The new social media app for readers. Discuss the books you love, at the pace you choose to take them. Bring your annotations from your margins to your friends.
Annotate's launch is taking a bit longer than what we had planned, and we wanted to apologise for that.
To make up for the delay, we're opening up 500 free tester spots. Check out our form for more info: we will get back to you from the 3rd to the 7th.
forms.gle/waGFAZDzeR4tUerj7
ALT Dear Friends,
We know many of you have been eagerly waiting for Annotate: the official launch is taking a bit longer than what we had planned, and we wanted to apologise for that.
Between the App Store's review process and the compliance requirements we need to meet for our European users, there's more red tape than what we had initially expected, which is pushing our original roadmap and deadlines.
As a small, volunteer team with a single developer, rest assured that we're doing everything in our power to get Annotate into your hands as soon as possible.
To make up for the delay, and to thank you for your patience, we're opening up 500 free tester spots. For this, please fill out our Google Form and join our Discord server, which is required to download the app! Our form will close in 24h.
Team Annotate
We listened and we delivered: you can now mute or reread a book, create your own custom feed, and display your folders as shelves, all on Annotate.
ALT Annotate heard your suggestions! Here are some updates we’ve recently made:
You can now see your folders in a shelf style, using the top right button!
ALT You can mute a book! It will not appear on your feed anymore.
ALT Curate your own feed by going to your settings,
and picking your feed name, an icon, and the users you want to see there!
We're closing our three Patreon tiers (Sidekick, Protagonist, and Mentor) on the 22nd, check out our Patreon before it's too late!
For those already subscribed, make sure to downgrade to free!
ALT Dear Friends,
We're closing our three Patreon tiers (Sidekick, Protagonist, and Mentor) on the 22nd! This means that you have until then to get our exclusive benefits, which include our badges that won't be available again, a free Annotate subscription, and more!
For our Patreon supporters, we advise that you downgrade to a free Patreon subscription as soon as you get your Annotate badge: this ensures that you won't be billed next month. Don't worry, we will be sending an email reminder in the following days!
Once again, we thank you for the overwhelming support you have all shown us, which has allowed us to be able to launch soon!
Team Annotate
Happy to announce that Annotate is scheduled for release at the end of September! In the meantime, we have opened a Patreon! We wanted to be transparent as to why.
Annotate will remain free with an optional subscription for advanced customization only.
patreon.com/cw/annotate
ALT Tier 1 - The Sidekick
1€/month
Pick a username to use once Annotate launches.
An exclusive 'Sidekick' profile badge.
Tier 2 - The Protagonist
6€/month
Instant access to Annotate in its current state.
An exclusive 'Protagonist' profile badge.
Access to the 'testers' category on our Discord server.
One month of free Annotate subscription once Annotate launches. Test some features of the subscription with us now!*
Tier 3 - The Mentor
10€/month
Instant access to Annotate in its current state.
An exclusive 'Mentor' profile badge.
Access to the 'testers' category on our Discord server.
Access to the 'mentors' category on our Discord, which allows for direct communication with Team Annotate.
One month of free Annotate subscription once Annotate launches. Test some features of the subscription with us now!*
Your name on our 'Thank You Page'!
ALT With the subscription, customize your accent colour for lighter modes, and dark mode!
ALT Dear Friends,
Annotate is launching a Patreon page, and we wanted to be very transparent as to why we have decided to do so. Building the app has come with costs that have, so far, been paid by the team itself. However, as we grow, our costs grow proportionately. We need to cover server and infrastructure expenses, fees required to publish and keep Annotate on official app stores around the world. These fees are beyond what a team of three can tackle sustainably.
We have thus decided to offer a Patreon for those who want to support our project and help us keep it running! Every contribution to the Patreon will go directly towards keeping Annotate alive!
We've broken our Patreon into three tiers, each with perks we hope feel fair. There is one perk worth clarifying, because we want to be clear about our philosophy with Annotate.
ALT If you subscribe to our Protagonist or Mentor tier, you receive instant, early access to Annotate in its current state. However, not locking our app behind a paywall, even during the testing phase, is important to us. As such, we will still be recruiting free testers through Google Forms while the Patreon is live: a batch of fifty testers at the start of September. This way, anyone who is unable to support us through Patreon still has a free path to Annotate early testing.
Another perk for our top two tiers is a free trial of our subscription. The Annotate subscription will not lock any features behind a paywall. Annotate will be a free app, with an optional subscription which allows for advanced profile customization!
Our Patreon will run until Annotate’s launch, which is currently scheduled for the end of September.
Your support, financial or otherwise, is greatly appreciated by the team. We thank you for being part of this journey!
See you soon,
Team Annotate
Annotate is looking for new Librarians! If you'd like to help us expand our library, check out our Form!
Please keep in mind that this role includes some responsibilities, it isn't only about testing the app.
We will get back to you on the 12th and 13th!
forms.gle/CavafWtM7ndb5LrW8
ALT Annotate is looking for Librarians, again!
As a Librarian your role is extremely important for our upcoming users! When our testers (or you) notice missing informations on book details (synopsis, number of pages, etc), you can come in and fill these gaps.
You get access to our portal and Librarian-only chat on our server. All you need is a Discord account, and some free time, as this is a volunteer role!
If you think you can help us, please fill the linked Google Form! The form will close after 24h, and we will reach out to the selected Librarians via email on the 12th and 13th. Currently, 100 spots are open.
See you soon,
Team Annotate
Annotate's readathon feature is here! Get a timer ready, track your stats and share them with your friends.
ALT Annotate’s readathon feature is here!
Annotate allows you to create your own readathon and post your stats to your feed.
ALT You can always pause a readathon, or end it early!
Select the book(s) you wish to read during your readathon!
Update your progress to get your stats. You can always edit your progress after the readathon ends!
ALT Your readathon will show up on your profile for all your friends to see!
You’ll also get a timer at the top of your feed page!
ALT Share your readathon to your friends, pick a doodle, download an image recap!
Annotate is looking for 50 new testers! If you’d like to help us find bugs and suggest features as we approach the official release, check out our Google Form!
We will get back to you on the 4th via email!
forms.gle/xcdFUaQjAgXGGLTe6
ALT Annotate is looking for testers!
We are welcoming 50 new free testers into Annotate, before the official launch, currently scheduled for the end of September! For our last batch before the big day, we are looking to stress test the app. As such, being a tester will require you to do in-app actions that might be unexpected, but might help discover hidden bugs we haven’t seen yet, and overall bring a pair of fresh eyes on user flow. We are looking to see if anything in Annotate feels unintuitive, audit existing features and discuss our roadmap with you.
If this is something you can see yourself helping us with, take a few minutes to fill the linked Google Form! We will get back to you in a few days. Please note that we will soon have a form to welcome new Librarians as well!
See you soon,
Team Annotate
Annotate is holding a Patreon giveaway! We are gifting 30 Protagonist Tiers. To enter, make sure to follow us, repost and reply with your favorite book and tag a friend!
We’re also holding a Mentor tier giveaway on Instagram! (@/annotateapp)
instagram.com/annotateapp
Happy to announce that Annotate is scheduled for release at the end of September! In the meantime, we have opened a Patreon! We wanted to be transparent as to why.
Annotate will remain free with an optional subscription for advanced customization only.
patreon.com/cw/annotate
ALT Tier 1 - The Sidekick
1€/month
Pick a username to use once Annotate launches.
An exclusive 'Sidekick' profile badge.
Tier 2 - The Protagonist
6€/month
Instant access to Annotate in its current state.
An exclusive 'Protagonist' profile badge.
Access to the 'testers' category on our Discord server.
One month of free Annotate subscription once Annotate launches. Test some features of the subscription with us now!*
Tier 3 - The Mentor
10€/month
Instant access to Annotate in its current state.
An exclusive 'Mentor' profile badge.
Access to the 'testers' category on our Discord server.
Access to the 'mentors' category on our Discord, which allows for direct communication with Team Annotate.
One month of free Annotate subscription once Annotate launches. Test some features of the subscription with us now!*
Your name on our 'Thank You Page'!
ALT With the subscription, customize your accent colour for lighter modes, and dark mode!
ALT Dear Friends,
Annotate is launching a Patreon page, and we wanted to be very transparent as to why we have decided to do so. Building the app has come with costs that have, so far, been paid by the team itself. However, as we grow, our costs grow proportionately. We need to cover server and infrastructure expenses, fees required to publish and keep Annotate on official app stores around the world. These fees are beyond what a team of three can tackle sustainably.
We have thus decided to offer a Patreon for those who want to support our project and help us keep it running! Every contribution to the Patreon will go directly towards keeping Annotate alive!
We've broken our Patreon into three tiers, each with perks we hope feel fair. There is one perk worth clarifying, because we want to be clear about our philosophy with Annotate.
ALT If you subscribe to our Protagonist or Mentor tier, you receive instant, early access to Annotate in its current state. However, not locking our app behind a paywall, even during the testing phase, is important to us. As such, we will still be recruiting free testers through Google Forms while the Patreon is live: a batch of fifty testers at the start of September. This way, anyone who is unable to support us through Patreon still has a free path to Annotate early testing.
Another perk for our top two tiers is a free trial of our subscription. The Annotate subscription will not lock any features behind a paywall. Annotate will be a free app, with an optional subscription which allows for advanced profile customization!
Our Patreon will run until Annotate’s launch, which is currently scheduled for the end of September.
Your support, financial or otherwise, is greatly appreciated by the team. We thank you for being part of this journey!
See you soon,
Team Annotate
Annotate's ePub reader now has seven colors you can pick from to highlight when you read in-app!
#booktwt
ALT Screenshot of Annotate's ePub reader displaying all highlights colors.
Annotate’s ePub reader now has seven colors you can pick from! Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple and pink.
ALT Screenshot displaying Annotate's 'My Annotations' tab.
All your annotations will be catalogued in the ‘My Annotations’ tab with the colors you have chosen!
ALT Screenshot displaying the ePub reader's modes: beige, grey, dark.
All seven colors on our beige, grey and dark mode!
You will never, ever get spoiled on Annotate!
#booktwt
ALT You will never, ever get spoiled on Annotate!
Annotate automatically blurs any post if a book is in your ‘Want to Read’ folder - you can still choose to view an annotation!
ALT You can manually mark an annotation as a spoiler as well.
Annotate’s formatting also allows you to hide any word, sentence or paragraph you see as a spoiler!
Annotate is looking for new Librarians! If you'd like to help us expand our library and test our app at the same time, check out our Google Form!
We will get back to you in a week's time! Fifty spots are available.
forms.gle/zDJz1kVPHUhc9FfY7#booktwt
ALT Annotate is looking for Librarians, again!
As a Librarian, you will be able to test the app, but your role is much more important for our upcoming users! When our testers (or you) notice missing informations on book details (synopsis, number of pages, etc), you can come in and fill these gaps.
You get access to our portal and Librarian-only chat on our server. All you need is a Discord account, and some free time, as this is a volunteer role!
If you think you can help us, please fill the linked Google Form! The form will close after 24h, and we will reach out to the selected Librarians in a week’s time. Currently, 50 spots are open.
See you soon,
Team Annotate
Annotate allows you to create as many folders as you want and display them on your profile, in an order of your choosing! Here are some of our favorite folders.
How are you organising your shelf?
#booktwt
ALT Screenshot from @diwatas' Annotate profile.
Fully customise your shelves with Annotate!
Annotate allows you to create as many folders as you want! They're displayed on your profile in an order of your choosing!
ALT A 'Women in Translation' folder by our user @jamie
A 'Classical August' folder by our user @chelsea
A 'LGBT+' folder by our user @gorgomenteia
ALT A 'lonely melancholic girl club' folder by our user @rhaenyra
A 'childhood nostalgia' folder by our user @anythingbutisa
A 'five stars reads' folder by our user @canyonzai
Wonder what it's like to use Annotate? Hear firsthand from our testers!
#booktwt
ALT Screenshot of an Annotate profile, reviews from users:
@pomegranate: This app is lowkey what Booktwt wants to be and you can quote me on that!
@inkndaggers: It’s so great just seeing what people are reading and thinking w/o discourse or intrusive recommendations because you accidentally clicked on some unrelated post.
@bookbeduion: I love the feature where you can add your own epub to your current read.
ALT Screenshot from Annotate, reviews from users:
@occulu: Guys, I deleted Goodreads I’m freee!
@bookswithdia: I genuinely love Annotate so much because I think a big part of why i sort of have given up on Booktwt was the Twitter algorithm spamming my feed with AI content, so having a place only for books and social media in general is amazing.
At Annotate, we like to give you options. Pick between light, beige and dark mode, plus five different accent colors to make the app your own!
#booktwt
ALT Make it yours
Annotate has a light and dark mode, but also, a beige mode! Pick between five accent colors: pink, red, yellow, green and purple.
Have you ever noticed that Annotate has two feeds?
One allows you to check up on your friends and their current reads, the other lets you see quotes and annotations about books in your folders!
#booktwt
Annotate is looking for new testers! If you’d like to help us find bugs and suggest features as we approach an official release, check out our Google Form!
We will get back to you in the following days! A hundred spots are available. forms.gle/ZUA1XJBmA1RBqWka6#booktwt
ALT Annotate is looking for testers!
This is not just an opportunity to use Annotate before it hits the market! We are very close to an official release and are looking to stress test the app. As such, being a tester will require you to import your Goodreads/Storygraph data (the larger, the better), do in-app actions that might be unexpected, but might help discover hidden bugs we haven’t seen yet, and overall bring a pair of fresh eyes on user flow. We are looking to see if anything in Annotate feels unintuitive, audit existing features and discuss our roadmap with you.
If this is something you can see yourself helping us with, take a few minutes to fill the linked Google Form! We will get back to you in a few days.
See you soon,
Team Annotate
While some big features are being added to welcome our next batch of testers at the end of the month, meet Team Annotate!
#booktwt
ALT Shrimpy, she/her, India.
X: @funkyshrimp83 Annotate: @thefunkycat
hi. i'm the developer for annotate.
i saw smile's designs back in october and thought they were incredible, from both a developer, and a book reader perspective. i asked him for the renders then and told him id implement them when i had the time.
almost a year later, i could not stop thinking about smile's app one night, and i had to open it up and start brainstorming how to get started with it. i stayed up until 5am figuring out the database schema and what i would need to get started.
ive been working on it doggedly, and here we are i dont think ive ever been this passionate about coding anything in my life. it's beautiful to see people using this app, enjoying it, finding bugs (for my lovely bug board) and helping make it better every single day.
i'm here for all questions about anything going wrong with the app, or something you'd like to see as a user.
ALT Smile, he/him, USA.
X: @smilemoredotexe Annotate: smile
hello:) i'm the ui designer & product designer for annotate.
i've been active on booktwt for about a year and a half now. my two favorite authors are clarice lispector and solvej balle, and my favorite character is klara from klara and the sun.
i started designing wireframes for annotate in october of last year with the goal of making a platform more carefully tailored to the needs of booktwt, along with my own needs as someone who's used basically every mainstream book tracker on the internet.
i wanted annotate to bring the social connection benefits of a community like booktwt, but specifically catered to discussions that would sprout from your reads. a place where you could ask (or answer) questions about your current reads, or share your favorite quotes, or buddy read with your friends all in the same space. discuss the books you love, at the pace you choose to take them
ALT Nini, she/her, France.
X: @wyvernism Annotate: @wyvern
hi, i’m annotate’s social media manager!
i first saw screenshots of shrimp showcasing the app in its early stages around the start of july, and thought annotate already looked like a reader’s dream. it reminded me of times where i would leave annotations in margins for my sister to read, as we are both bookworms.
i had the opportunity to get early access, and after playing around with annotate and talking to both shrimp and smile, it became very clear to me that their work deserved to be showcased and shared with the greater public. that thought was the start of me volunteering to create and manage @tryannotate :)!
i’ve been creating graphics to put the spotlight on annotate, and write the posts you see in your timeline, which isn’t foreign to me as i’m a journalist.
i’m here to bring you regular updates on annotate, and to sneak a vicious reference whenever i get the chance!
What’s your favorite annotation you’ve made so far? Here are some that made it to our bookmarks, written by our brilliant testers!
#booktwt
ALT ‘Some of our favorite annotations’, drawing of a woman sticking flyers.
Annotate user nightlemonn, quoting ‘Agua vivia’, ‘No voy a morir, ¿escuchaste Dios? ¿No tengo coraje, escuchaste? Porque es una infamia nacer para morir sin saber cuándo ni dónde. Voy a estar muy alegre, ¿escuchaste? Como respuesta, como insulto.’
Annotation: ‘This quote has been jumping around my head for more than a year, it has become my anthem, my battle cry, my internal struggle. Clarice Lispector thank you for seeing me and sharing this with the world.’
ALT Annotate user vynylrecords, quoting ‘The New Age of Sexism’
Annotation: ‘this quote remained on my mind after finishing two chapters, and this quote comes from chapter one, where it talks about deepfake technology and how it has been used to abuse women and girls.
it is harrowing to be reminded of how much danger there is in the world just to be a woman, and how much worse everything will get as technology advances, and laws and human rights protections remain lagging behind because of societal beliefs and a world that cares more for profits than about the safety of everyone. it reminds me very deeply of when I was so disturbed by all the news of deepfakes used against women, and the Telegram channels exposed locally to have been sharing non consensual sexual images that I became afraid to be on public transport and that fear still dips in and out of me’
ALT Annotate user rat, quoting ‘The Very Hungry Caterpillar’.
Annotation: ‘Hes just like me frfr’
Annotate user wyvern, quoting ‘Vicious’, ‘The word made Victor laugh. Not just because it was absurd, but because it posed a question. If Eli really was a hero, and Victor meant to stop him, did that make him a villain?’
Annotation: ‘VICTOR GET BEHIND ME RIGHT NOW’
Wondering what makes Annotate, Annotate? A few things, but let's start with our ePub reader, and the feature that gives the app its name: public annotations! #booktwt
(We forgot alt texts, but adding them now!)
ALT Screenshot of the Annotate app, ePub reader with highlighted quote of ‘The Nonexistent Knight & The Cloven Viscount’, blue circle around an ‘Annotate Quote’ button.
What makes Annotate, Annotate.
Annotate allows you to read your own downloaded ePub files by loading them into our app! Annotating a quote is just a tap away...
ALT Two screenshots of the Annotate app. First is the app’s timeline with a quote from ‘The Nonexistent Knight & The Cloven Viscount’. The second screenshot shows the book’s details.
Straight from your margins to your feed, update your friends on your current read!
And find all your friends’ annotations on the book’s page.
Wondering what makes Annotate, Annotate? A few things, but let's start with our ePub reader, and the feature that gives the app its name: public annotations! #booktwt
Team Annotate wanted to take a moment to thank all of you for the immense support we've received! We also wanted to answer some frequently asked questions. If you have any other questions, do not hesitate to reach out under this post and we will try our best to reply :).
#booktwt
Annotate is looking for Librarians! If you’d like to test our app, and help us at the same time, here’s how.
Five to eight spots are currently available. Send us a DM, and we’ll get back to you in a couple of days :).
#booktwt