Hardcover Roadmap

Hey hey! Here are the major projects that are planned for Hardcover in the next 6 months. These don’t include everything we’ll work on – only the major blocks. We’ll always try to sneak in fixes, improvements and the occasional “for fun” projects between these.

Front-End Migration

Target: December 2024

Technically, we’re moving much of the codebase from Next.js to Ruby on Rails with Inertia.js. Our backend was already in Rails, and our front-end will continue to be in React.js. This change mostly changes how pages are served to switch from Next.js to Rails.

It’s an entire site shift, and a major update that’ll take is about two months of total work. Most of this update won’t change the experience you feel as a reader (except to make it faster, more responsive, and with fewer bugs), but there are a few features we’re dropping into this release:

• Advanced Goals – Create goals by page count, audio hours, book type (book, graphic novel, etc), author demographics (gender, BIPOC?, LGBTQIA+?).
• More Letterlists – Whenever we’re showing a list of books (series, characters, etc), it’ll use the same listing format that allows sorting and changing the view (and later filtering! see below).
• Custom Profile & List Headers – Currently these images are based on the content of the list. Supporters will be able to change these or upload their own.
• New and Edit pages for Characters and Publishers for Librarians
• New Stats Page – I cannot wait for this! You can see some demos of this in our recent episodes of Hardcover Live. Ste’s been killing it on these.
• API Changes – These are still in progress, but once we have a plan, we’ll be sending out an email to everyone to let them know the changes. This will make it easier to know who’s using the API so in the future we can target those contacts to only people actively using it.

The Hardcover 2024 Year in Books

Target: January 1, 2025

In 2023 we created The Hardcover 2023 Year in Books, a time capsule of what was most popular that year.

We’re doing that again this year, with a few tweaks and changes! For one, we’re not planning on using AI for everything. We’re reaching out to artists and finding fan art created by avid readers who love these books.

We’ll still feature what was popular, some themes from the year, and a bunch of other interesting things we’ve observed from another year in books.

New Dashboard

Target: January 2025

This will be the main experience you see when you open the app, or login. We’re working on a customizable dashboard where you can add the widgets that are most useful for you.

Here are a few examples of widgets we’re creating for the dashboard:

• Quickly update your Currently Reading books
• See what your friends are reading, or have recently read
• Check your progress towards your goals
• Find which books are trending on Hardcover
• Get a list of which books are coming soon by your favorite authors

And many more.

The stats page is the first step towards the new Dashboard. In fact, we’re adding a way to “add to dashboard” stats you want to see everyday when you log in.

Open Source Hardcover

Target: February 2025

We’ve been talking about this for a while, but in order to bring this across the finish line we’ll need to make it a priority. Preparing our codebase to be run locally without all the same permissions that we have takes some planning. For example, if someone runs Hardcover locally, they won’t have an entire database of book data, or a CDN of images. We need to make changes to allow anyone to import their library from production and use Hardcover locally. That’s the goal.

Along with this, we want to figure out how to work with the open source community to review contributions, how to handle language translations, and so much more. Open sourcing is the app is the start of working together with the community – not the end of it.

Author Pages

Target: Q1 – Q2 2025

We’ve started talking to authors to better understand how they could use Hardcover. Right now we’re a place for readers. As more readers join, more authors want to connect with those readers. That could be connecting with their audience or introducing their work to new readers.

We’re still figuring out what this will look like, but we’re excited to explore it more in the new year.