Hardcover Report for February 2025
By Adam Fortuna
Hi Book Friends!
Well, you made it through January. 😂 January feels like the Monday of months, especially this year. Balancing news consumption, activism, communication, community while trying to still take time to enjoy life can sometimes feel like a struggle.
However you’re handling it, I hope you take some time to read something fun.
For me, that’s meant putting in an audiobook (Wind and Truth, followed by Onyx Storm) and going for a long walk outside and through nature. There’s a reason why being in nature makes us happier, healthier, and more creative (also the byline for The Nature Fix).
The Nature Fix describes how the smells, sounds and sights of nature can improve our overall health – mental and otherwise.
Whatever you do to stay mentally healthy, I hope you’re taking time for it. While it’s important to be an informed citizen, having the energy to be there to support those around you is just as essential.
For the last 6 years my wife and I have been volunteering at the Sundance Film Festival here in Salt Lake City. It’s technically in Park City & SLC, but we stick to the SLC side usually because it’s a madhouse on the other side of the mountains.
My role volunteering is about as low level as you can get. I volunteer at a local theater a few blocks from our apartment, and help do what I can so guests can have a fun movie night. That mostly means cleaning movie theaters, answering questions and helping people find the right lines. Sundance opened interest if you’d like to learn about how to volunteer in 2026.
It’s so much fun talking with other film lovers about what they’re excited about in the time before awards. That’s an exciting time. We don’t yet know what the “popular” movies of the festival will be, so people rely on word of mouth to determine where the buzz is.
That’s something I’ve been wondering how we can do more of on Hardcover. Currently, Trending Books and most saved new releases are two of the top ways we showcase what’s popular. But there’s so much more we can do! I’d to love to figure out how we could elevate more books. If you have any suggestions of this, I’d love to hear about them.
What’s New On Hardcover?
📚 2024 Year in Books
In January we launched the 2024 Year in Books, a look at what was most popular on Hardcover last year, common trends, popular authors, and popularity by month. If you’ve read any new books in 2024, there’s a good chance you’ve read at least one of these!
For this year we listened to community feedback and removed all AI generated artwork. We’re working to remove all AI art and AI usage across the entire site in the coming months. This is a step towards that.
What was the most popular book on Hardcover in 2024? Funny Story By Emily Henry! It’s a romance with deep and flawed characters overcoming their own issues and history in a satisfying, yet fun, way.
🚛 Major Migration
For those who have been following along in Discord, we’re making progress on the Next.js to Ruby on Rails migration. It’s taking a while, as we’re trying to fix a bunch of bugs as part of this.
You can check out the new migration on our Staging server right now. The production version will be faster than this, as our database will be hosted on the same servers, as opposed to on AWS.
Speaking of which, this migration will also completely remove Hardcover from ANY AWS hosting! We’re not using them directly today, but we are hosted on Heroku, which in turn hosts on AWS. It’s always felt icky to be there, and I’ll be happy to be using Digital Ocean (affiliate link that helps support Hardcover).
✅ Verified New Books in Search
Whenever a new book is added to Hardcover manually, we add a “user added” indicator to it and wouldn’t immediately show it in search. This is because we only want search to show “verified” books. You’re free to track whatever you’d like on Hardcover by creating new books, but unless it’s widely considered a book, we don’t want it showing up for everyone else in search.
We’ve updated how we handle new book creation. If we’re able to verify the book exists by it’s ISBN, Goodreads ID, Google Books ID or OpenLibrary ID, we’ll now mark this book as verified and show it in search. 🥳
☝️ Upgrade from a Monthly Supporter to a Yearly Supporter
One very positive sign lately has been members asking to upgrade from monthly to yearly. We didn’t have the ability to do this before, we it’s possible now! It does require emailing me to do it, but the instructions are your Account page.
🔍 Migrated Search
This behind the scenes change changed where our search infrastructure is hosted. We’re using Typesense for search, which has been absolutely amazing.
It works by sending a snapshot of everything that we want searchable to a Typesense server. It holds all of that in memory and provides an API that swiftly returns results. If you’re working on a project that involves search, and you need more than a SQL ilike statement, then I’d absolutely recommend it.
🗄️ Migrated Cache Database
This was another behind the scenes change. We store a LOT of data in our database. This includes the history of edits by librarians, times for when we’ve hit every external API for every entity (so we don’t hit them too often), and the returned data from all of those APIs.
It’s a lot of data. It also needs to be pruned in line with those external APIs guidelines (ex: we can only store Google Books API data for a month). Rather than deleting it, we try to get a new updated copy.
This migration helped lower the size of our main database drastically, with backups reduced from 20gb to 4gb. 🙌
The new DB is hosted on Digital Ocean, and we’ll use this same database for Solid Cache in the new migration.
All of these infrastructure changes are parts of the major migration we’re working towards which will speed up the site!
What’s Next on Hardcover?
I’m putting 100% of my effort behind wrapping up the migration in February. That’s priority number one, two and three right now.
If you’ve seen slower than normal response times in Discord or email, please be patient with us. We’re a tiny team and this is a major migration, but I believe it’ll set us up for an incredible rest of the year.
If you’re curious to see what our next priorities are, you can always checkout our Public Roadmap.
After the migration my next top priority is open sourcing the application. That might sound like just making the code public, but there are a bunch of other steps (legal compliance, security, local setup, etc).
Behind the Scenes at Hardcover
January was our best month ever! We had the most visitors, the most supporters and the most active readers! To top if off, we’ve had more people talking about Hardcover on TikTok, Bluesky and other social media. It’s been amazing. 🥰
Meanwhile Hardcover grew from 214 supporters to 255! That’s more than one a day. 🙌
The last few months have started to feel like we’re starting to reach a new audience. I’ve been reluctant to put too much effort into marketing until the current migration is done
Featured Prompt for February 2025
Every January lots of new readers make resolutions to start or change your reading habits.
Which books made you think deeply about freedom, truth, and society?
Books have the power to challenge our perspectives, reveal hidden truths, and inspire us to think critically about the world around us. Stories—both real and imagined—can illustrate the importance of freedom, the consequences of unchecked power, and the resilience of those who fight for justice. Whether through dystopian fiction, historical accounts, or thought-provoking analysis, these books help us understand society in new ways. Which books have made you reflect deeply on freedom, truth, and the structures that shape our world?
Last month’s prompt was The winning book right now is What books are you most looking forward to reading in 2025? The top two books, Onyx Storm and The Blade Itself. The later keeps being recommended for me and is on my list too!
Most Read Books for January 2025
There’s a trend in the most read books this month. See if you can find it. 😂
- Wind and Truth by Brandon Sanderson (53 reads) (The Stormlight Archive #5)
- Fourth Wing (50 reads) (The Empyrean #1)
- Onyx Storm (48 reads) (The Empyrean #3)
- Iron Flame (38 reads) (The Empyrean #2)
- Mistborn: The Final Empire (31 reads)
With Wind and Truth’s release in December, more and more people are taking on the somewhat daunting task of reading all of Sandersons Cosmere books. If you’re wondering if this is for you, Mistborn is the recommended starting point.
A full three of the top five books are in The Empyrean series. Fourth Wing’s release in 2023, combined with ACOTARs growth, threw romantasy into the spotlight. Onyx Storm is already the fastest selling young adult novel in 20 years.
All five of the top books are fantasy this month!
Most Saved Books to be Released in February 2025
A bunch of this months popular releases are next in their series.
- Emily Wilde’s Compendium of Lost Tales By Heather Fawcett (Emily Wilde #3)
- Scythe & Sparrow By Brynne Weaver (The Ruinous Love Trilogy #3)
- Deep End By Ali Hazelwood
- Rebel Witch By Kristen Ciccarelli (The Crimson Moth #2)
- A Drop of Corruption by By Robert Jackson Bennett (Shadow of the Leviathan #2)
If you haven’t started Emily Wilde’s series, this is a good time to start. It was a featured book club book in in the Sword & Laser podcast last year. A Drop of Corruption is the follow up The Tainted Cup, which mixed fantasy and mystery in an exciting world.
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.
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.
We appreciate you reading this and hope you have an amazing month. Talk to you soon. ♥️
Adam & the Hardcover Team