Version 6 marks the beginning of a new chapter in Anobii’s history, a story that celebrates its 20th anniversary this year.
In January, we invited Anobii users in Italy to take part in a survey asking how we could improve the platform and, more importantly, how many of them would be willing to contribute financially to keep it running.
In just three weeks, we received 5,553 responses, and 27.8% of participants said they were willing to contribute. This was an important signal for us, encouraging us to invest in the project once again.
Here are the new features in version 6.0.0:
- As we hope you’ll appreciate, we’ve started giving Anobii a soul. We’re not there yet, but we’ve replaced everything that was gray and anonymous with a new visual language that communicates important ideas through words, shapes, and colors. Our main goals are to communicate more, explain how things work, and be transparent and stay close to the entire Anobii community.
- Another major change in version 6 is that Anobii now has a new monetization model. In 2023, we tried to generate revenue through an offer aimed at bookstores, but the experiment didn’t deliver the results we had hoped for, and finding a sustainable way to keep the project going remained an unresolved challenge. On our new page, Support Anobii, we explain everything and outline the different ways you can contribute.
- We’ve rebuilt the portal used by librarians to manage requests for missing books. The old system belonged to another era, and we hope this update will help the volunteers who work tirelessly behind the scenes at Anobii to expand our book database, which now contains more than 13 million records.
- We’ve upgraded the technology infrastructure behind our search engine. For now, the only noticeable benefit is speed, but thanks to this work, we’ll soon be able to make search perform as well as we’ve always wanted it to.
- We’ve brought back the concept of affinity, which some of you may remember from 2017 and 2018, when Anobii was owned by Mondadori. For now, affinity is displayed when you visit the profile of a user who has rated at least five books that you’ve also rated. If you haven’t rated five books in common, the profile will show the number of books you have in common instead. Clicking the affinity badge takes you to your books in common, filtered to show the titles you’ve both rated, with your ratings displayed side by side.
- We have implemented push notifications in the apps, so you can receive the updates you care about this way as well. You can choose what you want to be notified about under Settings > Notifications.
Thank you again to everyone who took part in the survey. We’ll be running more surveys so you can tell us what you think and which improvements you’d like us to prioritize as the platform evolves. We hope to hear positive feedback from all of you as we work to make Anobii an increasingly welcoming home for everyone who loves reading.
If you have any questions, please email us at contact@anobii.com, and don’t forget to update the apps.
See you soon!
The Anobii Team