25 April 2026 · Book Assembly Team · 6 min read
The old notes field was a single text box. You'd open it, type something, save it, and that was your note for the book. If you wanted to add another thought later, you'd scroll to the bottom of what you'd already written and tack it on. Over time, it became a wall of text with no structure, no timestamps, no way to know when you'd written what.
That's not how reading works.
You have thoughts at page 50 that you've forgotten by page 300. You want to remember what you were thinking when you first met a character, not just your final verdict after the last page. You want to capture the moment when a plot twist happended, not reconstruct it weeks later from a jumbled paragraph you half-remember writing.
So we rebuilt notes from scratch.
Notes are now entries. Each one has its own timestamp, so you can see when you wrote it. Add a note at the start of the book when you're intrigued by the opening. Add another halfway through when you've figured out who the villain is. Add one when you finish, now that you know whether you were right.
They stack up as a reading journal for that book - a record of your experience as it happened, not just a summary after the fact.
Each entry can have an optional title. Useful if you want to label a thought ("The twist in chapter 12", "Why I don't trust the narrator", "Called it") or leave it blank if you're just jotting something quick. Up to you.
The body supports basic markdown: bold, italic, bulleted lists, and links. Enough formatting to structure your thoughts without turning the editor into a word processor. You can preview how it'll look before you save.
Here's something that always bothered me about book notes: you write something, come back to it months later, and have no idea where in the book you were when you wrote it. Was that reaction to the opening chapter or the finale? No way to tell.
Now you can tag any note with your progress - a page number, chapter, or percentage. It shows as a small badge on the entry, so when you look back you know exactly where you were in the book when that thought hit you.
This is particularly handy for longer books. A thousand-page epic fantasy generates a lot of thoughts. Being able to see "Page 412, chapter 23" next to a note about a character's motivation is genuinely useful when you're trying to piece together your reading experience later.
It's also useful for rereads. You can compare what you thought on your first read versus your second, at the same point in the story.
Sometimes you want to capture an actual page. A favourite quote you want to remember. A map you keep flipping back to. A diagram that finally made a magic system click. A passage that hit hard and you don't want to lose.
You can now attach a photo to any note, with an optional caption. Snap it with your phone camera, upload it from your computer, and it's saved alongside your thoughts.
The caption is useful for context - "This is the passage I was talking about" or "The map on page 214" - or leave it blank if the image speaks for itself.
Once you've got a few dozen notes on a book, finding a specific one matters. "I know I wrote something about the ending, but which entry was it?"
There's now a search box inside the Notes section that filters by title and body. Type a word or phrase, and only matching notes appear. The matched words are highlighted in the results so you can see exactly why each note came up.
This search is deliberately local to the book. Your notes are private journal entries - stream-of-consciousness reactions, half-formed theories, personal responses to the text. They're not indexed in the global header search. When you search from the header, you're looking for books. When you search inside the Notes section, you're looking through your own thoughts on that specific book.
Notes default to newest-first, so your most recent thought is at the top. But you can flip to oldest-first if you want to read them chronologically - following your own journey through the book from first impression to final verdict.
If you've written more than ten notes on a book (and for some books, you will), the rest are tucked behind a "Show all" button. Keeps the page manageable when you're just checking in, but the full history is always a tap away.
If you had notes on a book already - maybe a few paragraphs you'd accumulated over time in the old text box - they're migrated automatically the next time you open that book.
The old single-string note becomes the first entry in your new journal, dated to when you last edited the book. You don't need to do anything. Nothing is lost.
Once the migration runs, the old field is cleared. If you export and re-import, the new format carries the data forward.
Speaking of exports: the backup format is now version 7. Exports include all your notes per book - the text, titles, progress markers, image references, timestamps, everything. They round-trip cleanly if you restore a backup or move to a new account.
If you import an older backup (v6 or earlier), any legacy notes strings are converted into starter entries automatically. So you can restore an old backup and still end up with the new journal structure.
One caveat: images are stored in your account's cloud storage, so if you export from one account and import to another, image references won't transfer. The notes themselves will be there, but attached photos will show as missing. Same limitation that applies to book covers and wishlist images. The data is yours, but the files are tied to the account that uploaded them.
Rebuilding notes wasn't just a UI change. The underlying data model changed from a single string field on the book to a separate collection of documents, each with its own structure. That meant updating the backup format, the import logic, the image cleanup routines, the bin emptying process, the orphan scanner, and the account deletion flow. A lot of plumbing to get right before releasing.
But the result is worth it. Notes are now something you can actually use throughout your reading, not just a box you fill in at the end and never look at again.
