Why Wir Buchverliebten exists

Notes arrive when you are at the same place

What somebody writes about chapter twelve only appears once you have reached chapter twelve yourself. Before that it does not exist for you; afterwards it sits exactly where it was meant to.

The difference to a group chat is who decides the order. There it is the clock. Here it is the book.

The useful part follows from that. Fast readers keep writing without giving anything away. Slow readers miss nothing, they get the same thing later. A group no longer has to agree on a shared pace.

The evening a group falls apart

The occasion is an evening every reading group knows. Someone has not got through the section, does not say so, and stays quiet all evening. Next time they do not come, and nobody asks, because nobody knows what it was.

Being behind is not the problem. The problem is that it becomes uncomfortable as soon as it is visible. The usual remedies, a reading deadline, separate discussion threads, hidden text you tap to reveal, all demand attention from exactly the person who has least of it right now.

Book clubs do not end because someone is behind. They end in the silence about it. Protection from spoilers is therefore not a request made of the group, but a property of the application.

What running this costs

There is no advertising, no subscription and no payment button, and that is not generosity but a consequence of how it is built. Books never sit on our servers; we store only the structure of a book and your own reading position. That little fits inside the free tiers of our providers.

• Servers, database and delivery: within the free tier, so nothing.
• The domain wirbuchverliebten.com: about ten euros a year.
• Apple Developer Program, once there is an app in the store: ninety-nine euros a year.
• From roughly two thousand regularly active people the free database tier is no longer enough, then it is twenty-five dollars a month.

What happens if it ever costs more

The sum works while the project stays small. If it stops working, it will say so here first. The options are then a smaller operation, fewer features, or in the worst case an ending with notice and with a way to take your own data with you.

Advertising, subscriptions and selling data are not among the options, for the same reason the application exists: it knows who is where in which book. That is precisely the thing that ought to be protected.

What Wir Buchverliebten is not

A good share of the decisions here are decisions against something. They stand together because they explain why things you might expect are missing.

• Not a bookshop. No buy button, no affiliate links to retailers.
• Not a review site. This is about the conversation around a book, not a ranking.
• Not a social feed. Nothing loads as you scroll, nothing keeps running on its own.
• Not a library of other people files. Books are never uploaded.
• No game mechanics. No streaks, no badges, no leaderboards.
• No progress display. Reading position governs which notes you see and is never shown as a number.

Who builds this, and where the project stands

This is built by one person: Julien, in Mödling near Vienna. No company, no team, no investor and nobody who needs growth to add up. That is why the list above is allowed to be so long.

Being honest about where things stand includes what is not there yet: not a single book club is reading with it. The first one has to be founded, probably in Vienna, because that is the nearest city where a meeting can happen.

Questions, criticism and corrections go to post@wirbuchverliebten.com

The same person who built the rest answers.