Hardcover

Goodreads has been coasting for over a decade. Amazon bought it years ago and has treated it like a dormant asset ever since: the same five-star ratings with no half-steps, the same clumsy shelves, the same recommendation engine that seems to have been trained on a warehouse manifest. Readers noticed. StoryGraph carved out a following by offering mood-based discovery and a Goodreads import. Now Hardcover, from the small independent outfit Hardcover LLC, is making a more direct pitch: keep everything you liked about Goodreads, strip out the ads and corporate ownership, and rebuild the parts that were never good.

The product runs on iOS, Android and the web, and it describes itself as a “book brain.” That’s marketing shorthand for a fairly conventional loop. You log what you want to read, what you’re reading and what you’ve finished. You organize with custom lists and tags. You track progress by page count or percentage. You rate in half-star increments and write reviews with granular control over who can see them. Wrapped around that core is a social graph for following other readers, a recommendation engine that assigns every book a 0 to 100 percent match score, and, for the power-user crowd, data export and a public API.

The business model is the interesting part. There are no ads and no affiliate-driven “buy on Amazon” nudges. Instead, the core app is free and a Supporter subscription unlocks extra features and funds development. It’s the Patreon model applied to a consumer app, and it puts the developers’ incentives in the right place: they get paid when readers find the product worth paying for, not when a publisher buys placement.

Reception so far is mixed-to-positive. The store rating sits at 4.2 out of 5 from 61 ratings. That’s a small number, which tells you two things at once. Hardcover has a real, engaged community that is still tiny compared to Goodreads’ vast audience, and the app is early enough that its rough edges are still fully exposed.

• Match-score recommendations: Every book gets a 0 to 100 percent likelihood-to-enjoy score derived from your own reading history, not from paid placement. It’s the single feature that most clearly separates Hardcover from Goodreads.
• Half-star ratings and private-by-choice reviews: Ratings support half-step increments, and you control who sees your profile, activity and reviews. Goodreads still can’t do the first and barely does the second.
• Lists, tags and progress tracking: Custom lists and free-form tags replace the rigid shelf system. Progress can be logged by pages or percentage, which matters if you split time between print, Kindle and audio.
• A social layer that’s actually social: Follow readers, browse their shelves, see what they’re queuing up next, and compare stats and yearly reading goals. The community is small enough that comments get replies.
• Community-editable catalog with fast entry: Add books by ISBN or search. Metadata errors can be fixed by users rather than waiting on a support ticket that never gets answered.
• Public API and data export: Your data is yours. This is a rare and meaningful commitment in a category where lock-in is the default strategy.
• Supporter tier: A paid subscription for extra features, in place of ads.

The Tracking Loop

Book-tracking apps live or die on friction. If logging a finished book takes more than a few taps, people stop doing it, and a tracking app with a half-updated library is worthless. Hardcover gets the fundamentals right. Search is strong, ISBN entry is quick, and the three-state model of want-to-read, reading and read maps to how people actually think about their queue. Layering custom lists and tags on top of those states is the correct architecture. Goodreads’ “exclusive shelves” always forced you to choose between organization and status. Hardcover lets a book be “currently reading,” tagged “book club,” and sitting on a “2026 backlog” list simultaneously without any of those fighting each other.

Progress tracking by pages or percentage is a small thing that reveals thoughtful product design. Anyone who reads across formats knows the pain of trying to reconcile a Kindle location with a paperback page number. Percentage is the lingua franca, and Hardcover speaks it natively.

Where the loop breaks down is speed. The app’s design asks for quick capture, but responsiveness is its weak point, with lag around logging and slow loading baked into the experience. That’s a serious flaw in a tracking product, because the entire value proposition is capturing a moment before you forget about it. The thread runs through every criticism of Hardcover: the design is right and the execution is slow.

Recommendations That Show Their Work

The match-score engine is Hardcover’s best idea. Goodreads’ recommendations have always felt like a black box that occasionally opens to reveal a sponsored title. Hardcover instead scores each book against your history and puts the number on the page. A 92 percent match and a 41 percent match communicate very different things at a glance, and because the score comes from your own data rather than an ad budget, you can learn to trust it.

Whether the algorithm is any good is a separate question, and the honest answer is that it depends on how much you’ve logged. Cold-start is the eternal problem for collaborative filtering, and an app with a small user base has less signal to work with than a platform with an enormous ratings database. Hardcover partially mitigates this by importing your Goodreads history, but expect the scores to feel generic until you’ve logged a real backlog. The upside is that the engine has room to improve as it learns, which Goodreads never did.

The Social Layer

Hardcover’s community is small, and the app turns that into a feature rather than a liability. Following someone means seeing their shelves, their queue and their yearly goal progress, and the activity feed is uncluttered enough that individual reviews get seen. Conversations actually happen here, which is not something anyone says about Goodreads anymore.

The comparison tools, stats and reading-goal tracking are competent rather than groundbreaking. They do the job. What Hardcover lacks is any of the deeper social scaffolding that StoryGraph has built around buddy reads and challenges, and it has nothing resembling Goodreads’ groups. If your reading life is organized around a book club, Hardcover is still a personal tracker with a follow button.

The Catalog Problem

A community-editable catalog is the right long-term bet. It’s how Wikipedia beat Britannica and how MusicBrainz outlasted every commercial metadata vendor. In the short term, it means gaps. Hardcover’s catalog is thinner than Goodreads or StoryGraph, with non-English editions the most obvious casualty. Wrong and missing covers are a recurring complaint. For an English-language reader of mainstream fiction, this will rarely bite. For a polyglot or a reader of small-press and translated work, it will bite constantly, and every time it does, you’re being asked to fix it yourself.

The Supporter Question

The subscription model is admirable. The execution has a wrinkle: meaningful functionality appears to be gated behind the paid tier, and the app doesn’t always make the boundary clear. A feature called Airlist draws particular confusion. When a feature’s name doesn’t explain what it does and the onboarding doesn’t either, that’s a design debt, not a user problem. Hardcover needs to be more precise about what free users get and why the paid tier is worth it, because the current ambiguity risks resentment from the people who would otherwise be its best advocates.

Visually, Hardcover is exactly what a modern app should look like: clean typography, generous white space, cover-forward layouts and none of the visual clutter that makes Goodreads feel like a 2009 forum. The half-star widget is crisp. Lists and tags render cleanly. It’s a modern interface and it makes the incumbent look ancient by comparison.

Performance is where the praise stops. The design carries slow loading, occasional crashes, login problems, and lag when logging books as known weak points. Those are not edge cases. They hit the core loop. A tracking app that stutters when you try to mark a book finished is failing at the one thing it exists to do. The profile of these problems is consistent with a web-first product brought to mobile without the native-level optimization a phone demands. Hardcover LLC ships steady updates and is transparent about its roadmap, which earns real goodwill, but goodwill has a shelf life. The team needs to treat responsiveness as a feature and prioritize it above the next new capability.

Cover metadata errors compound the visual problem. A cover-forward design lives on its covers, and when shelves fill with placeholders or the wrong editions, the polish evaporates.

On iOS, Hardcover feels the most settled. Touch targets are sized properly, the rating control is built for a finger, and progress entry is designed to work one-handed. Adding a book by ISBN or search is built for the bookstore use case, which is the scenario that matters most on a phone: you’re standing in an aisle, you want to remember this book, and you need it logged on the spot.

On Android, the experience is rougher, and the design suggests the Android build receives less optimization attention than iOS. Login issues and crashes are more associated with the Android build. Android’s wider hardware spread is the usual culprit, and a small team can’t optimize for every mid-range device, but the gap is real and Android users should expect more friction.

Both mobile apps share a lineage with the web app, and that shows in the good and the bad. Your data syncs between phone and desktop, and the web version is the better fit for heavy list management, bulk edits and catalog corrections. Use the phone to capture and the browser to curate.

Hardcover has the right ideas and the right incentives. Match scores, half-stars, real privacy controls, a community-owned catalog and a public API are the features Goodreads should have shipped years ago, and the ad-free Supporter model means the developers answer to readers rather than advertisers. That combination makes it a credible independent book tracker on mobile.

It is not yet a dependable one. Performance problems land squarely on the tracking loop, the catalog needs more community elbow grease, and the paid-tier boundary needs to be explained rather than discovered. If you’re leaving Goodreads and you read mostly in English, it’s a reasonable switch if you can accept some friction; the trajectory is promising and the team is shipping. If you need a tracker that never stutters, give Hardcover a few more releases and check back.