About

Picking the next book is one of the worst parts of being in a book club. The thread fills with maybes, half the room missed the message, and someone’s holding out for a title only they’ve heard of. Most polling tools assume signups and email gates — neither earns its keep for a decision that should take one evening.

The usual workaround makes more work, not less. Someone pulls the suggestions out of the chat into a list, untangles the ones whose links never previewed, pastes them into a poll or a form, sends the form back to the chat, chases the people who haven’t voted, then screenshots the results and posts them back. None of those steps is hard on its own. The cost is the round-trip — shuttling one decision across the chat, a notes app, and a separate voting tool, then back again.

ReadRound collapses that loop into a single link. Nominations land in the tool directly, with the cover and blurb fetched for you. Ranking happens there. The winner shows up there. The group chat goes back to being a group chat — one message: “the ReadRound link is up, go nominate.”

ReadRound does one thing: it picks the next book. Everything else — discussion, scheduling, reading along, arguing about the ending — stays in whatever chat or app your club already uses. That’s deliberate, and it’s permanent. We’re not building toward an all-in-one book-club platform.

Your club already has a home — a group chat, a Discord, a Teams channel — and that’s where the people already are. Trying to move them into a new app is a fight those platforms win every time. ReadRound takes the one job a chat is genuinely bad at — turning a thread full of maybes into a single decision — and leaves the rest alone.

A round has three states. The host opens and closes; everyone else just points.

Open.

Anyone with the club link can pin a book. Paste a Goodreads, Amazon, or publisher URL and we fetch the cover and blurb so the shelf is glanceable. The host can cap how many nominations make it in.

Ranking.

The host opens ranking. Each member drag-orders the nominations from most-want to least-want. Books a member actively doesn’t want to read get a veto — those drop out before any counting.

Closed.

The host closes the round and we tally with Borda count: top of N gets N points, next gets N−1, on down. Highest total wins. If two books tie, the room sees both and picks — we don’t pretend the math broke a tie when it didn’t.

No deadlines, no nudge emails, no “X people are voting now.” A round closes when the host says it does.

Single-choice polls hand the night to whichever subgroup shows up loudest. Approval voting — check every book you’d read — rewards the least objectionable title over the one people are actually excited about. Borda asks everyone to rank the whole slate and rewards the book with the broadest support: the one the most people are glad to live with, which is what a book club is really after.

Its known weak spot is that you could rank a strong rival last to drag it down. ReadRound defuses that with the veto — if there’s a book you genuinely won’t read, you spend a veto on it outright instead of gaming your ranking.

The full mechanics — the veto, the live tally, and the host’s commit-reveal — are on the how it works page.

Yes. ReadRound is small by design — it doesn’t store much, doesn’t run heavy infrastructure, and doesn’t burn through expensive AI services. That keeps it cheap enough to run indefinitely without charging for it.

If we ever add a way to grab the winning book in one tap, it’ll be an optional, clearly-labeled Bookshop or Amazon link on the results page — the kind that earns us a small commission. We may add a tip jar for anyone who wants to chip in. Neither will ever gate a feature or put a wall in front of a club.

No accounts, no email, no third-party trackers. We keep what you nominate and what you write — that’s it. The full version lives on the privacy page.

A small team. We run our own book club on ReadRound, which keeps the friction honest — when something annoys us mid-round, it gets fixed. Bug reports, feature ideas, “the tally is wrong on this edge case” — all welcome at [email protected].