It is possible to have a play button, to save a reading session, with reading time, number of pages read, leading to a statistic of pages read per hour, among others.

Maybe in the Settings > Account Settings page along with the Preferred Reading Format option.

I’d like to use Hardcover as my main place to track everything I read, including webnovels and light novels. Right now those formats don’t fit the app very well: they’re usually long, released chapter‑by‑chapter online, and often have both web and print versions of the same story.

A few concrete changes would help a lot:

Add formats for webnovels and light novels.
Being able to tag something as a “Webnovel” or “Light novel” (not just “Book”) would make shelves and stats clearer. For example, I could see only webnovels on a list, or see how much of my reading is print vs web.

Let us track progress by chapter for serials.
Many webnovels reach hundreds or thousands of chapters and are updated one chapter at a time. It would be very useful to set progress by chapter number (current chapter / chapters read, with an optional total) instead of only volumes or a simple finished/not finished.

Capture where the story lives online.
Web fiction is usually tied to a platform like Webnovel, RoyalRoad, ScribbleHub, Kakuyomu, Narou, etc. Fields for “source/platform” and a main URL would help with attribution and make it easier to build lists like “RoyalRoad series I follow” or “Webnovel titles I’m reading.”

Connect the web and print versions of the same story.
A lot of series start as webnovels and later get light‑novel editions. If those could be linked as different versions of the same work, it would be possible to track webnovel progress in chapters and light‑novel progress in volumes without splitting up stats or shelves.

I’m currently trying to build a curated list for a specific literary award, but I noticed there's no option to add individual notes or comments to books once they are added to a list.

For list curation, having a small notes/comment field for each book would be incredibly helpful. For example, it would allow users to specify why a book is in that list, or note specific details like "Winner (year)" or "Nominee (year)".

This would make custom lists much more informative and useful for the community.

Many books Namedrop other books within their books they referenced in research, or even for pop-culture relevance. It should be possible to link these references as directly being mentioned within the book you just read.

So for example, in Octavia E. Butler’s “A Few Rules for Predicting the Future”, she references “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich” as having been an inspiration for her works in science fiction.

In John Fugelsang’s Separation of Church & Hate, he references “A People’s History of Christianity”.

It doesn’t even have to be research related, it could be as obscure as being a book mentioned within a fictional story that a character refers to as having read.

This would be ideal to show in a row before other recommendations once you’ve read the book, allowing you to continue to explore the subject area or the author’s inspiration they recommended within their text, but is otherwise unavailable to find without re-reading the part in which they made the reference.

The NLS produces and provides access to audiobooks for people who cannot read standard print. Many NLS copies of audiobooks are recorded by different narrators from those in the Audible or retail audiobook edition, which makes for an opportunity to add them as book editions to catalog the differing narrators.

Based on these sample entry from the NLS Catalog, these titles have NLS Book Numbers as well as LCCN numbers assigned which differentiate them from other editions, while also sometimes including the ISBN from the original text copy from which the recording was read.

The Martian by Andy Weir
Narrated by J.P. Linton
Public Facing Record:
https://lccn.loc.gov/2014991015
Gated Link for Verified Users:
http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.nls/db.78389
NLS Book Number: DB 78389
LCCN: 2014991015

TimeRiders by Alex Scarrow
Narrated by Dave Corey
Public Facing Record:
https://lccn.loc.gov/2011990544
Gated Link for Verified Users:
http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.nls/db.72804
NLS Book Number: DB 72804
LCCN: 2011990544

One of my favorite Kindle features is X-Ray, which lets you quickly look up characters, places, organizations, and important terms while reading without worrying about spoilers.

Hardcover already has a Characters page for books, which feels like a great foundation for something similar.

Feature Idea:

Expand the existing character system into a community-maintained Book X-Ray.

For each entry (character, location, organization, event, etc.), contributors could add:

Short spoiler-free description
Alternative names or aliases
Relationships with other characters
First appearance (chapter or percentage, when available)
Optional spoiler-tagged information
Links to other related entries

This would make Hardcover a valuable companion while reading, not just after finishing a book.

It would be great if Hardcover exposed an API endpoint for its community-maintained character data.

There is already a Hardcover sync plugin for KOReader, and an endpoint like /books/{id}/characters (or a more general /books/{id}/xray) would allow plugins to provide a Kindle-style X-Ray experience directly inside the reading interface.

Since the data would be maintained by the Hardcover community, improvements would automatically benefit every app and plugin that integrates with it.

There doesn't seem to be a way to extract a url or otherwise share a link to any HC asset from the app.

Sometimes I want to link someone to a book or elsewhere on the site and have to switch to web to do it.

OAuth could be implemented for Hardcover to give users the option to login with google. Also, when logging in on a 3rd party app, they can use OAuth instead of being directed to use their Bearer token.

Make not only book lists but author lists and series list and another stuff like that.

Currently the goals page only has a progress bar telling you how many books you have read meeting the goal. However, for those of us with qualifiers for what counts towards the goal, it can be a bit confusing to figure out what is counting towards the goal or not.

Specifically, I only want to count actual books (not novellas etc), but it is unclear if somethings are erroneously counting as books

I think it would be good to be able to choose to only see unreleased books in the series tracker if they already have an entry for your preferred format. I only listen to audiobooks so seeing that there’s an upcoming book for one of my series and then realizing there’s no release date for the audio version it’s useless to me. I’d rather not know that it’s coming out until there is an audiobook release date.

Can you add import feature from the libib app? (Books I own)

The factor that keeps me from fully switching from StoryGraph is the duplicates in the library. If there’s a way of creating a unified database of books so new imports don’t create duplicate entries, that’d be amazing.

It would be nice for me to count stopped books as part of my reading goals and include the read pages to the general statistics, i.e. if I've read 60% of the pages, only thay much to be added ^^"

sometimes ebooks have different page counts based on country and etc, it would be nice to allow readers to input their editions exact page count instead of having to nitpick between the existing editions, and maybe input the standtart page count as an avg between editions of the same format/language.

i only say this bc i like to track my page count as a goal, and sometimes is hard to find the specific edition i read.

Would love options that aren't just for all, but instead for like 5 entries

It would be nice to have an additional privacy option between 'public' and 'followers-only', where only logged-in Hardcover users can see our profiles.

My most common usage pattern is: browse the site (looking for books, reading others' profiles, etc) then wanting to go back to my own list of books (https://hardcover.app/$USER/books) but there's no quick way to do that. Seems like a very easy thing to add.

making sure the read/chosen edition show up first on a book page and changing the book info page to match the edition you choose, bc the display cover on your reading calendar is the default cover and not the one of the edition you are reading. also for lists! specially if you are writing lists in other languages/different titles.

I would like to be able to share whatever book i'm reading (or just end reading) on stories in instagram the same way I can share a movie from letterboxd. Just the cover, author and book name in an image.

I haven't saw this feature in GR or any similar app, so there's a serious chance to have an impact being the first book dedicated app to be in those spaces.
This feature would also help to spread the app to a broader and mainstream audience, given the fact that instagram is the SSNN to share stuff by default this could bring new users, eyes, collaborators and even possible donors.
(attached a SS of how looks when you share a movie from letterboxd)

It would be nice can follow an Editorial (and maybe a Writter), and get a feed with the published books of this Editorial

I think I have seen Authors previously requested with no implementation but:
An option to be able to set your Read/Want To Read sections to be organised into if their are part of a series/by Author.

I find it strange that if I open my "Read" or "Want To Read" list, it's just a jumbled mess (see picture) based on when I added it as opposed to being more neatly organised in Series Order/Author for a cleaner view. Having random parts of series spread out across the page makes very little sense to me, it would make more sense to go here is #1-#X of one series, then move onto another series.

Let us choose the privacy default value instead of it always being "Public". Also, maybe setting privacy at a list or status level would be better than at an action or book level?