catalog news 007: beta launch and latest updates 🚀

Dear book person,

It's been a little while and lots has happened in the life of catalog. In this post I'll go over all the biggest updates.

A new catalog staff member appears!

A big welcome to Mark Braude, our newest addition to catalog's staff. Mark, who writes narrative nonfiction, will be helping out with the author side of catalog. We're feeling so lucky to have someone with his experience and his passion on our team. Mark will also be joining the rotation of writing for catalog news, so look out for an upcoming post from him!

Rundown of new features

Some of the features we've built since our last email update that we're most excited to tell you about:

You can now invite your friends to catalog! We built catalog so we could enjoy books alongside our friends, and while it works as a personal book-tracking app just for yourself, catalog is designed to be more fun to use with friends. If there are book people in your life that you'd love to keep up with, go to "invites" in the main menu to generate invite links for them. You'll need to create a new link per person, but you can create as many as you want, and they never expire.

With general invites now enabled, we're thinking of this as catalog's transition from "closed alpha" to "closed beta."

A new intro tour to show you around. You should be prompted to take the tour automatically, whether you're new to catalog or have been with us from the beginning. If you don't see it or if you accidentally closed it, you can find it by going to "help" in the main menu.

You can change the visibility of your book notes, your shelves, your current status, and whether you are searchable. You can now decide whether your stuff will be visible to everyone (fully public), or only to signed-in catalog members, or only to people you follow, or only to yourself. Review these settings under "settings" in the main menu.

The new explore page is the place to see what's happening in the catalog community. Including staff picks, and the latest notes, conversations, and lists from everyone on catalog.

Your homepage now shows you what your friends are up to. From anywhere in the app, click the "catalog" logo to go to the homepage, where (if you are following anyone) you can see what books your friends last shelved, and your friends' latest statuses, notes, and lists. If you aren't following anyone yet, you can find someone to follow via the explore page, or by inviting a friend!

Recommend a book to a friend. On any book's page, click "recommend to a friend" (it's one of the buttons below the book's cover) to send a rec to anyone who follows you on catalog. The recipient will be notified. You can go to "inbox" in the main menu to see your incoming recs. Coming very soon: for friends who aren't on catalog, you'll be able to send a rec by email, which will include an invite so they can join as well.

Save any list, note, post, or comment for later. If you see a list or something someone said that you want to refer back to later, you can save it with the bookmark icon. Go to "saved" in the main menu to see all your saved items.

New "+" button shortcut in the nav bar. A quick way to look up a book and do something with it (add it to your shelves, add it to a list, or post something about it) without having to go to the book's page.

New overlay menu when you hover over (or tap) a book cover. Speaking of shortcuts, if you see a book in a list, or in the context of someone's note, or pretty much anywhere, you can now shelve it or add it to one of your lists without having to leave the page.

Tons of minor fixes and improvements have also gone out, which you can follow on our changelog.

Upcoming stuff we're excited about

Author pages and more author pages. You may have noticed that when you see an author's name, you can't click on it to learn more about them or see what other books they've written. Our next big initiative is to not only remedy that, but to make these author pages more dynamic, informative, and fun than any we've ever seen before, including not only bios and the author's own books, but the ways each author is connected to other authors and other books, via the public conversations they've had with other book people.

A timeline of your reading history. A little-known feature as it's not super prominent in the app, is that you've always been able to put in start/finish dates when you've read a book (it's under "add note or log" on the book page)—it's just that at the moment, these dates don't show up again anywhere else! Soon we'll resurface your reading history, so that if you've been logging dates all along, or even if you've just been clicking "finished" or "read" on a book, you'll have a place to see your history and what books you've read this year.

Email notifications (and settings). If you forget to check catalog for a while, we'll still let you know if people have interacted with you on catalog, so you won't have to worry about missing out (with the option to disable this, of course).

Plus lots of smaller improvements to make day-to-day things more intuitive and delightful.

As always, you can get in touch by replying to this email, or emailing us at staff@catalog.fyi, or by joining our Discord. Happy cataloging!

rory