Hardcover Report for June 2025
By Adam Fortuna
Hi book friends!
Happy start to the summer for those of us in the northern hemisphere! I’ve already started to see more people outside, enjoying the warmer weather or reading under a tree at a park.
What summer traditions do you have? As a kid in school, our tradition growing up was always a road trip. We’d take ambitious drives from Florida up to the ends of the country – Maine, or Washington State – camping along the way. Unfortunately cars aren’t a place that I’ve ever been able to read, so I’d settle for gas station games or Tetris on my Gameboy.
Since moving to Utah, our traditions have shifted to backpack or car camping in our general area – often with friends. There’s something immensely satisfying about finding a shady place with flowing water nearby and settling in to read.
Whatever your summer tradition is, I hope you’re able to focus in and enjoy it. ♥️
May was an exciting month for our household – we adopted Bucky! Bucky is a 5-year-old, 45lb, goldendoodle. He grew up during lockdown, making him very cuddly (as you can see from above 😂).
He had some minor surgery at the rescue before we adopted him and has a few more days in the cone of shame.
This month I also celebrated my 43rd birthday with a Eurovision party with friends. If you have never watched Eurovision (as most of our friends hadn’t), you’re missing out. A few of my favorites from this year were Sweden, Luxembourg, Albania and Ireland (about Laika, the first dog in space!).
It’s kind of crazy to think in the past 6 months we bought a house, moved in, started a new job and adopted a dog. I’ve been feeling a little overwhelmed lately with all of the changes. Going from nothing on my calendar to packed days hasn’t been without it’s anxious and stressful days. These are all good problems. Having more help on Hardcover (which I’ll touch on next), will help me mentally as much as it helps HC grow into it’s next phase.
🆕 What’s New
Last month we mentioned shifting gears to focus on growing the team from our current size of 4 (all part time) to at least 10. We had 43 applications of the roles – with the most applications for the developer positions with 15 applicants.
🤝 New Team Members
In May I had 22 video calls with applicants. I have tremendous respect for anyone who’s ever been on the hiring side – it takes a lot of coordination, timing, and just focused attention to get a good take on someone in only 25 minutes (my default first interview length).
Considering these are for unpaid roles on a project set to be open sourced, I’m absolutely floored by the depth of knowledge from these applicants.
I’ve been thinking a lot about what a long-term team for a project like Hardcover looks like. Something reminded me of the early IRC days where it was important to always have trusted people in charge (channels ops). This round of new members will be new Ops too. I’ve been considering this group to be the Hardcover Class of 2025 (no word yet on a yearbook 😂).
After talking to such passionate people, I’m leaning towards bringing on more team members:
- 6 x Software Developer
- 2 x DevOps / IT Manager
- 3 x Staff Librarians
- 2 x Community Support & Project Management
- 2 x Marketing & Community
For a total of 15 new team members (!). That seems a little crazy at first – bringing the team size from 4 to 19? Having more people means more members speaking for the group, more people responding on Discord or other channels.
This also changes how we communicate, since it’s unrealistic to get almost 20 people spread around the world to have a shared meeting time. We have some plans on how to change this so that we’re communicating much more asynchronously – utilizing Discord and Miro much more.
📚 Book Edition Page Filtering & Sorting
One frustrating page has always been the Book Edition Listing page. If you’re trying to find your specific edition, it often involved looking through page after page to find your edition.
We’ve updated this page with a few new filtering and sorting options:
This will allow for a few options including:
- Filter By:
- Reading Format – Physical Book, Audiobook or Ebook
- Language – From whatever languages we have editions for
- Sorting By:
- Title
- Popularity
- Page Count
- Audio Length
- Release Date
- Data Score
That last one, Data Score, is an internal metric we use to determine how “complete” our data is for an edition. The lower the score, the less we know about that book. If you’re librarian looking to help out, try starting with the lowest Data Score Editions for ones that need the most help (or ones that could be merged into other editions).
🔑 Revoke Hardcover API Key
We realized there was no way to revoke an API key. If you accidentally pushed an API key to a public repo, there was nothing you could do.
If this happens now, you can invalidate that key and create a new one.
I have some other plans to improve the API, but those are for another day.
🧑💻 Source Available → Open Source
Our most requested feature is, surprisingly, to open source Hardcover. I can see why. Many book tracking sites have come and gone over the years, and making the code available is one way to help the project live on.
I’ve spent a lot of time reading about different models for this and have come up with a plan (which can always change). We want to get to a GNU Affero General Public License version 3, but we can’t start there. If we do, then it becomes impossible to split out libraries from the codebase into MIT or Apache licensed libraries.
Instead, our current plan is to start with a “Source Available” license that lets us retain ownership. We’ll aim to split off as much of the project as we can into the least restrictive licenses. This will be for specific tools that are all part of the overall codebase (scrapers for getting data, merging data, etc). Once those are split out, we’ll flip the switch on the main codebase to AGPL-3.
Here’s what that would look like in practice:
Phase 1: Once we complete this hiring in June, the entire new focus of the dev team will be on getting the app to the point we can make the code available. (June – August?)
Phase 2: We make the source available with a “Source Available” license. During this phase we’ll be working with team and the community to identify and extract parts of the codebase. I’d also like to set a rule in this license where is the site is no longer available, then the codebase automatically becomes MIT licensed. I don’t know yet how long this phase will take. We might also start on this phase, realize it’s overkill and just make the entire project MIT licensed. 😂
Phase 3: We flip the switch over to AGPL-3 for the main codebase.
That’s the plan I’m considering right now. It’s significantly more work than just making it open source initially, but AGPL-3 ensures that future improvements to the codebase are available – which is important.
📈 Hardcover Stats
As part of making the site open source, we also want to be more transparent about our own stats. We’re starting by making our website analytics public!
👉 Hardcover Plausible Analytics
I’m a huge fan of Plausible Analytics, an open source alternative to Google Analytics that’s GDPR compliant and even open source! We paid for the hosted version for a few years and finally made the switch to our own hosted version recently.
Behind the Scenes at Hardcover
We started the month at 313 subscribers and grew to 337 this month. At 24 new readers in a month, it our highest month yet!
We saw a bunch of visitors this month too – in large thanks to a technical blog post that went viral about our recent migration.
Four years of work in a single graph. 😂 I think we’re in an amazing place right now.
Featured Prompt for Prompt 2025
This months prompt is one close to my favorite genre:
Science Fiction where humanity comes together to build something massive or ambitious?
Science Fiction where humanity comes together to build something massive – a colossal structure, a world-changing projects, or a civilization defining collaboration? This could be for any reason – either required to continue humanity or to explore beyond Earth
Do any books come to mind for this theme? Upvote them or add them to the prompt to help others find them.
Most Read Books for March 2025
This months books have a similar fun flair this time around:
- All Systems Red By Martha Wells (#1 of 7 in The Murderbot Diaries)
- Sunrise on the Reaping By Suzanne Collins (#0.5 of 3 in The Hunger Games)
- Dungeon Crawler Carl By Matt Dinniman (#1 of 7 in Dungeon Crawler Carl)
- Artificial Condition By Martha Wells (#2 of 7 in The Murderbot Diaries)
- Project Hail Mary By Andy Weir
Martha Wells takes spots #1 and #4 this month with the first books from The Murderbot Diaries series. At 90 and 144 pages, these are short, but satisfying and hilarious books. Also in May, Apple TV+ released the first few episodes of the Murderbot TV Series staring Alexander Skarsgård (aka Eric from True Blood).
If you need a break from the serious, many of the trending books on Hardcover are lighthearted reads. Project Hail Mary and the entire Dungeon Crawler Carl series had me laughing out loud (I’m only in book 4 – no spoilers! 🙈).
Most Saved Books to be Released in June 2025
- Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil By V.E. Schwab (113 saves)
- The Primal of Blood and Bone By Jennifer L. Armentrout (84 saves) (#6 of 9 in Blood and Ash)
- Atmosphere: A Love Story By Taylor Jenkins Reid (75 saves)
- Don’t Let Him In By Lisa Jewell (41 saves)
- The Listeners By Maggie Stiefvater (35 saves)
A number of popular authors on Hardcover have releases this month. V.E. Schwabs latest work gives me chills with just the teaser:
A new genre-defying novel about immortality and hunger.
The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue is one of my all-time favorites, and this one looks like it could hit a similar theme.
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.
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We appreciate you reading this and hope you have an amazing month. Talk to you soon. ♥️
Adam & the Hardcover Team