reading-community
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Otis Chandler and the bookshelf that became a meeting place
He built Goodreads to make a friend’s bookshelf available to everyone. Two decades of building for readers have kept Otis Chandler circling the same question: who helps us choose what is worth our time?
Bookclubs
Bookclubs is a free web and mobile platform that helps book clubs organize themselves - scheduling meetings, tracking reading history, polling on the next book, sending messages, and discovering what to read next. Founded in 2015 out of one Philadelphia book club's messy email chain, it now serves hundreds of thousands of readers and monetizes through publisher and author partnerships rather than charging its members.
Anna Ford
Anna Ford is the co-founder and CEO of Bookclubs, the free app and website that has grown into the organizing layer for more than a million readers and over 100,000 book clubs worldwide. A former public health policy advocate with a Georgetown degree and a Harvard Kennedy School MPA, she built the platform out of pure frustration after the tangled email threads of her own Philadelphia book club nearly killed it. The fix - coded by a friend named Ian Campbell, who later became her husband - turned a logistics problem into a company, and a public health career into a mission against loneliness. She runs it all from Camden, Maine.