I liked reading for the lessons it could teach me. I think because I was so focused and working so hard, I wasn’t a very gregarious kid. So in a way, I learned a lot about other people through books and I got to live thousands of other lives.

the idea was if you searched for a book, you would see your friends reviews first and then the larger community’s reviews later.

We did author interviews and book recommendations, and we were completely driven by a pure love for books and the fact that this was something we wanted to use.

I was a compulsive tracker of what I read. A few weeks after he programmed the first version of the site, I went home to my parents’ house and looked up every single book in the house that I had read and added them to my profile.

I think it’s actually a really cool experience to read someone else’s favorite book, even if it is a genre that you would never naturally go to. And I think there’s a lot of data about how reading books creates empathy. And I think it was a great example of that, where you learn about someone else through reading a book that’s really meaningful to them.