About BetweenBooks
Why I built it
I'm Louis Røislie, and I run BetweenBooks. It started with my girlfriend's books. She kept them in an Excel sheet and a paper review book. One day in a bookshop she couldn't tell if she already owned the book in her hand, because the sheet was at home on a laptop. I wanted to fix that.
I am by no means a designer or a programmer, and my background is a bachelor's degree in IT security. So I decided to build it together with Claude. Claude did the design and wrote the code, while I did the reviewing and testing.
BetweenBooks is a modern take on the book trackers that are already out there. I took the best parts of them and brought them together in one place, to make a book tracker that most readers would enjoy using.
How I run it
There is no advertising here, and I never sell your reading. Pro subscriptions pay for the site, and later on they will pay real people to work on it.
I make three promises. Nothing you record is lost unless you delete it yourself. Your reviews, thoughts and notes are never shown to other readers. Sharing with friends and writing in book discussions stay off until you switch them on, and you choose what friends can see. I only say what is true on this site, so you won't find invented reviews or reader counts. This is built for a community of readers, not for a big corporation.
Where it's from
I make BetweenBooks in Norway. Your library is stored with Cloudflare. You open it on your phone in the bookshop or on your laptop at home, and it is the same library on both.
Where the series come from
The series a book belongs to, and the order of its books, are checked against Wikipedia, whose text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike licence. I take only the names, the order and the ISBNs.
Meet Felix
Felix is the cat who keeps the shelves here. A small black cat in a purple witch's hat, usually asleep on whichever book is nearest. You will find Felix around the site, on the front page, on an empty shelf and anywhere else a book could use some company.
What I want it to be
A reading record that is complete enough to keep and pleasant enough to look after. It holds every book you have read, are reading, gave up on or want next, and what each one was like.