graphic by kayleigh wotal
Amelia Goodman loves to read — so much so, she’s typically working through five books at once. If you’re wondering how she has the time — or even the patience — to read as much as she does, don’t take it as a personal slight to your productivity levels. Reading is just part of her job.
Amelia is the brains behind Bookworm, a community-oriented reading app that allows you to track, rate and review your reads. Upon signing up for the app, you’re prompted to create a username (typical) and design your worm avatar (not typical, and as absolutely exhilarating as it sounds). No two worms are alike: users can customize their wormy friends with a range of seemingly hand-drawn and cartoonish clothes, hats, shoes and accessories. The app has four different tabs: on the bottom far left, a yellow apple with a worm poking its head out brings you to what could be equated to your “feed.” You can filter this feed to see all wormy activity across the app, or just see what your friends are up to. A small magnifying glass directs you to a search feature that allows you to find books by title, author and ISBN. Once you find the book you want, you can save it to one of your library shelves, leave a rate and review or even recommend it to a friend. The next tab is a heart, which serves as your notification center. And lastly, the stack of books on the bottom right brings you to your profile’s aforementioned “library,” which is organized by the customizable “shelves” through which you track your reads.
Think Goodreads, but way more color, cuteness, and community, and much less “cog-in-the-capitalist-machine” energy.
Community is the inspiration and driving force behind Bookworm. Although reading is largely regarded as a solo activity, Amelia has found lasting friendship in between the lines. She’s been part of a book club for five years — although it’s changed, died and been reborn in many iterations. Despite this, the sense of community has remained constant, and she’s found her “favorite group of people” through a shared love of literature — even if they only talk about the book of choice for three minutes before devolving into gossip and giggles. In fact, it’s this group of people that encouraged her to pursue Bookworm:
“Two years ago, I was thinking ‘what if I built something better to keep track of my books?’, so I whipped something up in a couple of weeks and was really happy about it. I showed it to my friends and bookclub, and they really liked it and wanted to use it. [I spent more time with it] to make it prettier, and collaborated with friends on the color scheme. [We thought], ‘what if it was so colorful, and it didn’t look like other apps? And that’s how that was born — from the idea of ‘oh, I can do whatever I want.’”
Amelia keeps the idea of community at Bookworm’s core through intentional product features and design choices. For starters, the ability to customize your worm avatar allows users the opportunity to create a unique identity for themself within the broader community: “So many people have had [the] reaction ‘ugh, this outfit represents me’. And the outfit is always different. Seeing people [feeling] identified by a worm is always incredible.”
Then, users are encouraged to interact with each other through features that promote engagement, such as the ability to send friend requests, comment or react to another user’s review, participate in community-wide reading challenges and even make in-feed posts asking for recommendations
“[My] book club is such a fun excuse to gather… and I think that delight and fun translates into Bookworm. Yes, it’s about books, and also you get to express creativity and decorate your worm and make friends and share!”
From how you can interact with other worms, to the way the feed can be filtered, connection is at the forefront of Amelia’s mind. Additionally, Amelia not only welcomes, but seeks out, feedback from the Bookworm community about what features they want to see and how their experience can be improved. For example, she monitors a Bookworm-user chat hosted on Geneva, a group chat app allowing you to “find your people” that has grown in popularity in recent years. In the future, and as the app grows, she aspires to amplify the community’s voice through “steering committees” so projects and features can be prioritized based on user feedback. But the bottom line remains the same: all feature and product ideas are derived from user conversations and built with users in mind, which she believes is Bookworm’s greatest strength.
Bookworm’s secondary benefit is that it serves as an alternative to Goodreads. While Amelia is a former Goodreads user, it was more out of necessity than anything else. Amelia found it hard to use, “ugly,” outdated and lacking obvious community-oriented features — “you can find friends [on Goodreads], and then you’re like, now what do I do with this?” — but it was the only book tracking app widely used amongst readers. Then, in 2013, Amazon bought Goodreads, adding the popular app into Amazon’s scheme for total world domination. What was once a personal grudge transformed into a moral and ethical dilemma — Amazon is largely criticized for how it perpetuates late stage capitalism, including but not limited to, monopolization, climate change and worker exploitation.
Interestingly, her mission to divest in Amazon reinforces her commitment to the community:
“Goodreads got bought by Amazon, and nothing happened to it, it was just a legacy product that Amazon now owns… I want to explore new ideas of what a co-operative app could look like… How can we play with the idea of what an app traditionally is, which is exploitative, and how can we build something together?”
The dream of a co-operative is a work in progress.
As of now, Bookworm is a one-woman machine — kind of. Amelia’s background is in software development, so coding the app was easy enough (if you consider coding “easy,” at least.). She started Bookworm as a side project to her paying day job in the tech world, until she realized that it had the potential to become its own full-time endeavor. It was actually a number of (not all so happy) circumstances that helped her come to this realization: First, she shared the app with her friends and bookclub, who absolutely loved the product, and second, Amelia was already considering leaving the tech world because of the harassment, misogyny and patriarchal standards she experienced every day as a woman in the industry.
Although Amelia is the only full-time employee (and has spent more of her own savings on the app than she has profited off of it), there is a dedicated team behind the brand who have volunteered their time and skills out of pure passion for Bookworm:
“I’ve had a couple of people volunteer their time… People just reach out and they’re like ‘hey, i like what you’re doing, how can i help out?’ I’m amassing this group of volunteers who help where they can, and I try to make it… exciting for them, where they can learn and grow.”
People’s willingness to give a couple of their hours a week to Bookworm, especially for free, is something she does not take for granted. If anything, it confirms that there is interest in the Bookworm team if it does become a profitable app. As of August 25, 2023, Bookworm has 6,000 downloads with 2,500 active users. Amelia recently introduced a Bookworm pro, a paid subscription plan that grants members priority support and exclusive worm outfits and accessories, and coming soon, co-ownership of the app and the ability to create a book club via the app! There are currently 50 members, with wormy friends converting into a paid user everyday. All income from subscriptions and merchandise sales goes towards maintaining Bookworm, such as the cost of the server. As the membership, and therefore income, grows, Amelia is one step closer to making the app self-sustaining, and eventually, profitable for a team who could make it run. Her goal is sustainability through loyal and active users rather than funding, as she fundamentally disagrees with capitalism and wants to preserve Bookworm’s integrity without worrying about stipulations from potential investors: “Imagine the things we will think of together.”
So Amelia relies on the community to keep Bookworm thriving, and the community looks to Bookworm for a much-needed bookish community. The best parts of this project are the friendships and partnerships forged:
“One of my favorite moments… is when I’m just out in the world… and someone’s like ‘oh my god, I know Bookworm, you built Bookworm?’… their excitement over the thing I built [feels] like magic.”
And then there are the bookstores. Funnily enough, it was through one of the bookstore partnerships that I stumbled across Bookworm myself. Every so often, a number of my favorite Lower East Side bookstores organize a book crawl, inviting New Yorkers to journey from bookstore to bookstore in the neighborhood for discounts and various other special offers for those on the crawl (and those lucky enough to stumble upon it). I had reached Bluestockings NYC, a community oriented co-operative bookstore and activist center, and was immediately intrigued by a table stationed out front. All it took was the promise of a customizable worm bookmark in exchange for an app download, and I was hooked.
Amelia sees working with bookstores as a win-win. She promotes bookstores that host her pop-up events, bookstores promote the app to their book-loving clientele, and readers get a new funky worm friend. She gets to spend time at her favorite places with her favorite people — thus reinforcing her passion for everything she’s striving for.
“Being in community with independent bookstores is so special and important, and it’s truly an honor to be able to do that. And to then go and host an event somewhere and bring more people to a bookstore that I love [is so fulfilling].”
So if you’re looking for a way to keep up with your reading goals, track recommended reads in a more organized way than just blurry photos of books you picked up while browsing the bookstore, stick it to Amazon, or even just want to talk to other book-ish people as the most colorful and stylish avatar worm you’ve ever seen — you’ve found your community.
To connect with Bookworm:
Download the app from App Store or Google Play