Fantasy book community Tome shuts down

Goodreads remains the dominant social media site for readers, despite the almost total hatred they seem to have for it. It has two overwhelming advantages: it already has the users and it's owned by Amazon. The latest competitor to shut down is Tome, which served readers of romantasy and similar genres. It was too expensive to operate on a userbase of 100,000, it reports.

We have sad news to deliver: Tome is shutting down, and the last day that it will be online is May 29th, 2026. Even with a community we love, Tome wasn't financially viable to keep running. Social apps with tons of memes, GIFs, and videos are expensive to operate, and the Tome Keeper model and badge marketplace, as much as it meant to us, didn't reach the scale we needed to cover those costs.

Perhaps unsustainable choices were made with the stack and the monetization model: the former gets locked in as soon as you get going and the latter gets locked in as soon as you set expectations. And even without Goodreads, the competitive environment looks brutal. Techcrunch's Sarah Perez counts numerous other platforms trying to make a go of it.

But the space to leverage that community to take on the still-reigning book-tracking champ Goodreads may be a bit too crowded now. Tome, for instance, had to compete against several other book trackers with a similar vibe, such as Fable, Margins, Bookly, StoryGraph, Bookmory, Pagebound, TBR, and others. (TBR's app not to be confused with the book recommendations site TBR, which is also shutting down in June!)

Can't help but notice that those linked websites are "no, download an app" gateways. One has pictures of books all over it that you can't even click! The only site among those linked in the paragraph above where you can click a book and read about the book and read things people are writing about the book? Goodreads.

Previously:
• Goodreads readers select 'The Hunger Games' as best book ever
• Goodreads has a problem with extortion scams and review bombing
• Why Goodreads is bad for books