Epilogue

Brief

Epilogue is a modern book discovery platform for readers. You can search for a book from a catalogue of 120,000+ editions and find book information. Soon you’ll be able to track your own reading (e.g. books you want to read) and discover new ones!

Team

I have full end-to-end engineering ownership over the project, from architecture to writing the code through to deployment.

I am partnering with Amrita Sakhrani, an amazing product designer, on user flows, product direction and market fit.

Why?

Other book discovery platforms exist, but I’ve found that none met my need. Through extensive research, we found that this a common problem! I’ve tried Goodreads, Oku, Fable and The Storygraph, but none were quite right. I even tried a handwritten book journal and creating a Notion database, but neither were that practical for cataloguing a large number of books.

This is actually my third attempt! My first version was an Android app that used the Google Books API, but I found it didn’t work so well. The second was close to my heart: an open-source project called the Book Project (it was meant to be a temporary placeholder name).

We’re not looking to make a clone of another app. We have a lot of unique, interesting ideas, but we’re still conducting a lot of user research to guide what will provide the most value.

Challenges

There are many challenges! The main one is time. We’re both prioritising other parts of our work life right now, but we want to invest a lot more time and love into this as soon as have more capacity.

From an engineering perspective, building a large catalogue of books is hard! Using other book APIs like the Amazon Books API or the Google Books API is not feasible due to licensing terms. So I’m building it from scratch. The main difficulties here are ensuring high quality data. Curating a small dataset is relatively easy. It becomes harder as we scale. There are many books with the same name and authors with the same name could be different authors. It’s also challenging to handle duplicates on the scale of tens of thousands. I have an automated service for identifying this that I’m hoping to expand on.

How do I use it?

Go to https://epilogue.club in your web browser! It’s still early in development (alpha), so we’d love to hear what you like and don’t like!

We also share mini reviews on our social media channels, especially on our Instagram profile.