Hardcover Report for April 2025

Adam FortunaAvatar for Adam Fortuna

By Adam Fortuna

8 min read

Hi Book Friends!

Spring is here, and the cold is reluctantly starting to thaw, making way for greenery and flowers. Spring is my favorite season – even more so since I starting getting allergy shots last year.

This time of year feels like a restart just as much as New Years. It’s a chance to get outside and go for a hike – or enjoy the fresh air at your local capital building.

Wherever you are, I hope you’re able to take some time to stop and smell the flowers this month.

Doing so is more than just a luxury: being in nature actually gives you energy. Whenever I’m feeling stressed out or overwhelmed being outside helps – as does journaling.

Whatever you do to help relieve stress, I hope you’re taking that time for yourself this spring.

What spring traditions do you have?

Each spring my wife and I have our own tradition: we get something tasty for takeout (often sushi, or banh mi’s), head to the Utah Capital and have a picnic under the Cherry Blossom trees there. Even though we’re a world away from Japan, we appreciate this chance to hanami, the Japanese tradition of having a party beneath the sakura trees.

This past month has been a very stressful one in our household. We had the foundation of our new house repaired, and some new piers added to help support the weight (it was sinking). It was loud, took ten days and was underway during the Hardcover Alexandria Migration. 😅

The weight of having that house work completed and the bulk of the migration wrapped up has allowed me breathe much better going into this Spring. 🪻

What’s New On Hardcover?

📜 Alexandria Release!

After many months developing, testing on staging and learning a lot about how to speed things up, the migration is complete (aside from some cleanup)!

You can read the full release notes in the launch blog post, but here are a few of my favorite new features.

Compare Your Reading

On the profile page, you’ll now see a little teaser for “Shared Reads”.

Clicking into the page will show every book that both you and that reader have read. We’ve divided it up into four groups: Books you both rated 4.5+ ⭐, ones you rated 2 ⭐ higher, ones they rated 2 ⭐ higher, and all books.

You can try this out with anyone right now:

If you’re a content creator on BookTok, Bookstagram or BookTube, please reach out to me (adam at hardcover.app)! I’d love to feature you here in the future.

Advanced Goals

A few years ago, before Hardcover, I used to do write ups about my past year in books on my blog. One year I realized I’d read 100 books, but only 10 were by women! The following year I intentionally read more books by women authors and saw that percentage grow to about 40% of my books from the year.

I only realized that because I was tracking and had the data. For others who are also data driven, we’ve improved Hardcover Goals to now support and celebrate more diversity in your reading.

This allows you to create goals that use any (or all) of the following:

  • By Reading Format – Read, Listen or Both
  • By Book Categorization – Book, Graphic Novel, Novella, Short Story, etc
  • By author gender – Male, Female or Other, including gender non-conforming
  • By author background – BIPOC or non-BIPOC
  • By author sexual orientation – LGBTQIA+ or Cis/Het authors

The author demographics are only as good as our database. If you spot an author not listed in a goal, or listed incorrectly, you can help out by updating that author or filing a report for us to update them.

Custom Profile Headers for Supporters

Supporters can now upload a profile header, or use one of the ones we provide. Down the line we’ll also allow Supporters to set custom headers for Lists.

🐇 It’s Just Faster 🐇

The biggest feature isn’t a specific page – it’s the overall speed of the application! Everything renders so much faster it’s already hard to remember how slow it was (and it was slow 😅).

Community Appreciation

This migration has been a massive project – the largest since starting Hardcover. We replaced the entire application that powers Hardcover with a replacement and it (mostly) worked.

People often compare these types of releases with changing a cars engine while it’s running. In this case we kept the engine the same, but redesigned the car to be able to fly. 😅

One of the biggest reasons it worked as well as it did was because of the amazing Hardcover Discord community who have helped us find and fix bugs in the system.

I wanted to give a huge thank you to a few members of the community who have been very active in finding and reporting bugs:

@billiam, @trelinarch, @emma, @tsparr, @argash, @euphoriapotion, @kodermike, @thranduel, @giovanni, @Gio, @Conciselyverbose

Thank you’ll so much! Many others have reported issues, helped test problem areas and helped us discuss solutions to problems (changes to genres and collections are on the horizon). Thanks to everyone who has helped and for everyone else who’s been patient with this release. ♥️

What’s Next on Hardcover?

We’re currently in a bug fix phase following the release. If we were a big company, we’d have full test suite to make sure things work at every important level. Currently though, we have a partial test suite and some alerting when things go wrong. In the meantime, we’re working to fix the bugs while improving the codebase for the long-run.

We have a few more tweaks that should make it faster still. We also will finally figure out why the iOS application needs to be restarted. 😭

If you spot a bug, please send an email to [email protected]. That email address is shared by the team for us to investigate issues and make sure everything is tracked.

Or if you’re on our Discord, you can jump into the #migration-feedback channel and mention things there.

I’ve been keeping track of all known issues in a public Google Sheet pinned in that channel. Currently Hardcover has one developer focused on the main application (me). I’m prioritizing issues that impact everyone, make the app unusable, or mess up data above all else.

Migration Phase 2: Babylon Release

Once I feel like the application has reached a stable place, we’ll continue on with a few more updates that we put off that are still part of this release:

  • Finish Stats – We’re aiming to do this first as we work on fixing bugs related to the release.
  • Final API Updates – We’re adding a follower database which API read queries will hit. This should separate API use from impacting the main site. Also limiting all queries to at most 3 levels deep (discussion of this in #api on Discord for the last few months).
  • Database migration – I’d like to move our primary database from Heroku to Digital Ocean. This, combined with moving the API, would get us completely off AWS (Amazon) infrastructure which Heroku uses.

This feels like plenty of work for April. If we happen to complete it, we’ll figure out next priorities – which are a mix of open sourcing, increased dependability (status pages, alerting, etc) and like 5 other things. 😅

We’re ambitious, but that’s one of the exciting things about working on Hardcover. The sooner we can open source, the more we can work with the community on projects. That’s higher on my list than any new feature.

Behind the Scenes at Hardcover

We started the month at 270 subscribers and grew to 277 this month. Before the migration, we’d grown to 295 – I thought we would hit 300! I suspect some people had somehow slipped through the cracks and were marked as supporters even though their subscription expired. I think that bug is fixed now, and this is an accurate count of Paid Supporters.

I think April will be the month we make it to 300 subscribers! 🤞

Featured Prompt for April 2025

This months prompt comes from @Tara123:

Non-fiction books that expanded your understanding of the world

Any non-fiction books that taught you something that made you understand the world better.

This is one of my favorite subjects. One of Hardcover’s taglines (which we’re still iterating on) has been a place to find “life-changing books“.

Life changing means it was the right book for you at the right time. What are some books that taught you something about the world?

Most Read Books for March 2025

For the first time in a while, we have five different authors in the top 5!

  1. Sunrise on the Reaping By Suzanne Collins (#0.5 of 4 in The Hunger Games)
  2. Fourth Wing By Rebecca Yarros (#1 of 3 in The Empyrean)
  3. Dungeon Crawler Carl By Matt Dinniman (#1 of 7 in Dungeon Crawler Carl
  4. Project Hail Mary By Andy Weir
  5. Mistborn: The Final Empire By Brandon Sanderson (#1 of 3 in The Mistborn Saga: The Original Trilogy)

The newest Hunger Games book has taken over the top spot this month immediately after it’s release. I’m in the middle of it right now, and it’s been exciting to return to Panem. I’ve seen Dungeon Crawler Carl showing up everywhere lately – TikTok, Bookstagram and even the guy next to me at the coffee shop! That ones next on my list.

Most Saved Books to be Released in April 2025

  1. Great Big Beautiful Life by Emily Henry (68 saves)
  2. Say You’ll Remember Me by Abby Jimenez (42 saves)
  3. The Notorious Virtues by Alwyn Hamilton (41 saves)
  4. Fearless by Lauren Roberts (#3 of 3 in The Powerless Trilogy) (41 saves)
  5. The Staircase in the Woods by Chuck Wendig (30 saves)

Romance, romance, fantasy thriller, dystopian fantasy, mystery fantasy.

I’m loving this mix, and the increased interest in darker fantasy and dystopian fantasy. If you need a palate cleanser from those worlds, this pair of new romance novels by Emily Henry (Book Lovers, Funny Games) and Abby Jimenez (Part of Your World) could be just right.

Join us on Discord

The Hardcover Community isn’t just on the website – we’re also on Discord! If you’re not an expert in Discord, don’t worry – neither are we.

Join the over 2,000 readers to chat about books, hear about product updates, and be part of the community.

Join the Hardcover Discord

Want to Support Hardcover?

As a fledgling startup, we can use all the help we can get, whether that’s becoming a Supporter, sharing Hardcover with a friend, or just following along. Supporters get full Librarian abilities and access to Support and Librarian channels on Discord by linking roles.

We appreciate you reading this and hope you have an amazing month. Talk to you soon. ♥️

Adam & the Hardcover Team

← More from the blog