I love tracking stuff, organizing things, recording accomplishments of various sorts as a way to, somehow, make them more persistent. That goes for my reading too. Way back I abandoned Goodreads because it felt outdated, cluttered, and simply bad. Literal is the opposite of Goodreads!
My reading definitely leveled up after discovering Literal - quick, clean, beautiful and easy to use. And it does exactly what I want it to - keep track of my reading, having shelves of what I want to read, and help me discover books that inspire me to read even more.
Big plus that they've got a real nice open AI, making it possible to roll your own widgets, browser extensions and what not.
I joined the 2021 beta after looking for a Goodreads alternative. I mainly use this for keeping track of my reading and they have a lightweight embed widget for displaying books from your lists on a website. In early 2023 they opened up the CMS to "Librarians", select community members who want to improve the book metadata in the database. The UI is good, but I've noticed a lot of products in this category are starting to look similar. The community is good, but many of the readers I want to follow are using different apps, I find myself wishing there was a way I can subscribe to people on other platforms through something like RSS.
I love the minimalist UI (from a browser) and it's very simple to use! Only reason why I didn't give this 5 stars is that there's discrepancies with the language (I was adding a book that I finished, but upon save the book title was in a different language) and profile picture (I added a profile picture a day after I created my account but I'm still seeing the default profile picture in some places). It also wasn't very clear to me how to add more books that I'm reading from my profile/the home page.
I've been using Literal as my main books tracker for about a year, and it's been amazing. An excellent Goodreads replacement, I use it weekly to ensure I track my book reading, keep up with friends reading, capture good quotes, etc. The feature set keeps growing and my shelves are always cleanly organized. Love the product and the team!
It's very smooth to use compared to Goodreads. However, it's unclear how it's helping us discover new books to read - the recommendation isn't as robust and when asked to recommend, it takes you to one specific book and there is no way to ask for more.
