How it works

A club runs in rounds, and a round moves through three states. The host drives the transitions; everyone else just nominates and ranks.

Open.

Anyone with the club link pins books. The shelf fills up. The host can tidy it before the vote.

Ranking.

The host opens ranking. Each member drag-orders the books and, if the host enabled it, spends a veto on anything they refuse to read. Nominations are locked — the ballot is fixed.

Closed.

The host closes the round. The tally is counted, the winner is published, and everyone can see the result. A round only closes when the host says so — there are no deadlines or nudge emails.

You nominate a book by pasting a link to almost any book page. ReadRound reads the page and pulls the title, author, cover, and blurb so the shelf is glanceable — no typing book details by hand.

It resolves a link in layers. Most reading apps and retailers expose structured metadata (Open Graph or JSON-LD) right in the page — StoryGraph, Goodreads, Bookshop, publisher pages, library catalogues, most Shopify-based indie shops. When a page has it, we read it directly.

Amazon is the exception: its pages don’t expose that metadata. So for an Amazon link we pull the ISBN or ASIN out of the URL and look the book up in Open Library, the open book-catalogue run by the Internet Archive. That keeps the dependency on stable, nonprofit infrastructure rather than on scraping Amazon. If a cover ever comes back wrong, the host can refresh a book’s metadata in place.

The host is whoever started the club. They get a small set of controls aimed at one thing: keeping the ballot sane.

• A nomination cap. Set how many books each member can pin, so the shelf stays a shortlist instead of a backlog of forty maybes.
• Set a book aside. While the round is Open, the host can pull a nomination off the ballot (a duplicate, something off-theme, a book the club already read) with an optional note. It can be put back just as easily. This is moderation, and it happens in the open before any votes are cast.
• Reopen a vote.If the shortlist needs to change after ranking has started, the host can drop back to Open. That discards every ballot on purpose — if the books change, a half-finished ranking is worse than starting clean.

In Ranking, each member drags the books into the order they want them, most-want at the top. You don’t have to rank everything — what you order is what counts for you.

The veto is a separate, blunter tool: a hard no. If the host turned vetoes on, each member gets a fixed number of them to spend. A book that takes even a single veto is removed from the count entirely — it can’t win, no matter how everyone else ranked it. That’s the point: “I will not read this” shouldn’t need a coalition.

Because a veto is powerful, the host decides how many each member gets — often zero (off) or one. You cast it privately on your own ballot; no one sees who vetoed what.

When the round closes, ReadRound counts the ballots with a Borda count. On a ballot of N books, your top pick gets N points, the next N−1, on down to 1 for the last. Add every ballot together; the highest total wins.

The reason is consensus. A single-choice poll hands 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 weigh the whole slate, so it 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.

Borda’s known weak spot is that a voter could rank a strong rival last to drag it down. The veto is the honest answer to that: if you genuinely won’t read a book, you say so outright instead of gaming your ranking.

While a round is in Ranking, the running tally is visible to one person — the host — and only after the host has submitted their own ballot. That ordering is deliberate. The host needs to see how the vote is going to manage the round, but watching the trend and then voting strategically would let them swing the result.

So submitting is a trade: the moment the host submits and the live tally lights up, their ballot locks. They can no longer reorder or change it. It’s a commit-reveal — you commit your vote to earn the reveal. Members get the opposite deal: they never see the live tally during ranking, so their ballots stay editable right up until the round closes.

When the host closes the round, the full tally — scores, vetoes, and the winner — becomes visible to every member at once.

Closing computes the winner and writes it down. If two books tie on points, ReadRound doesn’t pretend the math broke the tie — it shows both at the top and lets the room call it.

Rounds accumulate. A club isn’t a one-time poll — the same link carries it from book to book, and past winners stay on the record. When the host starts the next round, they choose which of the leftover nominations to carry forward, so good suggestions don’t get lost between cycles.

ReadRound picks the book. Discussion, scheduling, and reading along stay in whatever chat or app your club already uses — that’s a permanent scope choice, not a missing feature. More on the reasoning, the privacy model, and whether it stays free is on the about page.