A Better Reading App: Peruse
Hi,
Welcome to my little thought experiment that occurred to me in a dream.
The Spotify for Books: creating and curating lists for power-readers
I’ve been using Goodreads since 2013 when I first started cataloging things I loved reading. Goodreads has a very special place in my heart for being the first to give me an understanding of the vast universe of undiscovered books. Back then, the idea that I could keep discovering new books on the internet gave me great happiness.
Goodreads is a social cataloging website that allows individuals to search freely its database of books, annotations, and reviews. It currently has 90 million registered users and is by far the largest book cataloging platform on the internet.
However, Goodreads UI/UX has not changed much since 2013. The rating system is clunky and a little slow. It only allows you to write reviews publicly, quotes are only organized linearly rather than per book, and the overall navigation is outdated (the endless middle column of the newsfeed always gets to me). One only needs to do a simple search of ‘Goodreads’ to find voiced annoyances at its web design and functionality.
Yet everyone still uses Goodreads. Why? One explanation I can think of is the loss of long-term book records on Goodreads — it is difficult to download your history of books and upload them onto another platform and most people don’t want to lose their recorded progress or ‘goals reached’. Another explanation could be network effects whereby everyone you know and trust is on Goodreads. Another valid point is switching costs from the richness and the sheer number of reviews and rankings of books in Goodreads to a platform with much fewer and less in-depth reviews. The only way to get around this would be to implement trust and authority within the first few reviews through users with strong personal brands.
I have a vision of what I want my reading and listening record to look like and it is neither Goodreads nor a note-taking app like Evernote. It is somewhere in the middle, a recombination of the two. I want to be able to capture my thoughts on a book in an easy and accessible way and share that thought on my social feed whilst keeping a record of completed books. Make lists that are meaningful to me. Track the books I read and the podcasts I listen to, all whilst minimizing clicking and excessive reloading of pages.
I hypothesize that the discomfort of leaving Goodreads is much more potent than the desire to stay. If the transition from Goodreads to another platform is seamless and simple, many users would consider switching. That is, of course, a simplification. To outcompete Goodreads, a new product would need to establish a comprehensive database of books. A way to imbue trust and reliability in the quality of reviews and recommendations to make up for the fewer reviews as compared to Goodreads. An algorithm that explores and exploits just as Spotify does. Speed and simplicity of use.
Inspired by this, I outlined an idea for:
Peruse — The smartest place to read, listen, curate, and share.
The Pitch
The Spotify for Books: creating and curating lists for power-readers
For power-readers who want to share and curate meaningful lists and want to access recommendations from well-known figures, Peruse is a platform that allows you to do so in a clean and neat fashion. Unlike Goodreads, Peruse is faster, with more emphasis on UI and UX.
The Pain Point
People dislike Goodreads’ design and it takes away from the experience. There’s also no way to record notes on books and so many take separate notes on Notion or Evernote. By keeping everything in the same place, it’s easier to cross-check previous notes and find relevant books.
The same way that Medium.com is a minimalist version of Blogspot or Wordpress, I want a beautiful, design-focused website that narrows in on seamless cataloging and note-taking experience for books and podcasts. Including but not limited to: much nicer font (Garamond or Georgia), cleaner ways to arrange the covers, and profiles that encourage following and sharing. Spotify-Esque lists where you can name your bookshelves in ways that describe what that list means to you rather than the functional ‘favorites’. Knowledge trees that allow you to link things you’ve read and things you’ve listened to. Thought leaders’ opinions and book lists you can follow.
Key Issues with Goodreads
According to Bookish in 2019, over 100 readers listed similar complaints:
- Poor quality search on desktop and slow navigation
- Poor quality app (this is from people I follow on twitter)
- Poor integration with Amazon lists
- Group function doesn’t facilitate groups and just looks like a message board
- No half-star ratings
- Censorship on reviews
Key features of Peruse
- Beautiful and intuitive design
- The ability to import library from a CSV (previous Goodreads, Amazon, Apple Music, Spotify List) or through ISBN/Scanning easily and seamlessly
- Speed and Shortcuts (unlike Goodreads where it takes you 5+ clicks to review a book)
- Getting top thinkers to rate the site/app, or create profiles to follow (perhaps this could signal quality of reviews and attract their followers to the site)
- Knowledge and Discovery Trees (linking topics and figures to themes and ideas)
- Half star ratings
Why Include Audio?
Knowledge from books is timeless, but the way we experience content continues to evolve. I used to covet physical books. I stubbornly carried thick novels around with me on train rides. (For that reason, I never got into using small handbags simply because I couldn’t fit my book in it). Now, I use Audible to listen to e-books and listen to podcasts on Apple and Spotify.
According to Infinite Dial, More than one-third of Americans age 12 and over (104 Million) are consuming podcasts regularly. Startups focused on podcast discovery and social aspects of podcasting have risen to popularity, such as the podcast on-demand social app Breaker. The mean number of smart speakers is increasing in-home, allowing more ways for people to consume audio content — all pointing towards a rise in audio as a social network and way to learn new things.
While there are numerous book catalog sites and podcast review portals, there are very few that combine the two. I’m betting that people will soon be listening to podcasts just as much as reading books. A site that tracks both these sources will be useful.
Customer
- Values great design and simplicity of use
- Values clean and organized systems that are logically mapped
- Takes notes on books and podcasts (the most obvious use case: investors, thinkers, philosophers, professors, and students studying a specific field)
- An active reader that sets goals for themselves for learning and reading
- Enjoys recommendations by friends and respected figures
Competition
I think that in terms of competition there are 2 separate categories of competitors: note-taking apps, and book catalog/social book/podcast catalog apps. Goodreads falls into the latter as the largest competitor, alongside other notable competitors such as Bookself (app), WhatShouldIReadNext (discovery portal), LibraryThing (catalog). Note-taking apps include Evernote, Notion, AppleNotes, etc. As the idea is not completely fleshed out, it’d be interesting to see which category Peruse would fall into.
Onboarding and Launch
Similar to the model used by Medium and reading.supply, first onboard a limited number of users that will be productive reviewers/profile builders (Link to Article here). Pay people to create content and lists. Import famous authors and podcasters recommended lists. Use micro-influencers to write personal recommendations.
Domain-specific use: another route is to only onboard users of a certain domain, perfect that experience, and then branch out. A clear use case would be self-help book readers.
Ambassadors for the brand: ‘Morning Brew’ used an ambassador referral program that brought them 1.5M newsletter subscribers: an avenue that could be interesting is ‘Booktubers’ (Youtubers who make book reviews) or college students.
A Tangential Thought — Game Design versus Gamification
While Goodreads has 90 million users, are users ‘ghost’ users or shell registrations (register but never use)? How many readers actively use the platform? How can a site make cataloging and taking notes on books feel rewarding and promote consistent use?
With these questions in mind, I listened to a talk by Rahul Vohra, CEO of Superhuman — ‘the fastest email experience ever made’, which made the argument that software and web design should feel “play-like” to retain customers. To do this, he argues, companies have to pursue ‘game design’ rather than ‘gamification’. Where Gamification is “adding points, levels, trophies, and badges”, Game Design is held up by 5 factors: Goals, Emotions, Controls, Toys, and Flow. He argues that Gamification only contributes to extrinsic motivation that tapers out after an initial onboarding period, but Game Design keeps users on the site or app longer and more consistently.
I’d recommend listening to his lecture at a16z about these factors. Even though Superhuman’s model for clearing inbox is vastly different from a Goodreads alternative or reading, I think there is a lot we can learn from this — Goodreads right now has a model that rewards people for ‘challenges’ or ‘trophies’, exactly fitting the outdated gamification idea Vohra provided us with. For another platform to do better, it will have to go beyond gamification and move towards amplifying the elements of game design.
Also, Vohra talks a lot about onboarding users. His first onboarding took multiple hours to complete, and it helped his ‘super-users’ thoroughly understand his product and use it to its full potential. Since then, Superhuman has shortened its onboarding time to a mere 30 minutes (still considered a long time for an email app) — Vohra stands by the fact that the onboarding process is one of Superhuman’s most important processes. For a site like Peruse, it could be interesting if there was an onboarding process for each super-user.
Final Thoughts
If I were to start this project, the first place I would start would be customer discovery — do readers even want to take notes? Comparing casual readers versus active readers: how do they use Goodreads or discover books? Do they want their notes and reviews private or public?
Some questions I have remaining generally are: whether this idea aims to be a ‘Better Goodreads’ in terms of speed or functionality, or whether it is a form of note-taking focused on the experience of books and podcasts or an alternative social media app?
I got a lot of really informative and encouraging feedback after sharing these designs which pushed me to write down my thoughts in a more concrete fashion. Thank you for all the kind words and excitement for the project, I truly appreciate it. This idea was a ton of fun to build out and conceptualize — all from a random dream I had one day! Hopefully, I will be able to build upon it and refine this idea further.
As always, comments and suggestions are welcomed.
Nicole
