Shelves, because forty series in one list is a hostage situation

Nobody starts with forty series. You start with four. Four is beautiful. Four fits on a screen. You open the app, you see everything, you feel like a person with their life together.

Then it's forty, and opening the app feels like opening a closet you've been throwing things into since March.

Make shelves. Name them whatever you want.

A group is a shelf you define. Give it a name, give it an emoji, drag things into an order that makes sense to you and nobody else. That's the entire feature.

What people actually build, based on looking at anonymised group names and being charmed:

• By genre. 📚 LitRPG, 🐉 Epic fantasy, 🚀 Space opera. The obvious one, and it works.
• By mood. "Brain off," "Actually good," "For flights." This is the real way people file books.
• By status. "Caught up," "Behind," "Abandoned but hopeful." That last one is doing a lot of emotional work.
• By who recommended it. "Marta's fault." A surprising number of these exist and I love every one.
• By shared reading. A group for a book club, or the series you and your brother both read.

Nobody organizes their books the way a database would. Groups let you organize them the way you actually think.

Ordering is manual, and that's on purpose

Groups sit in the order you put them, not alphabetical, not by date added, not by some engagement score.

Because the thing you're most excited about is rarely the thing starting with A. The whole point of a shelf is that the good stuff goes at eye level. An algorithm cannot know your eye level. You can.

Each group is its own page

Groups aren't just filters on the dashboard. Each one gets a real page — what's in it, what's next in each series, what just came out.

Which means you can open "Brain off" on a Friday night and see six options that are all correct, instead of scrolling past your serious literary ambitions to get there.

And because they're pages, they're shareable. Send someone your whole 🐉 shelf without handing over your entire library — the same sharing system works at group level. Book clubs use this. So do people trying to convert a friend to a genre, which is honestly the noblest use of software I can think of.

Small feature, disproportionate effect

This is the least technically interesting thing in the app. It's a join table and a drag handle. I could describe the schema in one sentence.

It's also the feature that determines whether people with big libraries stick around, because an unusable list gets abandoned no matter how good the tracking underneath it is. Turns out the hard part of a library isn't collecting. It's finding.