About
About Novella
Last updated 12 July 2026
Novella is a community-driven database about books, built for one thing above all: helping you find the next book worth your time.
What Novella is
Think of Novella as TMDB for books — an open, community-built catalogue of works, editions, authors, and series, with a stronger emphasis on discovery than on being a reference shelf. It is the place to look a book up, but more than that it is the place to find what to read next.
The catalogue is the source of truth, and it is built by the people who use it. Anyone can add a missing book, correct a detail, or improve how works connect together. We seed data from open sources to get started, but the long-term record is the one readers maintain — not any single outside database.
Novella is web-first: every book, author, and list has a real page you can read without an account and share with anyone. Native mobile apps come later, on the same catalogue.
Books are the atoms, not posts
Everything published on Novella attaches to a book: a review, a rating, a list, a “currently reading”. There is no free-form post box, and there never will be. The thing that travels is a book, not a take about a person.
That single structural choice is what keeps Novella from drifting into general social media. It is social around books, not around people — which is a much healthier place to spend an evening.
Honest by design
Discovery is only useful if you can trust it. So a few things are permanently off the table:
- No engagement-ranked feeds. What you see is chronological and taste-based, never ordered to provoke a reaction.
- No paid placement in recommendations. No book can buy its way onto a “recommended for you” shelf. The moment that became purchasable, the product would be worthless.
- Honest ratings. Ratings and reviews reflect real, first-hand opinions from people who actually read the book — not paid or coordinated scores.
- No selling your reading data. Your reading life is yours. We do not sell it or follow you around the rest of the internet.
Built by readers
The catalogue is community-editable with a trust-based moderation layer rather than a hard user-versus-moderator split. Anyone can contribute from day one; how much review an edit receives depends on a contributor’s track record, not on a permission someone hands out. Clean, consistent contributors earn trust bandsthat let their edits go live instantly and, higher up, let them help review others’ work.
If you want to help — fixing a wrong page count, adding a missing edition, tidying a series — you are welcome to. Our Community Guidelines explain how editing, reviewing, and moderation work.
Who is behind it
Novella is a small, independent project, built in the open and shaped by the readers who use it. It is early — you are looking at it near the beginning — and a lot of what it becomes will be decided by the community that shows up.
Questions, corrections, or a book the library is missing? See our contact page. The Terms of Service and Privacy Policy set out the rest.