Recent changes to Literal.
Every book page now has a "Similar books" shelf — titles that people who read this one tend to reach for next. There's always a handful to browse, so it's an easy way to line up your next read without leaving the page.
The reading stats on a book page now show a little stack of reader avatars next to each line, and big numbers are shortened — so it reads "1.4k finished" instead of "1399". Easier to take in at a glance.
The highlight composer got a tidy-up: scan a passage with your camera or dictate it out loud instead of typing it all in, and a note field that now matches the quote box. Quicker to capture a passage and move on.
A few small refinements to your signed-in home: "Recommended for you" now uses the same clean book cards as the rest of the sidebar, and your currently-reading covers no longer get their shadows clipped at the edge.
Two long-standing import bugs are gone: a shelf with more than 100 books used to import only the first 100, and running a second import (or re-sync) would silently do nothing. Both fixed — and your custom Goodreads shelves now come in with proper names ("Sci Fi Faves" instead of "sci-fi-faves").
There's a dedicated place to wander now. /explore gathers trending books, hidden gems, quick and long reads, and a wall of genres and moods to browse by — a nicer way to find something to read when you're not looking for anything in particular.
A big foundational upgrade this month: the whole site moved onto the latest versions of our frontend framework (Next.js and React), which sets us up for faster pages and fewer rough edges going forward. Alongside it, more database headroom and a much faster "who's reading this" on popular books.
Every book page got a fresh layout. The cover finally sits where you'd expect, friends' reading status now lives right next to it, and a new "discovery chain" shows how the book traveled through your network — who recommended it, who read it, who's reading it now. Buy links are tidied into a single "Where to find this book" section.
Anyone landing on a book or author page without an account should notice it appears almost immediately now. We're caching at the edge and preloading covers, which together knock real seconds off a cold page view.
The dropdown under your avatar is split into three clear groups now — account, library, settings — instead of one long list. Easier to spot the thing you actually want.
The API docs at /developers got a proper redesign: a sticky table of contents on the side, cleaner endpoint cards, and a "Try it in Apollo Sandbox" button so you can poke at the API without leaving the page.
We're sunsetting the current version of Clubs. Existing clubs still work in the meantime, but we've moved the link out of the main nav and into your avatar menu — and we're building something that's a better fit for actually bringing readers together.
Every book page now lists where to actually get it — independent bookshops first, then the ebook and audiobook stores that pay their authors properly, plus a link to find it at your local library. Where a store pays us a small commission we say so plainly, right under the links; it costs you nothing and it keeps Literal independent. But the point is the shops: buying a book should be able to support a bookseller rather than default to the cheapest warehouse.
Quieter month on the surface, busier underneath: edge caching for anonymous traffic, a typography pass that aligns the static pages (legal, privacy, terms, press, contact) on a shared layout, and a pile of small performance wins.
The logged-out page at literal.club got a refresh — tighter sections, less filler, and a mobile layout that doesn't bunch up at the top anymore.
When you sign in, your home is a little more focused now: a condensed currently-reading row up top, recommendations moved into the sidebar, and the sidebar sticks while you scroll.
We launched /guides — a hub of honest comparisons, migration walkthroughs, country-specific guides for readers in different places, and three free tools (reading speed calculator, time estimator, Goodreads CSV analyzer). Mostly written to be useful, not to chase keywords.
These pages used to live on a separate WordPress site. Now they're served straight from literal.club — same content, faster, and easier to keep up to date.
Literal no longer has an in-app chat feature. It was around for years, but it didn't really fit how people use the site, and the maintenance was pulling time away from things that did.
Book pages now surface highlights that have resonated with other readers, sitting right alongside your own. A nice way to spot which passages tend to land.
When a highlight is shared by multiple readers, every name and avatar now links straight to that reader's profile — go check out who else stopped on the same passage.
A round of stability work behind the curtain — hardened server-side rendering against upstream hangs, automatic database migrations on deploy, and a cleanup of dead config. The site should feel snappier and crash less.
The logged-out homepage used to be fetched from a separate WordPress instance. Now it's part of literal.club itself — faster, and it means we can actually iterate on it without context-switching between two systems.
We finally published official documentation for the Literal API at literal.club/developers — for anyone wanting to build something on top of their own reading data.
For librarians: saving a book with a new cover image used to silently fail in the CMS. It doesn't anymore.
Moved file storage to a faster provider (Cloudflare R2), set up automated backups for assets, MongoDB, and environment variables, and squashed a server-side memory leak that had been quietly bothering page loads.
