Follow each other on Open Library

By Nick Norman, Mek, et al

Subscribe to readers with complimentary tastes to receive book recommendations.

Over the past few months, we’ve been rolling out the basic building blocks of the “Follow” feature: a way for readers to follow those with similar tastes and to tap into a personalized feed of book recommendations.

How does the “Follow” feature work?

Similar to following people on platforms like Facebook, Open Library’s “Follow” feature enables patrons to connect with fellow readers whose Reading Logs are set to public. When you follow other readers, their recent public reading activity will show up in your feed and hopefully help you discover interesting books to read next.

You can get to your feed from the My Books page, using the My Feed item in the left navigation menu:

What’s next?

Most of the functionality for following readers is live, but we’re still designing mechanisms for discovering readers to follow. Interested in shaping the development of this new feature? Take a look at these open Github issues relating to the Follow feature.

Your feedback is appreciated

Have other comments or thoughts? Please share them in the comments section below, connect with us on Twitter, and send us your feedback about the new “Follow” feature.

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