Opening book and review links in a new tab now reliably loads the page content.

Comments and replies now support a small set of Markdown formatting.

• Bold and italic text
• Blockquotes
• Bulleted and numbered lists
• Links, including bare URLs
• Line breaks

Book search is now powered by our own catalog search engine for faster, more reliable results.

Older book links now load the right title, details, reviews, shelves, and lists instead of sometimes showing as an unknown book.

Removing a book from your shelf now also clears it from favorites, including redirected book entries.

Author names now display in English when available.

Metadata and Open Graph previews were refreshed across the app, so shared links now have cleaner titles, descriptions, canonicals, and social images.

Opening a new page now starts at the top, while Back and Forward still restore your previous scroll position.

Explore trending now refreshes scores for reviews, lists, threads, writings, and quotes more reliably, so older posts no longer keep stale scores after they should have decayed.

• Current activityRecent content continues to refresh throughout the day.
• Older activityA daily reconciliation now clears out stale scores from older content, keeping Explore better aligned with current engagement.

Shelves can now show a subtle activity indicator, like Active now or Last active 2 days ago.

lit.salon now has its own book metadata database, built from Open Library data.

• Current useBook cards, book pages, author pages, quote metadata, and poster generation now read from the owned database.
• NextSearch, cover caching, and recurring catalog refreshes are still being built.

A big chunk of the app's backend was reorganized to reduce cold starts, especially on the first action after the site has been quiet for a while.

• Less waiting on common actionsThings like adding books, liking, commenting, editing, and profile updates should feel much more responsive instead of occasionally acting like the site is stuck waking up.
• Faster high-traffic readsShelf, profile, and discovery data now share warmer backend paths too, so common reads should load more consistently.
• Lower overhead behind the scenesThis change also reduces the number of separately warmed functions we need to keep alive, which makes the performance setup simpler and more efficient.

Reviews now support three visibility levels: public, unlisted, and private.

• PublicVisible everywhere — on your shelf, the book page, search, and discovery feeds.
• UnlistedVisible on your shelf and by direct link, but hidden from search and discovery.
• PrivateOnly you can see it. Private reviews stay off your public shelf and never appear to other readers.
• Built into the editorYou can choose review visibility while creating or editing, using the new footer control next to publish.

You can now download a poster version of any list as a single image.

• Built for listsThe export uses the same tall poster format as shelf posters, but adapts it for list titles, descriptions, and ordered book selections.
• Public sharingPublic and unlisted lists can be downloaded without signing in, so posters work cleanly for direct links and sharing.
• Rank-awareRanked lists preserve their list order and show numbered badges on each selected book.

You can now download a polished poster version of your shelf as a single image.

• Designed for sharingThe poster uses a tall mobile-friendly format that still looks good on desktop, with your shelf identity, stats, and a 5 by 5 grid of books.
• Real shelf dataIt pulls from the same cover and edition-selection pipeline used on the site, so the exported books match what you actually see on lit.salon.
• One clickUse the new "Download poster" action on any public shelf to save it instantly.

You can now add descriptive tags to books — things like "atmospheric", "dense", "romantic", or "unreliable narrator". Tags are crowdsourced: the more people who add the same tag, the higher it ranks.

• Vote on tagsClick any existing tag to add your vote. Click again to remove it. Tags are sorted by vote count so the most agreed-upon descriptors surface first.
• Add new tagsClick the + button to search existing tags or create new ones. Autocomplete suggests tags already used across other books.
• Visible on every book pageTags appear below the description. Your own votes are highlighted so you can see what you’ve contributed at a glance.

You can now add short notes to individual books in your lists — a sentence or two about why a book belongs, what it means in context, or anything you want to say about it.

• Detail viewToggle the new detail view on any list to see books in a side-by-side layout with space for annotations.
• Inline editingClick "Add a note..." next to any book and start typing. Your note saves automatically when you click away.
• Smart defaultsLists with annotations automatically open in detail view. You can always switch back to the grid.

Lists and writings now support three visibility levels: public, unlisted, and private.

• PublicVisible everywhere — search, explore, your profile.
• UnlistedAccessible on your profile and via direct link, but hidden from search and discovery.
• PrivateOnly you can see it. Completely hidden from other users.

Visibility is enforced at the server level — private content is never sent to unauthorized clients, not even in API responses. You can set visibility when creating or editing a list or writing.

Removed automatic canonical title redirects on review, list, and writing pages to prevent redirect/reload loops in some browsers.

These pages now resolve by content ID, which preserves user-entered URL title segments more reliably while still keeping canonical metadata for SEO.

We replaced the Firebase image resize extension with our own image resizing and optimization engine. This gives us tighter control over image processing and quality.

Image uploads now support files up to 20MB.

You can now upload a background image for your shelf. It renders as a full-bleed image on your shelf page with adjusted theming for legibility.

You can also now delete an existing banner or background image, not just replace it.

You can now delete comments on your own content (reviews, lists, threads, quotes, and writings). Comments with replies are soft-deleted to preserve conversation context.

Search has been completely re-done and expanded. Now, every single content type can be full-text searched.

• Books
• Reviews (title and content)
• Lists (title and description)
• Quotes
• Users
• Threads

Redesigned the entire app by migrating to our custom UI library, which will match the look of the mobile app coming later this year.

If you notice any UI inconsistencies, please let me know in Discord.

Hi, welcome to the changelog. I'm going to be using this to document all the updates, improvements, and fixes to lit.salon. Stay tuned.

• Notification changesYou'll now be notified when people you follow post new content (reviews, threads, lists, writings, quotes) and when your own content starts trending.
• Removed notificationsRemoved the rather useless notifications: 'user added X book from your shelf or list'