Launching today
DreamBooks
Discover children’s books and track reading together.
35 followers
Discover children’s books and track reading together.
35 followers
Dreambooks helps families discover children's books by age, grade level, awards, series, and favorite authors. Kids can track reading together in communities, and every book links to your library so the next great read is easy to find and borrow.
Tandem
Hi Product Hunt,
DreamBooks started because I got kind of obsessed with children's books once my son started listening to me read to him. I loved going to the library and bringing books home. Librarians would sometimes tell me we were in a golden age of children's literature, and it honestly felt that way.
At the same time, trying to find books online always felt wrong to me. Amazon throws you into a marketing and ad space. Library websites can be slow and kind of clunky. Neither feels like the children's corner of a library, where the covers are face-out and the whole thing feels a bit like an art gallery. That experience was missing on the internet, and I wanted to build the closest thing I could to it.
The first version actually started on top of Open Library. I spent a lot of time trying to carve out a real children's-books-only layer there, and I even worked on improving some of the data. But after a while I realized I needed more control over covers, structure, and cleanup, so I built my own pipeline that pulls from different sources and turns them into one cleaner canonical book record.
The way I think about DreamBooks now is in three pillars.
The first is beautiful browsing. I wanted covers front and center, with everything else minimal. You can browse by age, grade, Lexile level, series, awards, authors, and curated lists, but the point is not just filtering. It is making discovery feel visual and inviting.
The second is being borrow-centric. I did not want this to feel like another place that mainly pushes you to buy books. You can link your own library, browse on DreamBooks, and then one-click borrow from your branch. I wanted it to be easy to discover something great and then actually get it through your library, whether that is your catalog, Libby, or Hoopla.
The third is social reading journeys. You can create profiles for your kids and track a simple reading journey: want to read, reading, and finished. I care a lot about the fact that children's reading is different from adult reading. Sometimes a parent reads to a child, sometimes they read together, and sometimes the child reads by themselves. I wanted the product to make room for that. I also wanted reading by yourself to feel worth celebrating, so when a child marks that they read a book on their own, there is confetti on screen 🎉 Communities are already part of the product too, because I keep thinking about what happens when a child can see what their friends or classmates are reading. Maybe that gives them the little push to pick up the next book.
If you check it out, I’d especially love to hear what feels delightful, what feels confusing, and what would make it more useful for your family, classroom, or library.
Medium
This is rad! I'm all for tools that help get more kids stoked about reading and connecting with new books that will be meaningful to them.
I run https://obob.dog which is a site for kids doing Oregon Battle of the Books to play reading games, battle others, and read more together. Kids are eager to go deeper with the books they love. I'm excited to see where @DreamBooks goes. 🙌
Tandem
Thanks @brianellin ! What's an "Oregon Battle of the Books"? I love the idea of having a more social way to think about what a kid has read. It seems like the app is set for using it together in the same physical space for those questions, rigth? that is, the question are open ended so I guess you ask, and then the kids say their thing, and then you reveal the answer?