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Users can create book clubs on The StoryGraph
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May 14, 2021
We haven't yet fleshed out what the feature set will be, and it'll evolve over time, but we reckon it'll include some mechanisms for selecting books, setting a meeting, seeing a history of books the group has read and what everyone thought, and more!
Please feel free to share any ideas that you have.
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Moving existing/past buddy reads and reading challenges into a new book club would be a very helpful feature.
This might be an outlier use case that does not work for design, but I thought I would mention it just in case: I run a Silent Book Club where our group gets together and reads their own books. Sometimes this results in buddy reads between some members, but more often we are reading our own books. It might be cool to have the option to allow users to add their books to the group page so that we can see stats on everyone's aggregate reading in the group page. That way we could also do buddy reads from the group page for those that want to read books concurrently. :D
malorie Girl, tell me more about your Silent Book Club! I'm trying to start an in-person book club just like yours in my area, and your group sounds fun!
mbartman21 Nice! You definitely should! We are just getting started, but here is the instagram page with our info and links in bio in case it gives you an idea of where to start! https://www.instagram.com/baberead_boise/
malorie Don't think this will fit for the first version of this, but I love silent book clubs!
Love this idea and can't wait to see it implemented someday! I currently run a book club through Discord, but I'd love to have a way to collate and organize everything without using manual spreadsheets/docs.
I'd love to know if there is an update on how this feature is progressing. My org is starting a public bookclub and I'd love to set up an online bookclub for people who can't attend in-person. I'd prefer to set it up on StoryGraph!
mnmtbookworm It's on the roadmap for this year but I can't give any promises as to when!
I would love to see some features that would help with scheduling a meeting. Similar to how you vote on books, my book club also “votes” on what day we should have the meeting by listing what days they’re available and what top 2-3 days they prefer. If this was built in to the storygraphs book club feature it would be perfect!
I just was introduced to Fable, not for me, but I would love a Buddy Read/Book Club version within StoryGraph.
kmsourada Have you tried out our buddy reads yet?
Nadia Yes. But I like what Fable is doing by allowing hundreds of readers a place to 'gather' insights/comments/thoughts around a book. No invite needed just join in.
This would be awesome to have as a feature. I really enjoy the Buddy Reads feature, but I find it super difficult to find people who will even join the Buddy Read, let alone participate.
I think the people who join one of the book clubs would be way more likely to actually participate vs just sending a Buddy Read invite to someone who has the book on their tbr list!
kylethewild We'll also have a way for people to post open buddy reads to the app so interested parties can opt in!
Nadia oh that would be a great way of doing it! That would definitely make my Buddy reads more successful I think
This would be a lot of fun!
In addition to what you have there:
I love this idea and think it would be so powerful! It'd be great if we could also share resources, like discussion questions, interviews with the author etc. And have the same functionality as buddy reads to avoid spoilers.
The option to have mod posts/content that is displayed more prominently, for club rules, announcements etc. would be awesome.
A form of shared tags for the group would be nice. One of my book clubs tags books by genre or trope, so people can find what they're in the mood for. Another club tags books that haven't been read by the group yet, but that fit the topics we read.
The option to configure how many votes everybody gets in a poll.
If there will be a built-in feature for finding a meeting time, it would be great if we could configure our timezone in our profile, so everybody can see the suggested date/time for a meeting in their local timezone.
One of the more important use cases is asking for book recommendations. So it would be great if we had an easy way to add book links to a post, and maybe we can even have a list of all books mentioned in a thread, so when somebody searches for "generation ship scifi stories with multive POVs" six months later, they can see what books were recommended without scrolling through the whole conversation.
I guess that means there would also be a search function in book clubs.
In the time book clubs that I oversee, we use ranked-choice voting for book selection. The first step in the process is for everyone to nominate a book. Then I send out a survey where everyone ranks the books in order of preference. I usually use a vote calculator like this to do the final vote counting:
https://paul-lockett.co.uk/av.html
I really enjoy the ranked-choice voting as it reduces the chance of a plurality in traditional voting (i.e. the winning book is only picked by a few people). Also, I prefer it over taking turns as well where feelings can get hurt.
On another note, I love the buddy reads feature!
A rich quote feature in conversations would be nice. Sometimes, when talking about a book, conversations split up into different directions. Being able to quote whole posts, or specific parts of posts, would really help to keep things clear.
When creating a new book club, a "similar clubs that already exist" space directly on the create page, maybe based on the title. Just so that there won't be 10 different clubs dedicated to basically the same topic.
This would rock. My bookclub uses Facebook and it would be so great to switch over to here for this.
This sounds like it would be a really exciting feature. As another poster has suggested, for me, having the possibility of setting them to open/private/invite-only etc. would be extra useful.
In terms of the 'meeting' aspect, since this is a virtual space, people read at different speeds, and timezones are a thing, I think I'd probably personally find more use out of something that adapted the fluidity of the current buddyread format to larger groupings - allowing sort of simultaneous discussion/progress rather than a set meeting times.
But as the long way meetings worked was flexible I could see myself potentially getting a lot of use out of a virtual bookclub space.
Am I reading it right in that only the host needs to be a plus member? It would make it much less useful if everyone needed plus .
Yes, only the host will need a membership!
Hoping these can have subgroup buddy reads to opt into (since not everyone in the book club reads every book), and that this can be a version of all the buddy reads features but for a much larger group!
Yes, we see book clubs as having buddy reads at its core (though a book club will not be forced to set up a buddy read for each book/meeting), with a bunch of extra features around it and no limit/a very generous limit on number of participants!
Hooray, I can't wait!! Thank you!
Another idea from my book club - would be great to be able to see "Club stats" - so in addition to the Goal I've already mentioned, the same genre, length etc stats you get as an individual, but for the whole book club (could be anything a book club member read, or could be just books that were selected as book club reads, or an option to set it either way - in my book club, we'd probably prefer the 'everything read' option).
Additionally, perhaps some kind of book club league table & pie chart where you can see who has read the most books in a given time period/the most book club books? We've been doing this manually for the month of December in our club and lots of people find it really fun!
I love the idea of club specific stats. I think it would help my book club expand our reading horizons. We tend to stay with the same types of books even with the best of intentions to broaden our reading. I think stats would help us during selection time.
Someone in my book club just mentioned the idea of having a "Book Club" communal annual reading goal. So basically just somewhere that shows the sum total books read by all members of that book club this year i.e. adds together each person's read that year. So the club can set a goal to read e.g. 500 books this year.
Thought this was a fun idea! I guess maybe you could have a checkbox option to not count duplicates as well, in case the club wants to read X many unique books between them?
I love the subpoint of having unique book goals.
The ability to vote on group reads would be great for book clubs. Also the ability to set them to either public or private/invite only.
This is very specific and would probably be really difficult to code, but it would be really cool if comments on a book could be page or percentage locked to prevent spoilers. So like someone makes a comment on a book club book that contains a spoiler for half way through the book (which they would have to mark) and it only shows up (or shows up without a spoiler warning) if the person viewing has also read to that point in the book. Maybe just something with comments that show how far the commenter is in the book and they can be sorted that way so folks can see comments without spoilers?
kestrellady This is the way things are currently set up in the Buddy Reads feature, I have to assume they will carry it over to book clubs!
I'd love to see a feature that is similar to Challenges where the club 'owner' (or other members?) can maintain an ordered list of what books the group has read together (I've mentioned wanting ordered lists in a different ticket but feel like it would be particularly useful in this context :) ). I had my own ordered "label" in GR before I made the switch, but what was really frustrating was that I HAD to add those books to my TBR in order to add the label to them and maintain the list. One of my favorite features about StoryGraph is the ability to add things to Challenges and not necessarily also add them to my TBR, because having my TBR be too long and uncategorized is overwhelming to me. Having the ability to maintain a list of all of my book club's back catalog, in order, in one easy-to-find location would be really nice, both for me and for current or future members of the club.
I also would love a way to have some kind of commenting conversation on individual books. I'm trying to work my way through all my unread book club books right now, and I'd love to have an easy way to re-open conversation with people about the books that I'm now reading, or reading other people's thoughts that they posted at the time. Perhaps also an easy way to view an aggregate of club member's reviews of books? One of the social features from GR that I do miss is being able to comment on reviews in general, so having some kind of conversation functionality would be really awesome!