Adam (00:38.494)
It was, it was pretty crowded. There were a couple of sold out shows that I was either volunteering at or attending, um, and a couple of those ended up getting picked up. So there'll be, some of them will be available on like Netflix or other streaming services, but yeah, it was, it was fun.
Ste (00:54.763)
Okay, nice. So that's how it happens. I mean, the shows there, they usually like, bitch, is this a thing? The people show stuff as a trend so they can like sell it to Netflix.
Adam (01:09.842)
Yeah, exactly. A lot of the time, like just being accepted is like kind of that first step. It's like getting an interview. And then a lot of the streaming services like come and watch all the shows and then decide which ones they want to like, buy the distribution for. So they're not like buying ownership of the thing. They're buying like distribution rights. Some movies want to like go to theaters. Some want to...
Ste (01:11.847)
Okay.
Adam (01:38.966)
go on streaming. So it really depends on like what the director and crew of the movie kind of wants to do next with it.
Ste (01:49.147)
That sounds great. I mean, I didn't know about that. I thought it was just like a preview kind of stuff. Guess I'm used to like festivals in Europe, although it might happen in Europe as well. Not sure. Yeah, that sounds great. Did anything like surprising happen? I know last year someone went on the red carpet on a leash, so anything like that going on?
Adam (02:13.263)
I don't know if I heard about any specific like celebrity things like we didn't go to Park City we're kind of going to the festival here in Salt Lake City which is which has fewer celebrity sightings but a lot of the time the directors and some of the crew still come down for the showings here so the top two films that I liked this year were
Adam (02:40.578)
And the premise is, without spoilers, it's a group of friends gets together the night before one of their weddings. And one friend that they haven't seen in eight years shows up carrying a suitcase. And the movie is called It's What's Inside. And it's kind of like thriller, but like exciting.
not, not like actiony, but like kind of like a little bit sexy, but thrillery it was, it was good.
Ste (03:17.227)
Okay. Oh, wow. Okay. Sexy suitcase, thrillery. Okay. That's definitely interesting. Nice. Yeah, that sounds great. Yeah.
Adam (03:21.07)
Thank you.
Adam (03:25.874)
And the other one was Your Monster, which is kind of like a modern take on something like Beauty and the Beast. It's like a woman that's going through some, like a breakup, finds a monster in her closet, and then it becomes like a sweet, but also a little bit scary, but it's like, it's a musical comedy horror,
spanning multiple different genres.
Ste (03:58.479)
That sounds amazing. Yeah.
Adam (03:58.71)
Yeah. It's like a romantic comedy with like horror element.
Ste (04:03.839)
Okay, that sounds even more amazing. Yeah, it's so nice that, you know, it goes on in your backyard, basically.
Adam (04:11.898)
Yeah, I wasn't thinking about that when we moved to Salt Lake, but now, now it's become like one of the things we look forward to every year.
Ste (04:19.883)
Yeah, it's one of the like maybe the biggest like independent I guess festival right Sundance.
Adam (04:29.158)
Yeah, there are a couple of big ones like South by Southwest, um, Toronto film festival is another big one. Um, of course, like can, but, uh, but yeah, in the, in the U S it feels like one of the biggest, like really indie ones that's not run by a company that has like their hand in the production.
Ste (04:33.925)
Mmm, yeah.
Ste (04:39.792)
Yeah
Ste (04:52.653)
Yeah, yeah lots of stuff I think came out of Sundance. Yeah.
Adam (04:57.57)
Yeah.
How about you? What have you been up to lately?
Ste (05:00.911)
Really good. Ah, I've been busy with parenting. My seven month old started on solids, so that's a whole thing right now. So mostly, yeah, indoor is life for me and making the most out of that.
Adam (05:20.924)
How has that been different from before?
Ste (05:25.183)
Well, it's been messier, I can tell you that because, you know, you wouldn't imagine where food can go in, you know, whenever he has to feed. So, yeah, that's been fun, like managing all that. And he's also learning new sounds. So it's been mostly dealing with that. Yeah, and I finished Fargo.
Adam (05:53.816)
Oh yeah. Season five. Yeah. What did you think?
Ste (05:56.843)
Yeah, yeah, that's the last one, right? I mean, I don't know how they do it, but every time, like, how many stories can you squeeze out of Minnesota? I think I'm also like, I love the accent. I think it's like one of the funniest I've ever heard. And yeah, the season was great. I mean.
Adam (06:25.71)
Yeah.
Ste (06:28.319)
I really like hats off how they, I don't know how they do it. I know first it was a Coen brother thing, but now it's Noah Haley. And I think he's, they've been like for the past few seasons, right? The director.
Adam (06:45.222)
Yeah, or maybe even since the series started. I can't remember, like, maybe if the Coen brothers were involved with the series or only the original movie.
Ste (06:55.423)
Oh yeah, that could be, oh yeah, it could be like, yeah. But yeah, it's crazy. Like the same pattern, but somehow it's different.
Adam (07:09.344)
Have you seen all the seasons? I know I haven't yet. Yeah, okay.
Ste (07:13.456)
Yeah, I've seen the first one, I think three times. I still like it the most, but now I think I'm gonna see all of them again. Yeah, it's one of those shows, Like Lost, I don't know. Those are my comfort series, Lost, Fargo, and now Homeland. My wife likes Homeland a lot. She also gets very, very angry at some.
Adam (07:32.676)
Mmm.
Ste (07:39.383)
like what's going on in there.
Adam (07:43.798)
Yeah, a lot of mistakes are made in that show.
Ste (07:46.631)
Yeah, exactly. Basically the plot line. Mistake, mistake, mistake. Yeah. And should we jump into our hardcover stuff and tell readers what we have prepared for them today?
Adam (07:51.03)
Yeah.
Adam (07:57.735)
Yeah.
Adam (08:01.894)
Yeah, let's see. Any things from last week before we jump into new stuff?
Ste (08:09.419)
Well, last week, what did we do last week? We published, we didn't publish yet, but we worked on the hardcover survey, state of hardcover, and I think that's been like answering some really key questions for us. We were telling people that we're deciding what to build next, and I think based on that we had some answers just like making the survey.
We also have to launch the survey to see if our predictions align with what people want. I think so far they've been pretty, you know, there, but now the answers are going to be really helpful because we have a lot of directions to go in. And
Getting clarity on the best way to go forward from the people who answer it is gonna be important. And what's your feel about the whole thing? What do you think about where the survey is gonna go?
Adam (09:20.558)
Yeah, it's, I'm really excited about this one because last year when we put out the survey, I feel like we kind of knew what the results were going to be. Like we knew like, oh, people want to, you know, track the date they started reading and finished reading. They want to track the percent progress of a book. Those were like the number one things in our, um, like up vote system. And that was mirrored in the results of the survey. I feel like this one,
It's not as clear cut what the next thing is based on like what we're hearing because we're hearing like lots of different things from different people. So I actually don't know what the results are going to be. So I'm, I'm really curious to send it out tomorrow with the, the hardcover report email.
Ste (10:06.859)
Yeah. Yeah, I don't know. Yeah.
Adam (10:08.827)
There are things I'm most excited to work on from it though, like the thing we're going to be working on today some.
Ste (10:12.771)
I bet. Yeah. Yeah, this one's going to be really exciting. I think it paves the way for some of the other stuff. That's important, but a bit more complex. So, yeah.
thinking because it's really early days, I think, for this feature, which is the reading journey. Maybe we can start with a bunch of brainstorming and then we can show you how we would approach designing a feature on hardcover. This is how we usually plan out stuff. So it starts with the hypothesis. This one, because I think it's been also requested
that some people were very specific in describing how it would work on our roadmap. Also aligns with some of the features we were planning for hardcover. So it's kind of like a stepping stone. And it's also going to unlock some really neat things about like.
posting updates for books. I think mainly it's gonna be the first time on HireCover when, apart from reviews, you will be able to post something that you wrote and...
Yeah, it will get shown publicly or not depending on.
Adam (11:44.141)
Yeah.
Adam (11:48.638)
Yeah, so the high level description of this, I'll share my screen here for two things here. First to kind of show, this is kind of the suggestion. And kind of, so the concept of this that we're thinking about is pretty similar to this report by Raphael. It's this idea that,
Ste (11:55.936)
Yeah, let's go.
Ste (12:07.029)
Yes.
Adam (12:16.766)
In addition to having like your dates read for a book, we'll have like a full out sequential journey or journal or log that describes all of your interactions with the book. And that most likely starts with you maybe saving it to want to read, but it could even start before that with notes about the book. And we show those in order. Maybe it includes progress updates. It includes...
thoughts as you're reading through it. Maybe it includes quotes. And potentially after you're done, it could include additional notes and thoughts on the book as well. So it's, the idea is that it's potentially including everything that you want to save about that book.
Ste (13:09.005)
Yeah.
I think this really like describes one of the main use cases. So when you're reading a book, like going from first principles, you open the book, you read through it and as you're reading through it, like logging your thoughts. I think many people do that either in spreadsheets or on obsidian or on notes or in like so many places. But
One, doors are all private, so you can't really share that progress if you want. So your friends can see it maybe, can see it maybe, yeah. And two, it's not tied to the book. It depends on you making that system. And yeah, we've seen lots of spreadsheets from people who are tracking their own system because, you know...
I don't think any app has this. I don't know, have you seen it anywhere else? Like this sequential note taking apart from, I mean, book apps. I think you can do it on, I don't know, maybe even Notion or Obsidian, but I haven't seen it.
Adam (14:29.075)
I did see it in one app. Book shelved has something like this.
Adam (14:40.586)
where for any book on here, let me see.
Adam (14:52.43)
I'm not sure where it was now, but I know there was an idea of like a journal.
Ste (15:00.324)
Okay, okay reading journal. Yeah.
Adam (15:04.805)
Let me log in here and then I'll share my screen.
Ste (15:07.883)
Yeah, go for it. I'm really curious to see how they approached it. Even the name reading journal, I wouldn't like reading journey to me is better journal is almost always a private thing. And I know some people and maybe even the default will be private. But for instance, I want to
show at least my network make those notes available just for people to see them, to comment on them. I think it might be maybe at times even more useful than a review because you can see the progress, you can see parts that you like. A review is you finish the book, you sum up all the impressions you had from that book and you try to distill them in
Adam (15:53.151)
Yeah.
Ste (16:05.495)
at the end of the book when you know you haven't maybe you can't remember all the things or you can like surprise how you felt throughout reading it. Oh here we go.
Ste (16:19.807)
Journal entries. Okay. Oh, so you can add those notes. Interesting.
Adam (16:22.382)
So.
Adam (16:27.406)
And you can say, I'm now at page 150. So it adds. It kind of is like sequentially adding them.
Ste (16:33.522)
I like that graph.
Adam (16:38.23)
And it looks like after I'm done, I can't add new journal entries, but I can delete existing ones here. And oh, if I go to edit, then I can. Okay, so this is like a view layer and then.
Ste (16:45.545)
Okay.
Adam (16:59.73)
Okay, maybe I was just...
Ste (17:00.039)
Yeah, I like that graph. Maybe it's a bit, you know, up top, a bit, you know, present up there.
Adam (17:18.433)
Yeah.
Ste (17:18.723)
What do you think? Do you think the focus should be on the actual... Because this clearly has a focus on tracking. So, yeah, exactly. It is a bit large. I think that's what I was trying to say as well.
Adam (17:29.744)
Yeah.
Adam (17:32.994)
Yeah, I feel like this is the most important piece on this page. But yeah, I think being able to track, like being able to know how far you were when you wrote a comment feels important. Like this context here seems useful. Like that I was about on page 100 when I wrote this comment, for instance.
Ste (17:37.748)
Mm-hmm.
Ste (17:55.057)
Mm-hmm.
Ste (18:00.995)
Yeah, exactly. It's got to say where you were in the book. I think, I mean, this is a reading journal, but it kind of shows you the reading progress up top, which is a stats related to your reading, which you might or might not want to see. So I think our focus should be notes. Let's say you're reading through a really good non-fiction book and you want to leave notes on every two pages. First off, people...
Adam (18:01.251)
that game.
Ste (18:30.647)
aren't going to be so if it's public people aren't going to be interested in your stats. That's a thing for you to yeah to notice they're going to be interested in what you thought about the book what quotes you shared and maybe even and we can discuss this later if they can comment on each note specifically.
Adam (18:53.55)
Hmm.
Ste (18:57.675)
I shared something and someone wants to say that they felt the exact same thing or they really liked that or they resonated with something. Or just like that bits.
Adam (19:09.024)
Yeah.
Actually, let me get some of this down. So let's say, like a, what should we call this? It's kind of like a journal entry, whatever entry.
Ste (19:18.623)
Oh yeah, perfect. Yeah, let's...
Ste (19:29.191)
Yeah, it's an update. Yeah. I was thinking about this earlier. Should we call them updates or should we call them posts or should we call them? Yeah, they're journal entries, I guess. In our system, they will be posts. So, yeah.
Adam (19:47.662)
I'll just put it as post for now. That way we can keep it generic and worry about naming later.
Ste (19:55.463)
Mm-hmm. Oh, yeah, that's a good idea. I'm seeing in the... Yeah, go ahead.
Adam (19:56.526)
So yeah, comments is also.
Yeah, go ahead.
Ste (20:05.075)
I was saying that someone mentioned that in the chat that commenting would be nice if it was shared or reposted as a status. Yeah, that's, I mean, if you're currently reading something and you're sharing it publicly, that posts can also, yeah, maybe a status would be nice apart from the post. I'm wondering what it can contain. It can...
Adam (20:15.767)
Hmm.
Ste (20:33.115)
contain maybe a mood or like an actual thing, a status has to be short. But yeah, that's, yeah.
Adam (20:39.359)
When you say, yeah, reposted as a stats. Oh, yeah.
Adam (20:46.762)
I could also see an action of like, um, copy to my reading journal.
So like, you know, you're looking at someone else's reading journal for a book that you're reading and someone posts a quote, you could like copy it to your reading journal is a kind of like wish wishlist items at this point, but might as well brainstorm it.
Ste (21:04.789)
Oh yeah.
Ste (21:09.395)
Yeah, of course we should put everything on here.
Ste (21:20.095)
This would be for the books you've already read or want to read as well, right?
Adam (21:25.658)
Yeah, I can see it as all of all the above.
Ste (21:34.736)
nice.
Adam (21:38.01)
We were talking about like some post types like status changed.
Ste (21:48.707)
Yeah, I think this would be like the basic level what we have right now. So you're just updating the page number.
Adam (21:56.5)
Yeah.
Adam (22:03.422)
Yeah, same with progress updates.
Ste (22:07.855)
Then I think the next one would be quotes because that's not content that you're creating, you're just posting it.
Adam (22:08.074)
Um...
Ste (22:18.887)
from the book. Yeah, characters mentioned. That's great.
Adam (22:21.118)
Yeah, you could potentially have.
All right.
Adam (22:28.371)
Or I guess this is also percent.
Adam (22:33.654)
if you don't have a page number or like.
Ste (22:36.398)
Yeah.
Adam (22:42.19)
hours into audiobook.
Ste (22:55.779)
and then it would be like, yeah, a note.
Adam (22:56.118)
And yeah, of course, notes.
Adam (23:03.17)
And this is like, this is, I guess this idea is like, kind of like our review form. It would be just a free form box to take any notes. And I think this will also give us an excuse to really improve our editor. Cause the one we use for reviews, it's okay, but I don't feel like it's great. I feel like for this, I wanna upgrade that to where,
like our editors is great, like it feels as smooth as using like Notion or something like that.
Ste (23:41.348)
Yeah.
Ste (23:44.675)
Yeah, for a note, like that editing experience, I think it would be similar to what we did for discussion. So you would be able to mention characters, books, other books, you know, you, so this would basically be mentions or other people. So if you wanna like nudge somebody in your network,
so they can look or you want to like, you talked about a book with someone and you want to tag them because they're on hardcover as well and you just want to remind them out this is what we talked about last week and yeah maybe that can be a thing and maybe even authors would be oh yeah authors oh it's already in there you go
Adam (24:08.383)
Mm-hmm.
Adam (24:35.567)
This is kind of almost making me thinking, this is almost like your activity feed for a book that you can go in and manipulate at any time. Like the activity feed as it stands now is kind of a, it's activities that have been automatically created for you by like your actions on the site.
Well, the reading journal is kind of a combination of automatic actions, like setting status or progress, as well as manually added things straight to it. But it's, it's giving you that ability to, um, in my eyes, like be able to like grab one of these and move it around. Even like it's like you control the order and how it shows up.
Ste (25:17.067)
Yeah, from that point of view, it's great because it allows you to have that level of control. And yeah, exactly. It's an activity feed for a book, for you or for others as well. So we're kind of like allowing any reader to have like nice...
you know, stream for any book and they can make it as private or as public as they want, which is not something you get from tracking stuff in a spreadsheet or notes or...
Adam (25:46.573)
Yeah.
Adam (25:54.933)
Yeah.
Ste (25:55.211)
Yeah, for the privacy, I was wondering, so would you set that for the whole thread? So, or would you set, could you set it individually as well? Or could you do both? What would make more sense?
Adam (26:06.902)
Hmm
Adam (26:10.278)
Yeah, good question. Yeah, maybe, maybe this, like, the easiest thing would be that this uses your status for that book. But that only works if you've saved that book to your library. Like if you want if you've marked it with a status, like if you're making. If you're adding something to a reading journal for a book you haven't saved to your library.
then we'd have no basis for setting the privacy settings.
Ste (26:40.575)
Okay, we could. I mean, if... Would there be any case where you didn't save a book and you wanted to add a reading journey?
Adam (26:55.014)
I could see that. Like maybe you're just wanting to make a comment on a book for later, but you haven't actually wanted to market as want to read. Maybe you have a list and you're going off of a list of books and taking notes on those books. But yeah.
Ste (27:05.157)
Mm-hmm.
Ste (27:11.047)
True. So maybe when you post the initial posts, that could maybe set the privacy status for all of the subsequent posts or the posts that follow it. Or would you be able to just set a whole thread, like for a book, as...
private or public. I'm wondering if it would make sense to go granular. So you are posting without having the book in your library and you want to make one post public but you wanna make the other one private. Would that make more sense? Or you just like set the whole like notes.
Adam (27:42.963)
Hmm.
Ste (28:06.387)
section on that book, the whole reading journey as private or public upfront.
Adam (28:08.382)
Yeah, it's, yeah, is the reading journal itself this or is in each individual post have this? And that's, yeah, that's a question I don't know. I think maybe making the entire journal this, have this status would be the easiest way to go. But.
Ste (28:29.767)
Mm-hmm.
Adam (28:33.734)
Yeah, I think, I think that makes sense because that's kind of how we treat the, your, like your, your review right now, like your, your review is considered part of your, um, your rating and your status and your dates read. All of that is like your activity on a book and all of that is set in one place. Like we can't have a public review, but a private status. It has to all be public or not. So maybe.
Ste (29:00.113)
Okay
Adam (29:02.41)
Maybe we do the same for this and either your journal's public or it's private or it's followers only.
Ste (29:08.979)
Yeah. And you would set that I'm guessing on the page, right? As you said, like your status. So if you want to read the book, you can right now set, if you want to have it public, private or followers only, it would be the same for reading journal. We could use the same component and just like make it.
Adam (29:14.707)
Yeah.
Adam (29:33.31)
Yeah, we'd probably want to use their status from there. If it's saved to the library, use that status as the default. So if I've already marked a book as private, and then I open my reading log, it should default to private.
Ste (29:42.384)
Yeah.
Ste (29:48.618)
Mm-hmm
Adam (29:52.692)
Let's see, so what are their post types?
Ste (29:52.739)
Yeah, that sounds good.
Ste (29:58.215)
Well, I was thinking like maybe this is a thing for further on, but if you want to share voice notes, so you're reading and or you're listening to a book and you don't feel like typing, you just want to leave a voice note.
Adam (30:19.201)
Yeah.
Ste (30:21.355)
Uh, and for status updates, maybe you want to do like a visual update, like maybe take a picture you're reading in a very beautiful part with a nice scenery and you want to like pose that moments as you're reading journal. Yeah. Photo basically.
Adam (30:29.741)
Make a photo.
Adam (30:41.271)
Yeah.
One, one thing that I'm not sure if this would be a note or if it would be like a different kind of update, but like one thing that's come up a lot is like kind of like why did I save this book? And it's like who recommended it? Or like where did you initially see it?
Ste (31:07.224)
Nice.
Adam (31:13.051)
Why did you save it? Basically.
Ste (31:16.055)
Yeah, yeah, this is nice. I'm wondering if it's, this is kind of like, it feels like an intro session, like stuff you would have for every book. It could also be like a note, and some people might not want to like, have that option there to show up, to fill in, but it's kind of like a helper or a prompt that,
Adam (31:22.734)
Thanks for watching.
Adam (31:41.279)
Ahem.
Ste (31:45.967)
we're like recommending for people. This is how it feels like. So maybe it can be.
So you have the reading journal for each book, and you have this separate section, which can also be like, it can include your stats, like the thing we've shown with the graph, and it can also include these little helpers, which are opinionated things that we think are helpful.
But yeah, I'd put them in a separate place or at least a place that you can hide and that contains all of these.
So the focus, the primary focus would be like, I just wanna add the notes and I wanna see my past notes so I can like just scroll through the notes. And if I tap something where if I wanna go, kind of like we have the stats for lists. So you wanna see the list, but I don't know, if you wanna see the stats for this, you go to a separate page, you don't have them right there.
Adam (33:06.054)
Yeah, yeah, I'm trying to think like what would be what would be interesting stats or something like that to show or like I guess it's like extracting metadata from this entire group and showing things like that. Maybe that's a different thing.
Ste (33:25.121)
Yeah.
Ste (33:28.815)
No, it makes sense. I mean, we could, this could definitely be a section. Are you thinking this is like more of a section you'd fill in or that we'd fill in automatically? So I'm seeing you discovered this book from, this is definitely like something we'd tell them. Where did you initially see this? I'm thinking this could be like also thing we'd, so this is automatic, right?
Adam (33:55.998)
I think it's both. It might have like, some of it might be automatically fed in. Like you discovered this book from Stay, we might be able to add if they saved it as want to read because of your activity directly. But then you might also wanna write additional information about what stood out to you and why you wanted to read it. And that could be a note or it could be
Ste (34:16.892)
Mm-hmm.
Ste (34:21.849)
Yeah.
Adam (34:26.51)
Uh, one, uh, one thing I was thinking is like, what if in the, the want to read button, like there's want to read, which just marks it as want to read, but then there's like want to read and then on the right, there's like a want to read plus log or something that, that Mark says want to read and opens up your log. And then you can just like type a couple of things on why you want to save it.
Ste (34:50.699)
That could be definitely the action is there. I mean, I'm imagining like how it would go into the UI. Let's put the action there. I'm not sure about the actual UI for the log, if it should be combined. I'm thinking like some people want to just like...
Adam (34:55.373)
Thanks for watching!
Ste (35:12.859)
Save that and that's the majority of people. If we put the log there, maybe we mix it in and we make it kind of vague. You don't know what that's like.
because we placed it, we associated it with one to read. So let's see about the actual UI, but the action definitely, so you'd wanna read it and you'd wanna like add reasons why. I think this would be basically the big use case.
Semi-challenge is asking, it would be similar to a review page. Yeah, kind of similar, but I think like, for it to not be like the review page, because we want to make it as, if you want to make it social to encourage that.
So to show it to people in the feed if you choose to, private would be the default and it would be set, I guess if you set your status like that, but...
Adam (36:28.016)
And we have a privacy setting at the account level. And so that's probably what we would default this to. So if their account is private, then their reading journal would be private by default.
Ste (36:43.491)
Yeah. So it's actually meant to be kind of like a social log. We want people to see those notes and especially the quotes, because if you share quotes, it's going to be important. You can't do that on other apps for reading log. There are places where you can do that, but, uh, there are no places. Let's say you're then.
best friends are on hardcover. You would, you're not like sharing notes, Apple, like iCloud notes, or you're not sharing spreadsheets, or you're not sharing your Goodreads notes with them. We want to make a place where you, they could go on your profile and see those and just say, okay, look, he's reading that book. Look at all the updates.
look at this nice quote, I'm interested in this or, so it's, yeah, it's kind of like, we wanna make it more social than just the log, but of course, if you wanna read, if you wanna use hardcover as like a log, you can definitely do that very easily.
Adam (37:55.918)
Yeah. As you were saying that it made me think of one of the thing that we have in our discussions prototype, which is a like links. So it's like, you know, you, you found a link to something related to this book on another site and you can add it to your reading log because you want to save it kind of like saving a bookmark.
Ste (38:06.355)
Mmm, yeah, links.
Ste (38:17.075)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, that's really good. Mm-hmm
Adam (38:22.366)
It feels like we're create recreating discussions, but as like a single, as a single player mode.
Ste (38:29.522)
Yeah, exactly. Well, that's a good place to start, right? And even these, I mean, voice notes, photos, even links, they're not going to be in the first. This is like blue sky thinking about it, but yeah, we're converging basically at what we, so the use case is definitely there.
Adam (38:33.152)
Yeah.
Adam (38:40.768)
Yeah.
Ste (38:51.003)
Uh, this is just like, uh, another facet of it because your reading log, it would, in most cases, uh, be something like a reading log, but, uh, you'd have the option to also let other people see it.
Adam (39:14.822)
Yeah, maybe instead of changing this, I'm going to change this to be log wide.
And then privacy would kind of, I can't do that. Let me.
Adam (39:36.014)
Let me change this to down here. So privacy would be like a, uh oh. It's hard to drag things around here. There we go. So like this is log-wide, but also probably like a journal, like you could probably, or like an entire journal.
Ste (39:44.015)
Yup.
Ste (40:01.503)
Yeah, yeah, and this is going to be important because like reviews, you're posting for yourself, but I think it's mostly for others. So people can decide if they want to read that book or not. A reading blog is like a review, but it's a more in-depth review and I think a more accurate review even. I mean,
I've always had this problem with book ratings and you'd want to get like people's opinions as they read the book. A review is kind of like a synthesized version that you attach a rating to, but that rating can be like very... You don't know nothing about...
who posted that rating. It could be someone who's very different than you and that book can be read by people who are very different than you, but you might love it, but like all the reviews you're reading have like a three star score and you're like, maybe this is bad, but if you read...
Adam (41:12.598)
Yeah, it made me realize that these were missing. Ha ha.
Ste (41:16.564)
Oh yeah.
Adam (41:20.562)
Yeah, we didn't add your review and your rating.
Ste (41:25.887)
Yeah. What about location for like notes? And it can be like a thing you enter, but it doesn't have to be, it can be automatic as well, like not that we're requesting like your exact like GPS coordinates, but if you want to say that you're reading from like the couch or the park or
Adam (41:32.031)
Yeah.
Adam (41:49.364)
Uh, interesting.
Ste (41:55.587)
Maybe that's a location as in like, where am I? Or the public library or yeah.
Ste (42:06.519)
And maybe, I mean, this is, yeah, it complicates it, but I'm just going to put it out there. Maybe moods while you're like making that note or like mood that you associate with that moment in the book, because moods are another thing that I have a problem with, but we can talk about that some other time. Mood for a book, I think is nonsensical. I don't think a mood for a book is something.
But yeah, we can talk about that some other time.
Adam (42:41.823)
There are many mood readers I have heard about, although I'm not one of them. I'm more of a genre reader, but it's one that comes up a lot, even though I don't personally read that way.
Ste (42:47.126)
Yeah, I mean, I get it.
Ste (42:53.715)
Yeah, I'm gonna tell you why. I mean, it's not like I totally like understand it. And yeah, but it's not. It's not about that.
Ste (43:06.144)
Okay, so discovery.
Adam (43:08.006)
Yeah, I was like, when I when I think about this, one of the things that the comes to mind is like, you as a reader, you've created some, some notes, maybe you've gotten there from the book button, but you want to see all of your notes. So it would probably need to be somewhere in the like,
journals or something like that. Some, some page that lists out which things you have, which things you've had journals for. That was the first thing that came to mind.
Ste (43:39.855)
Mm-hmm.
Ste (43:47.715)
Yeah.
Yeah, good point. I started sketching out something in Figma, but it's in this direction. I was thinking also about reads because you have a book and you can have multiple reads. Do we separate the journals for each read? So it becomes like a parent category to...
Ste (44:22.763)
So, yeah.
Adam (44:22.938)
I could see it, like I was seeing it as like one journal per book. And if you have multiple reads, then it's like, I read it and then I finished it. Then I read it again and I finished it and I read it again. And it's all on the same log.
Ste (44:34.187)
Nice. Yes. Okay, perfect. Yeah. That's great. Makes way more sense. The way we're separating reads now because of that can also, I mean, this read can easily become maybe the reading journal.
Adam (44:56.534)
What was that?
Ste (44:56.919)
where you can enter the dates read, but we'd rather use hardcover as the reading journal, even if you just like mark, because the reading journal is the date read, start date and then the date. If you wanna like just set a book, so this is like the basic level, start date and date. But if you wanna add stuff in between, like...
Adam (45:22.482)
Yeah, you can kind of just add whatever you want in between.
Ste (45:26.531)
Yeah.
Adam (45:29.27)
And so that it's like, add posts in any order. It's probably like drag to reposition.
Ste (45:42.043)
Mmm, yeah. Yeah, that's very nice.
Ste (45:50.007)
Yeah, this is gonna be so nice in design.
Adam (45:52.924)
Do you think it makes sense? When it comes to me as a reader, I'm looking at a book that looks interesting, or maybe I finished a book and I'm wanting to see what some other people thought about it. I imagine I go to the book page and maybe we get rid of that activity tab on the book page and replace it with journals.
Ste (46:16.524)
Mm-hmm.
Ste (46:19.831)
Yeah.
Adam (46:20.146)
and we show the journals that have either, you know, maybe we allow sorting that the journals that people have made by maybe by date, by likes count. So you could see the journal that has the most likes for a book.
Ste (46:31.879)
Okay.
Ste (46:36.575)
Wow, okay, yeah, this is, I actually did the same, this is like my initial starting point in Figma, so that's like what I was thinking we could do, but you're saying basically to have all the journals from all the people for that book, not just yours. Nice, okay, yeah.
Adam (46:59.078)
Yeah, see, you'd be able to see yours and edit it, but you would also be able to read other people's journals.
Ste (47:05.935)
That's perfect, yeah. That's, I mean, maybe you could see your spin up top. So you, if you have a reading journal, yours would show up there, but yeah, you'd see all the other reading journals. Yeah, this is great. This takes you to a whole other level, yeah. I didn't think of that, that's perfect.
Adam (47:11.103)
Yeah.
Adam (47:27.39)
Yeah. And maybe like this would be like your journal link would be at like, um, books and then the book slug and then your username and slash journal. And that would be your journal for that book.
Ste (47:40.623)
Mm-hmm.
Ste (47:45.422)
Yeah.
Ste (47:49.507)
Yeah, that's great.
So some basic sorting, like, yeah. Some filtering. Would you want filters there? Maybe, like, when they read it. Oh, actually, yeah, by date. Yeah, you don't want them. Filters, tags, spoilers, that kind of stuff.
Adam (48:05.351)
Yeah, filters maybe like.
Ste (48:13.019)
Thanks mood spoilers.
Ste (48:18.083)
I'm thinking at this point we can make the filters universal because these come up, I mean they came up for discussions as well, the exact same filters. We can even like... Yeah.
Adam (48:18.757)
I mean like...
Adam (48:30.494)
That's true.
Ste (48:35.137)
Um.
Adam (48:35.39)
Yeah, because like if you're looking at a journal entry by someone else who hasn't read the book and you haven't read the book, that's limited information that you're going to get. You're probably only going to get surface level information, but maybe that's only what you want at that point. Like why did someone else save this book to their library? Like actually yeah, like using like this information, like we could use why did you save this?
Ste (48:47.727)
Yeah.
Ste (48:52.365)
Yeah.
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I mean, that's interesting. And yeah.
Adam (49:05.294)
on the book page itself. Like, like, so why are people saving this book to read?
Ste (49:11.971)
Yeah, exactly. Oh yeah, that's great. And you can even have a field there that would show up on every book page that would be like, if you want, if you save this book, like, yeah, directly, it could be a flow. I mean, I think what you mentioned earlier, have a one to read plus log button. I think it would make even more sense if we would kind of make it into a flow where...
you would after you'd tap once to read, be able to mention why or the reason. Instead of the, yeah, the log seems vague. I mean, what am I doing with the log? First, I wanna say why I saved it. Is there anything else that I wanna say like when I save a book?
Adam (49:46.227)
Mm.
Adam (50:03.79)
It's like how, yeah, I guess, um, where did you initially see it? Like, how did you hear about it? Yeah. It's like, I saw it on Tik TOK. I saw it on Barnes and Noble and cap.
Ste (50:11.812)
Mm-hmm.
Ste (50:19.347)
Oh yeah. This would be so you can, yeah. I was wondering like you'd save that so you can remember maybe to search for a place to buy it or something like that.
Adam (50:34.904)
Yeah.
Ste (50:35.927)
or just like that, yeah. Save that.
Adam (50:41.739)
Let's see.
Adam (50:46.146)
And I guess maybe on the, we just already talked about this one for on the book page itself, like why readers saved this book, which would link to the reading log.
Ste (50:56.071)
Mm-hmm.
Ste (51:05.794)
Yeah.
Ste (51:10.503)
And another place for discovery. Uh, so it's your own journal, the book page, maybe in your library. So I think the most natural thing that would happen would be you open the hardcover, you're reading a book. You open the hardcover app, you go to your currently reading and you want to like quickly log a note. Uh,
for that book you're currently reading. So we should make this as quick as possible. So I think right now, the way we have it, it would require you to open the app. You're going to see the trending books. Maybe, I don't know, we'll rethink that because this could be like, for tracking, I think this is like the most important thing. Going to your library,
going to currently reading, seeing the books you're currently reading, tapping on the one you're reading, and that I think should take you to your reading journal. And maybe we can, yeah.
Adam (52:21.686)
When you say tapping on the book button for the book you're currently reading or tapping on the book itself.
Ste (52:27.715)
I was thinking the book itself, so it should be as easy as possible. I'm thinking to cut the steps as much as possible so you would ideally be able to go to your currently reading log. Ideally, it would happen straight away, but yeah, let's say you'd have to do a couple of clicks.
Adam (52:31.274)
Yeah, that could that could be
Ste (53:00.195)
Maybe it would even be an action on mobile or even on desktop that, yeah, you could quickly do to bring that up, at least on mobile. I think it should be as quick as possible to be able to log something for a book you're currently reading.
Adam (53:24.775)
Yeah, yeah, it's, I think my audio changed to my laptop for some reason. But can you still hear me all right? Yeah, yeah, it makes me think like, yeah, do we, do we link to this log from the book button itself or only from other places or both?
Ste (53:31.371)
Oh yeah, here we go. Yeah, I think it's good.
Ste (53:51.719)
I think we could link, I mean, in this case, it would be from your library currently reading. So you would have a special component for the book cover that would take you to the log for that book. So if you're accessing the...
Ste (54:15.287)
your library, the currently reading queue, and you tap on a book, it wouldn't take you to the book page, it would take you to the log for that book. Because else it would, it could take you to the journals on the book page and you could edit yours, but that's an extra tap. So I ideally want to do that in two seconds max. So open the app.
tap on my library, tap the book, start writing. So that's ideally how it should happen while I'm reading a book. I think any step beyond that would make you like not do it.
Adam (54:58.647)
Yeah, so you're saying like on this page, maybe like this entire row, aside from the button, this would take you to your journal for this book. And likewise, if you were on the currently reading page and you clicked on it, it would also take you there. But if you're on like, want to read and you click on the book, it takes you to the book. Or if you're on read and you click on the book, it takes you to the book.
Ste (55:02.817)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Ste (55:12.208)
Yeah.
Ste (55:17.627)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Ste (55:23.92)
Yeah.
Ste (55:27.147)
Yeah, because then you can go on journals, but I'm just thinking if you're reading something, you want to be quick for, for this and that extra tap, especially because, you know, you have to, you're on mobile, you have to scroll maybe to the journal, then a lot of stuff is going on.
Adam (55:48.503)
Yeah, one, this would be like, so you open the app, one, two clicks and you're on it. Like that would be, yeah, I think that would be good.
Ste (55:55.236)
Yeah.
Ste (55:59.287)
Yeah. And if it focuses, if we have an editable field there and it's like focused on that field so you can begin typing, that's perfect.
Adam (56:13.287)
That made me think one other thing here for photos. It's like OCR text. So like, you have a physical book and you want to get the text from that book and put it in a note.
Ste (56:30.67)
Yeah.
That being it, I mean, now for iPhones, you can just take a picture and select the text. So that's also helpful. It would be great to actually implement that ourselves. I mean, I'm sure we could do that, but it might be like, yeah.
Adam (56:39.854)
Yeah.
Adam (56:52.271)
Yeah, leaning on the iPhone functionality would save building out an entire feature.
Ste (56:57.439)
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I don't know if people can do it on Android, but definitely you can do that and you can do that on desktop that way as well. So you can just take a photo with your iPhone. I have to check Android might have done it. Android photo text OCR.
Adam (57:20.999)
I'm going to add one more here for discovery from activity feed. Repost all journal entries to feed.
Ste (57:34.911)
Oh yeah, and maybe if you want to repost... Yeah. Reposts.
Adam (57:35.131)
So like.
Ste (57:51.735)
Yeah, I'm wondering...
Adam (57:52.183)
Yeah, so that way if someone likes something in your feed, it also likes the entry in your journal, which is kind of how we do it for reviews. Like if someone likes your activity on a review, that's the same as liking a review. So we kind of like hoist the like up a level to what was liked, so we could do the same thing with this.
Ste (58:04.904)
Oh yeah.
Ste (58:13.627)
Oh yeah, definitely, that's smart, yeah. Good that we're doing it.
Adam (58:27.107)
And anything else before we break for the day?
Ste (58:31.383)
Well, no, yeah, I think this has been very useful.
Adam (58:35.887)
Yeah.
Ste (58:38.659)
We didn't jump in the actual high fidelity design, but this is, I mean, look at this step. It's so, so important. It's been very useful. I think we can take this and yeah, throughout this week and the next start prototyping it. And I was thinking maybe we can, the same we did for discussions, actually show people some prototypes. So...
whoever's on the Discord, we can ask them to, yeah, when we have the actual designs to get some validation before or see if there's anything we missed. There's a lot in there, so...
Adam (59:20.259)
Yeah, I was thinking one thing for quotes that could be really interesting. It's like, you know, the same thing, same idea we have for like mentions on discussions where you can either include it in the content of the post or you can add it as like a reference after it.
We'll probably have to do the same for quotes because a lot of the time in a book there will be a quote that you want to save but it doesn't have the character's name in the quote. So you'd want to have another separate place to attribute the quote to that character.
Ste (59:58.047)
Yeah, that's true. That's true. Yeah, we'll have to see how we do that in design. We do have the quote post type, but maybe we'll find something smarter. Maybe it is like it's on Discord. You can highlight the quote and actually tag the character, but yeah, we'll see. We'll have to make it very, very simple.
But we've got the important stuff, you know, the guts of the whole thing. I think it's there.
Adam (01:00:29.931)
It's a much easier feature than discussions. So I think this will be a good step towards it while we can work out a lot of the kinks.
Ste (01:00:33.198)
Yeah
Ste (01:00:38.731)
Yeah, definitely. Yeah, this has been very, very useful. Thanks everybody for sticking with us for the whole hour. It's been fun.
Adam (01:00:50.031)
Yeah, and if you're listening to this podcast wise, I'll drop a link to the generated reading journal and post that on the hardcover slash live slash 35.
Ste (01:01:05.767)
Nice. Perfect. Well, until next time, take care and happy reading. See ya.
Adam (01:01:07.495)
Cool.
Adam (01:01:11.015)
Yeah, talk to you later.