Readlink
A reading app for curious minds that brings your library, book discovery, reading progress, and thoughtful conversations together in one place.
Overview
Readlink is a reading companion for people who want more from their books than a list of titles. The product brings reading progress, personal shelves, ratings, reviews, highlights, recommendations, and reader conversations into one focused experience. Readers can track what they are reading, discover what to pick up next, compare their taste with other readers, and share a public library without giving up the privacy of their personal notes.
Key results
The Problem
Readers often spread their reading life across disconnected tools: one app for tracking books, another for recommendations, private notes in a separate place, and noisy social feeds that are not built around books. Existing platforms can make it difficult to see reading progress, find people with genuinely similar taste, or have focused conversations about the ideas inside a book.
Our Solution
Readlink creates a single, book-first home for the entire reading journey. A personal library organizes books by reading state, while discovery and reader matching surface recommendations tied to real reading history. The feed keeps every post attached to a book, and features such as barcode scanning, Goodreads import, highlights, and public library pages make it easy to build and share a meaningful reading identity.
Challenges We Overcame
Building a Complete Reading Library
The core library needed to support books that are to-read, in progress, and finished while preserving page progress, ratings, reviews, notes, and highlights. The experience had to stay quick and legible as a reader's collection grew.
Recommendations Based on Real Taste
Generic recommendations are easy to ignore. Readlink needed to connect suggestions to books a reader had actually finished, overlapping shelves, and curated libraries from people worth reading after.
A Social Feed Without the Noise
The community experience had to encourage thoughtful discussion without becoming another general-purpose social timeline. Attaching posts to books keeps conversations contextual and makes replies easier to follow.
Making Import and Capture Frictionless
Adding a book should take seconds whether a reader scans a physical spine, imports a Goodreads library, or searches the catalog. These entry points reduce the effort required to make the library useful from day one.
Results & Impact
Key Features
- Personal library with To Read, Reading, and Read shelves
- Page progress tracking for books currently in progress
- Ratings, reviews, private notes, and chapter-based highlights
- Book discovery with recommendations tied to reading history
- Reader matching based on overlapping libraries and taste
- A focused feed where every post is attached to a real book
- Barcode scanning to add physical books in seconds
- Goodreads profile and CSV library import
- Curated libraries from founders, writers, and other public thinkers
- Public profile pages for sharing a complete reading history
- Mobile experiences for iPhone and Android alongside the web app