Changelog

Author pages had a name and a list of books and nothing else. They now have a face, a life and a few lines about the work, the way the back flap of a hardback does.

• Photographs of 236 writers, each one credited to the photographer who took it and carrying the licence it was published under.
• Biographies of 220 writers, with a few lines showing and the rest one tap away. Every one of them credits Open Library, where it came from.
• Birth and death years for 262 writers, printed the way the source recorded them. A writer known only as born around 1200 still says around 1200, rather than being tidied into a precision nobody actually has.
• A record card down the side of every author page: the portrait, what the community scored them, the dates, what they write, how many of their books we hold, and where to find them elsewhere.
• An author page now fills the width of the screen instead of stopping a third of the way short, and the community score sits with the rest of the facts rather than stranded on a line of its own.
• Books on an author page are ordered the way the charts order books, by the member average weighted by how many readers have rated them. Unrated titles file below.

A new front door. The homepage now opens on a shelf of real books drifting slowly past, with the search box as the first thing you can do rather than the last thing you can find.

• A shelf across the top of the homepage, built from books people here have actually shelved. Jackets stand at their own heights, a couple are turned spine out, one leans where its neighbour was pulled, and the whole row drifts past slowly enough to read.
• Search is the front door now. "Discover your next book" sits under the headline, with a few starting points beneath it, instead of the two buttons that used to be there.
• Most shelved is a proper top ten, with each book showing the number of shelves it sits on and what the community has scored it. You can check the order rather than take it on trust.
• Books that tie share a position. Two books on the same number of shelves are both marked =3, because pretending one of them came fourth would be a small lie.
• The shelf holds still for anyone who has asked their device to reduce motion.

Authors finally have pages, opinions can be seconded, and blocking somebody now actually removes them from what you see.

• Authors have pages. Open a book, a search result, or the author directory, and the name takes you to their shelf: their books, what the community made of them, and who has read the most of them. Until now the Authors menu led to a search box.
• You can agree with a review. It is one tap, the count is public, and you can sort any review list by it, so the best thing anyone has written about a book is no longer buried by whatever was posted last.
• Blocking someone now does something. Their reviews, lists, notes and profile disappear from your view of the site, everywhere, not just from a settings page.
• A quiet Report control sits beside lists, notes, reviews and profiles, and never beside your own writing.
• Your reading goal can be changed or dropped from a new Reading tab in settings, instead of being fixed forever at whatever you typed during sign-up.
• The account deletion page now says exactly what happens and when, and a request you change your mind about can be called off.

The thing IBDB does that nobody else does is the note a curator writes under a single book on a list. This release pulls those notes out of the lists they live in and gives them a home of their own.

• Margins, a new page collecting every note members have written beside individual books. It is the one thing on IBDB you will not find on any other book site.
• Genre browsing, so a shelf of crime or nature writing is somewhere you can go rather than a tag you can only read.
• Covers are never cropped. Book jackets are designed rectangles with the title at the top, and squeezing them into a fixed slot was slicing the type off. Rows are level along the bottom and ragged along the right now, which is what a real shelf looks like.
• Shelve a book straight from a chart row, without opening it first.
• A homepage that stops repeating itself, with each band doing a different job.

IBDB gets its own face and its first real community. The site is now set in Fraunces on bookcloth green, every index sorts and pages properly, and the book page finally tells you how a book was actually received rather than just its average.

• A new look. The display face is Fraunces, the accent is a bottle green drawn from publisher’s binding cloth, and a shelf rule sits under every heading: a board with an upright at each end, so a heading reads as the edge of a shelf with a row of things below it.
• Members, lists and reviews now have people in them. Thirty readers with real shelves, real disagreement about the same books, and lists they actually annotate.
• Every browse page gained sort controls, paging and an honest count. The author directory picked up an A to Z jump bar.
• Book pages show the full ratings distribution, so you can tell a book everyone found fine from a book that split the room. Underneath, a Readers Also Enjoyed shelf built from what members actually shelved together.
• Reviews on a book can be sorted by rating or recency and paged through, instead of stopping at thirty.
• Your reading goal is no longer a question we asked and forgot. It sits on your profile as a shelf of spines that fills as the year goes on.
• Settings became real: export everything we hold on you, hide your profile, manage blocked members, and see the reports you have filed.
• Share a link to any book, member or list and it now unfurls as a proper card with the cover, the rating and the shelf, rather than a bare line of text.

The homepage gets a proper edit. Instead of one grid under a hero, you walk in to a stack of curated sections: the books just arriving, the reviews resonating with the community, the lists members are building, and the titles rising in the catalogue.

• A compact editorial hero up top. Visitors get a WELCOME TO IBDB greeting with two CTAs; signed-in readers get a LIBRARY CARD greeting that shows their shelf counts (3 reading, 12 want to read, 47 read) under their name.
• Recently released. The newest titles in the catalogue, ranked by publication year and tie-broken by community signal.
• Recent reviews. The latest reviews across IBDB with the reviewer's handle and the book they wrote about, both visible without a click.
• Featured lists. Public lists with three or more books, ranked by length and recency, surfaced via the same cover collage cards as elsewhere on the site.
• For signed-in readers, two personal blocks land first: recent activity from people you follow, and picks for you tuned to the genres you chose during onboarding. Then the same shared sections everyone else sees.
• The centred hero search is retired now that search lives in the header. Every section keeps its eyebrow and title even when its content is still warming up, so the page reads the same shape whether the catalogue is full or quiet.

The chrome around the site grows up. A new three-group mega menu replaces the row of placeholder text links, the search bar lives in the header now and returns categorised results across four kinds of thing, and the account cluster carries a chevron so it actually looks like a menu.

• Mega-menu navigation in the header: Books, Authors, and Community each open a panel of three destinations. Discover is live; the rest carry a SOON pill until their pages ship.
• Categorised header search. Type a query and see the top three matches across Books, Authors, Lists, and Members in one dropdown, with a "View all" link straight through to the full results page.
• A /search page that now mirrors that split, with Books, Authors, Lists, and Members each in their own section instead of just books.
• Sign in link plus a Sign up button for visitors; avatar, display name, and a chevron for signed-in readers, all opening the same profile menu.
• A mobile drawer with collapsible accordions, one per group, and the search bar pinned at the top.
• A polite "coming soon" page sits behind every placeholder route, so a directly-shared URL never 404s.

Search grows up. Results now carry community ratings and reader counts, forgiving matching catches author names and accented titles that used to slip through, and a bad day upstream no longer pretends to be a real empty result.

• A /search results page with a full grid, a loading skeleton shaped like the results, and a soft inline notice when the wider catalogue is slow rather than a blank screen.
• Two sources of results now merge into one ranked set behind the scenes, so the best match rises to the top whichever side found it.
• Community signal on every search card and book result: the star rating and reader count pulled from the IBDB catalogue.
• Covers and book details refresh themselves quietly in the background, so what you see stays current without you waiting on it.
• Type half an author name, an accented title, or a near-miss spelling and search meets you halfway.
• A degraded state that is honest about what happened: when the wider catalogue has a bad moment you see a soft notice and the books we hold, rather than a wall of nothing.

Reviews and ratings land. Every book now has a community rating and a stack of reviews under it, and every review you write gets a permanent page of its own.

• A review composer on every book page, with an editor that styles bold, italic, quotes, lists, and headings as you type.
• Ratings move to a one-to-ten scale, picked from a segmented control. Five stars never had enough resolution for the books you actually want to argue about.
• A short summary line above the review and room to go long underneath, with a soft character counter so you can keep going if you really need to.
• Every review gets a permanent page of its own, plus a card on your profile and one on the book it belongs to.
• Book pages now show the IBDB community rating, the latest reviews underneath, and a write-a-review link for readers who have shelved the book as Read.
• Reviews keep their formatting everywhere they appear, from the book page to your profile to the canonical page.

Discovery turns on. Find readers whose taste you trust, follow them with one click, and the next time you visit your home page their reviews and lists are waiting.

• A Follow button on every profile, with a hover-to-Unfollow affordance and an instant toggle.
• /discover lands. Trending books, popular lists, and a rail of people worth following for signed-in readers.
• Onboarding step six fills out: a suggested-people picker replaces the old "coming soon" placeholder so your home page has something to render the day after signup.
• A "from people you follow" block on the authenticated home, showing recent reviews and recently updated lists from the last two weeks.
• Discover joins the site header for both visitors and signed-in readers.

Lists land. Build a stack of any books, for any reason. Reorder by drag, type a position to jump, and add from any book page in two clicks.

• Start a list, retitle it, prune it, or retire it. Each one can be public, unlisted, or private.
• Drag-and-drop reorder with keyboard support, plus a click-to-edit position number on every row.
• Add-to-list popover on every book page, with inline new-list creation.
• A shareable page for every public list, with the builder's notes shown inline.
• The profile Lists tab fills out: preview of your six most recent lists, link to the full index.
• "My lists" in the site header to jump straight to your stacks.

Every reader gets a profile worth visiting, and every book gets the little Want / Reading / Read pill that turns browsing into shelving.

• A public profile page for every reader, with five tabs: Lists, Reviews, Read, Reading, Want
• A shelf toggle on every book detail page, with instant feedback and a sign-in nudge for visitors
• /me/edit for keeping your display name and bio current
• Settings tucked under /me/settings where they belong, with the old paths kept as polite redirects

The first day a real visitor can sign up, become a reader, and land somewhere that knows them.

• Magic-link sign-in (Google and Apple chips queued up next)
• A seven-step onboarding: pick a username, write a bio, choose your genres, add three books you have read, set a pace and a yearly goal, find a few people to follow
• Genre-based recommendations on the homepage for signed-in readers, with a top-rated fallback while the catalogue finds its feet
• Settings split into Account, Privacy, Data, and Reports tabs
• Leave onboarding halfway and your next sign-in returns you to the step you were on, never back to the start

Quiet work on trust. What you keep private stays private, and what you choose to share is all anyone else can reach, checked from every seat in the house before it shipped.

• Private shelves, lists, and profiles are enforced at the deepest layer of the site, not just hidden from view
• Visitors, members, and the people who run the site each see exactly what they should and nothing more
• Every visibility rule is exercised from all three of those seats before it ships
• Nothing new to look at on the surface, but the layer that keeps every later release safe

Pure groundwork with nothing new to click, but the catalogue, the readers, and their shelves now have somewhere to live. Everything the next few releases stand on landed here.

• A home for every reader: profiles, follows, and the connections between them
• A book catalogue built for searching, so titles and author names come back fast
• Shelves and reviews wired to a proper reading model: want to read, reading, read
• Lists ready for hand-curated collections, one book at a time
• Community signal (who shelved, rated, and listed what) counted from day one, ready for the trending and rating features that followed
• A profile that exists the moment you sign up, no setup required

The opening page of a long story. Everything we need to build on, with placeholder data where the real catalogue will live.

• A working site from day one: fast, simple pages ready to grow a feature at a time
• A catalogue drawing on a global book index, so nearly any title you look for is already findable
• A mock homepage with hero, search bar, and a trending-curators grid
• A permanent page for every book in the catalogue
• Magic-link sign-in sketched in, ready for the real thing