Most apps greet you with an interrogation. Name, age, interests, twenty checkboxes, and a progress bar that never seems to end. LinqFolio does the opposite. When you create your account, we ask for three books you loved, then one to three books you abandoned. That's it.
Three books to launch a whole app? Yes. And it's neither laziness nor a shortcut on our part — it's a deliberate decision, one we'll stand behind all the way through this article.
Three, because that's exactly what it takes
With fewer than three books, the app simply can't do anything meaningful. Your taste doesn't fit in a single title — one book can be a fluke, a gift, a one-off. Even two titles stay too ambiguous to draw anything reliable from. Three is the precise point at which a reader profile starts to take shape, where patterns line up and a coherence appears.
Above three, the logic flips. Each additional book adds less and less new information while costing more and more in motivation. Nobody wants to fill in twenty fields before they've even seen the app. Three is the perfect cup of coffee — enough to wake you up, not enough to upset your stomach.
So what are the abandoned books for?
Two reasons. The first is that what you don't enjoy is every bit as informative as what you love. Without that signal, we'd end up suggesting universally praised classics that you, of all people, find unreadable. Knowing what you reject is knowing where not to send you.
The second is that we also ask why you abandoned each one. Too dense? Too slow? Lost the thread around chapter four? That nuance changes everything. A book dropped for being too slow tells a different story than one dropped for being confusing — and the app won't react the same way to either.
What happens the moment you confirm
You tap “Confirm,” and several things fire at once:
- Your Reading DNA is computed. A few seconds later, you get a reader archetype (one of twelve) and a short description of yourself. Think of it as a personality test, but for your reading life — and noticeably more accurate.
- Your feed is already personalized. The recommendations, the home suggestions, the compatibility score shown when you scan a book — everything is tuned to your taste from the very first screen.
- Your public profile is set up. Your three loved books are visible. That's what other readers see first when they visit your page — your literary calling card.
No empty home screen telling you to “add your first book” before anything happens. The app is fully alive from the first second.
What stays private, what becomes public
The two lists don't follow the same path, and that's on purpose.
Your three loved books become visible on your profile. They're the first thing another reader sees, and that's exactly what can spark a swap, a message, or a conversation. Showing them is the whole point.
Your abandoned books, on the other hand, stay private. They're only used to calibrate your profile — nobody else sees them. No public notification, no sharing, no judgement. Whatever didn't click between you and a book is nobody's business but yours.
And everything else — read, owned, genres?
You've probably noticed we don't ask for anything else. No list of books you've already read, no full library catalogue, no preferred genres to tick. That's not an oversight — it's the same principle carried all the way through.
Those things build up over time, as you read. When you finish a book, the app asks. When you add a title to your shelf, it's tracked as a book you own — useful later when you want to offer it for swap. When you want to set your favourite genres, you can do it from settings, on your own schedule.
This gradual approach has one simple benefit: we only ask for a piece of information when it actually becomes useful, never before. That's exactly how you avoid fifteen-minute onboardings that make people want to delete the app before they've tried it.
What if I want to change my picks?
Any time. You can re-run a Reading DNA analysis with a new selection, add or remove favourites, log a new abandoned read. Nothing is set in stone: every change recomputes your profile and adjusts your recommendations.
And if your dominant archetype eventually shifts — because your reading has gradually pulled you somewhere new — the app notices and tells you. It's one of our beta testers' favourite moments: watching your profile slide quietly from Classic Storyteller to Consciousness Explorer over six months is concrete proof that you've grown as a reader.
The deal is explicit
We're writing this article because most apps never explain why they ask for a given piece of information. You fill it in, you confirm, and you only ever find out what happened to the data — if you ever do — much later.
On LinqFolio, here's the deal, in black and white. We ask for three loved books and one to three abandoned ones. The loved ones are visible; the abandoned ones stay private. Both feed your reader profile and your recommendations — and nothing else. We don't sell data to third parties, and our hosting stays primarily in Europe. The full breakdown lives in our privacy policy.
In short
Three loved books, one to three abandoned. A few seconds to pick them. An app that understands you from the first screen — and tells you plainly what it does with what you hand over.
You can download LinqFolio for iOS and Android. Three books — that's the whole entry ticket.