Dear friends,

Our team took some downtime from catalog over the last couple months and, unfortunately, our website did too. The Open Library (operated by the Internet Archive), which is an integral part of our service, went offline after being attacked by hackers. We’re sorry for the disruption, which is sadly both out of our control and not uncommon when working with under-resourced digital public infrastructure.

Since the break, we’ve taken stock of our goals for catalog and our progress over the last year.  We have built a site that we really love, but not one that can survive as a standalone business, so we’re setting a new path for how we plan to work on the project moving forward.

Rory and I started catalog as a way to care for book people online. We believed (and still believe) that our relationships to books would be strengthened by a digital home that directly served those who care most for the craft. We found that existing platforms like Amazon’s Goodreads were far down the path of enshittification and had failed the readers and the writers and everyone in between who care deeply about books. We imagined something better.

We imagined a space that would help the book community to take care of itself online, to curate what matters, and to contribute to the collective knowledge of books and our relationships with them. We started out seeking a path to commercial sustainability, but ultimately believe these tools are best built as digital public goods. There is an ecosystem of builders and projects that share our care for user agency and open data (OpenLibrary, ActivityPub, AT Protocol, etc.) and we hope to serve as a cozy bookish corner of the open social web as it develops.

We’re continuing our work on catalog as an open-source project – our code is now hosted publicly on GitHub here under a GNU AGPL v3 license – and have dissolved Prosocial Inc, the B-Corp under which we did the initial development. Rory and I and our friends (like Mark and Robyn and others) will be volunteering part-time to keep the site going and improving.  

So the building carries on and we have more planned for 2025! One thing we’re excited about is a new feature to showcase your year in reading. If you haven’t signed in for a while, now’s a great time to come back and log the books you’ve read this year to be a part of it. We’re also planning to open up registration to all comers soon, but in the meantime you can invite friends yourself to let them skip the waitlist (click your username in the upper right corner and select “invite”).

If you want to support the project, we’re accepting contributions on Open Collective, our non-profit fiscal host, to help fund the hosting, maintenance, and development expenses to keep it running (about $100/mo today). We’d welcome other forms of contribution as well, so please get in touch to discuss how you’d like to help!

Onward!

Glenn