Build a huge book database.

What does this feature do?

We are building a huge book database for the upcoming reader app.

Shepherd currently has only ~100,000 books in its database, as we add them only when a reader or author picks one to share. We did that in the early days because of our focus on discovery and to save money (building, licensing, and hosting infrastructure for 6 million plus books isn't cheap).

This means that when we roll out a feature like our 3 favorite reads of the year, readers often have to click “Add Missing Book” and tell us what they want to add.

Now, we are looking at Open Library’s data and using it to populate a bigger database of books. With this first version, we aim to have the book readers want to add ~90% of the time.

As the app grows, we will work to improve that percentage even further.

Status

We are building this now!

Why is this update important?

• We need this so that readers don't have to manually input a book they want to add to the DB 90% of the time.
• Over time, we want to use this to integrate authors' full book catalogs into various features on Shepherd.