How this works

Make an account from the home page. While we have room, that is the whole of it.

We are keeping this small on purpose while it is early, so we can fix what breaks before the next group arrives. If we reach the number of accounts we can look after properly, new signups join a waitlist until there is room again. Two things behave differently if that happens:

• An emailed invitation from someone who already runs a club here carries a pass through the waitlist, so its recipient can make an account whether we are full or not.
• A club’s shared link does not. You can open it and see the club before you have an account; while we have room it takes you straight in, and if we are full it puts you in the queue like any other signup.

Create one from your clubs. You choose a name, a description and whether it is public or private:

• Public — anyone signed in can find it and join themselves.
• Private — nobody joins without the owner adding them or sending them a link.

In both cases the reading list, the discussions and the member list are visible only once you are in. A public club is open to join, not open to read.

Three ways, from the invite dialog in the club:

• Share the link. One link per club, reusable, no expiry — the one to paste into the group chat you are leaving. It always arrives, which an email might not.
• Invite by email. Each address gets its own link, which also carries a pass through the waitlist if we happen to be full. There is a cap on how many go out while we are letting people in gradually; when you reach it, the shared link still works.
• Add someone by username in the club’s settings, if they already have an account.

A pending email invitation can be withdrawn from the club’s settings until it is used.

The person who created the club keeps it. Books sit in three places — reading now, up next and finished — and a club can be reading more than one at a time. Search for a book by title, author or ISBN when you add it; if the wrong edition comes back, you can correct the match.

A book that is up next can carry a start date — a particular day, or just a month — and the list keeps itself in that order. When a start date is getting close, everyone in the club is told (see Knowing what happened below).

There are no admin or moderator roles yet, so everyone else in the club can read the list, start discussions, reply and vote, but not change what the club is reading.

Anyone in the club can start one. A discussion keeps its own page with its replies attached, and it can be tied to a book on the club’s shelf so it is findable by what it was about. Whoever started a thread can rename it later; whoever wrote a reply can edit or delete it.

Whoever runs the club can open a vote — on books from the shelf, or on any question with the options written out. Every vote has a closing date, shown up front; the owner can close it early or extend it. Everyone in the club gets one vote and can change it, or take it back, until the vote closes.

The ballot is open.Members can see the tally and who voted for what, and the page says so before you vote. The club page shows the current vote; the rest, including closed ones, live on the club’s votes page — a closed vote stays as a record of what was decided.

Your library is yours, separate from any club. Books sit in three shelves — reading, want to read, and read — with your rating, your finish date and a note if you want one. You can pin a few to the top of your profile.

Coming from Goodreads, export your library there and upload the CSV. Shelves, ratings and finish dates come across with it.

Your library is private until you say otherwise. In your profile settings you can open it to other signed-in members, which is what puts it on your public profile page. That setting is off by default, and an import does not change it.

Notificationscollects what happened in clubs you are in: a new discussion, a reply, a book added to the shelf, someone joining, a vote opening, and a book’s start date coming up. The count in the nav updates as you use the app. You can dismiss a notification once you are done with it, or clear the read ones in one go.

One email, and only one: when a book on your club’s shelf has a start date coming up, we send a note. You can turn that off in your profile settings. Nothing is pushed to your phone. Notifications older than 30 days are cleared.

Said plainly so you do not find out after moving your club over: no reactions, no meeting planning (a club schedules its books, not a time and place to meet), no reading-progress tracking, no admin or moderator roles, no club discovery page, and no app-store app — it is a website that works properly on a phone browser, and you can install it from the browser so it opens like an app.

Email support@bookmarksociety.com. If something is broken, saying what you clicked and what you expected gets it fixed considerably faster.