Show HN: A more social, Amazon-free alternative to Goodreads

Unfortunately, I felt like the online book space was missing a platform that does the book community justice. Goodreads is the go-to "social platform", but if you've been on Goodreads before, you'll probably agree that it's not all that social, and overall not all that exciting.

So I set out to build what I personally was looking for (but could never find). The goal: to give the book community a more social and streamlined alternative to Goodreads or StoryGraph.

We also felt like it was important for Booqsi to be independent of Amazon; we care about supporting local bookstores, so every book in Booqsi links you to Bookshop.org to purchase that book (not Amazon).

Here are some of my favorite features launched as part of beta:

- A book-focused social feed (finally!)

- Beautifully-rendered custom bookshelves to show off to your friends

- Streamlined book recommendations to friends

- Easily track reading goals and books you've read

And many more...

It's completely free and easy to use, and we would love your feedback as you explore the platform.

Show HN: A more social, Amazon-free alternative to Goodreads
booqsi.com

I have stopped using Goodreads already--probably for a couple years now. I found that the only feature I really used was the "To read" bookshelf. And I found that I just replaced it with a specific "To read" list of reminders in my iPhone's Reminders app. For that use case, this seems to work great for me. Can you speak to potentially any features of Booqsi that would be an improvement over my simple / non-book-specific approach?

Giving authors tools for self-promotion is also a big deal -- and something many authors actively engage in with Goodreads.

One more thing, that should be higher priority: The ability to add books to the database. There's nothing more frustrating than wanting to add a book to a shelf, and not being able to! (Maybe it's already an option? If so, it's not easy to find.)