In the Books > Read [Table] listing add a column to indicate whether I have reviewed a book or not. This could simply be an icon for when a review entry is present on the book, or an icon prompting me to write a review when one isn't present.
Here is a janky illustration of what I mean.
It would be really nice if we could selfhost hardcover. Maybe even allow for a distributed system of instances via ActivityPub.
It would be nice if a user could add its favourite genres and display them on the profile page. Maybe those could be used for recommendations, too…
Because publisher names change over time, and with mergers but often only slightly it would be great to be able to add active years to publishers-even just as a description, not an true date field- to help differentiate editions, especially when older books have a publisher that no longer exists.
At the moment, I can mark an e-book edition as 'owned'; but (unfortunately for me, lol) there's several places I could own it, all mutually exclusive.
At least one dimension of this is at least partially encoded in the 'editions' interface (is it physically on my shelves in my house, or is it in my eReader?); but there's an orthogonal dimension in both cases - for me, that's "owned on iBooks" (for my most ancient books), "owned on Amazon" (for the majority of my books), or "owned on Kobo Store" (nowadays.)
I imagine the same feature (sub-lists for the 'owned' feature) could be mapped to physical books as well - where is my book, in my basement storage, up on the shelf in my home, at my parent's place ... and so on.
(This isn't at all high priority for me, but I thought it was worth pointing out as an enrichment of the data-model that would have at least some value for me, personally.)
We can follow authors but it would be awesome to be able to write private notes and tags on authors like we can do on books. For example, there are many romance authors - some are great at writing spice, others comedy, others sweet hallmark romance. If we could write notes and tags, when we are ready to read a book we could also search for books by authors who match the reading vibe we are feeling.
I would love the ability too quickly add my entire physical library to Hardcover. However the process of scanning each book then clicking lists then clicking owned is tedious when you think about it for hundreds of books. Having the option set default fields for a series of scans would be amazing. For example, set "want to read" and "owed' then scan the isbn of 50 books in a row. Click save and all 50 entries get created.
I've toyed with CSV and looked at the api but those get tedious with the amount of additional data lookups that have to occur. Having a clean experience within hardcover would be amazing.
Concerns I have regarding Discord:
age verification
security breaches in the past (e.g. ID photos of 70,000 users may have been leaked)
privacy concerns (e.g. EFF criticizing Discord's privacy; see see Elliott Cable's reply below for more)
access (see Elliott Cable's reply below)
...
Maybe hardcover could switch to matrix (distributed, selfhosted, ...), though the platform to switch to is still something worth discussing.
It should be mentioned in policies.
Any plans to change it?
Would it be difficult to implement a sort by series? For books I want to read or have finished reading instead of showing sort by author or alphabetical, just sort and group all books in series together. Like name of series a-z but have the books in the series grouped together. I haven't found any other book tracking app that does this. And I really like the UI of this app so I would want to keep this app. Thanks
Match other users who have read and rated books similar to my bookshelf and rating. Give a score of how "close" my bookshelf and rating is to the other users, e.g. that my list of books (that I've read) and my rating of them matches 86% to a certain user, and 75% to some other user and so on. Why is this algorthm so hard to develop (I can't understand why Goodreads haven't made this option avaliable years ago).
We can attribute multiple pen names to a single author, but we can't associate a pen name with multiple authors. There are many cases where authors write together under a shared pen name.
Search should show books that you have on your lists first.
So anything you have on a list, want to read, read, dnf, etc. Should show up before general search results.
It would be nice if once you re-read a book to add it to the reading goal of that year.
I've recently imported my library and saw that for my 2025 goal the app doesn't track or count my re-reads. And I think they can also be added to the tally for achieving the reading goal for that year. 😇
With about 450 series in my tracker, it's quite painful right now to manage them through the "All" tab. The biggest pain point for me is not being able to easily ignore series I've already mentally cataloged one way or another. Being able to filter the All tab by a combination of user-based series status, especially Dropped, and additional series-based statuses would probably be sufficient.
Examples of filters I'd find useful:
Separating Dropped into its own tab (and not including it in All/by default) could also be nice.
Then Following could be explicitly about notifications.
It'd be really useful to have a librarian tool that can clone an existing edition, so that you get a new edition with the ISBNs, ASINs and mapping stripped out but all the other data present.
It'd make multi-creator works so much easier to deal with, and GR imports are often missing a lot of that kind of data - it'd be faster to clone and then attach the mappings.
Currently we treat "no one assigned a type yet" and "this book can't be called either fiction or nonfiction" the same way. It's annoying to have Unknown shown on the stats page when it's actually all correctly classified poetry and some essay collections, which are Not Applicable rather than Unknown.
It'd be good to have a forth option in literary type so these can be correctly displayed.
The portrait for thumbnails are normally square, as opposed to the rectangular book covers. On the dashboard at the moment, these are stretched in a way that means the edges are cut off. It would be cool to resize these (I guess to add bars above/below) so they fit within the rectangle and so the whole cover is shown
The Editions of the former states can't be properly marked because these states are omitted in the list of countries. Now this field says "No Data" for these countries. Please add:
• Czechoslovakia
• USSR Soviet Union
• Yugoslavia
• Austria-Hungary
I think, that's an easy correction.
Fix update progress on ios. When I'm entering % complete, pressing 6 enters a 5 into the box.
Allow for the addition/creation of individual work that is part of a single book (ie The Collected Works of so-and-so) and allow tracking of the progress on those individual works. This would be a finer grained accuracy of reading. Ideally the collected works would roll-up to show progress over the entire omnibus.
This should be an option in list to change all its contents in bulk
Users still can see what I added to my "Want to read" list even though I've marked book as private and list to whom I assigned it too. I'm not proud of some books on my WtR list and I'd like to hide them without making my whole account private.
Book on pic related still shows my profile when I log out
I'd like for hardcover to support id routing for all important data routes. (books, series, editions)
Discord discussion: https://discord.com/channels/835558721115389962/970354107397329007/1496148992726269982
TLDR: There's a need for a fixed, unchangeable url