Where to Make and Share Book Lists Online
Or, how to spread the book love
Five years ago, I fell in love with an app. I knew giving it my heart was probably dangerous, that it was likely to change in ways that I didn’t love since I already thought it was perfect. Nevertheless, I jumped into The List App and helped to make it a bookish place, sharing lists of my favourite reading-related podcasts and facilitating group lists where we could share what we were reading each week.
A couple of years later, in September 2017, we got the email many of us had been sensing was inevitable. The List App, having undergone multiple reincarnations and been rechristened Li.st, was closing just three days later. “Is it possible to be astonished and yet at the same time not surprised?” those of us with a propensity to quote The West Wing might have said. We’d seen it coming, but it was still unbearably sad.
It’s hard to explain what this app meant to many of us — it was a community more than an app, a place more supportive than anything I’d come to expect online. Several of us have found each other online elsewhere — Facebook, Twitter, even Slack — but BJ Novak and his team trained us to think in lists, and we missed making them together and sharing them with each other.
