The scroll
Kelly has always been a reader. Hers are the kind of shelves that get rearranged on a quiet Sunday, where the special editions face outwards so the sprayed edges catch the light, and where the to-be-read pile has quietly started a to-be-read pile of its own.
But Dean kept noticing a small ritual. Standing in a bookshop, or halfway through a preorder page late at night, Kelly would stop, pull out her phone, and start scrolling. Back through weeks and months of photos, past everything else life had captured, hunting for a picture of her shelves so she could answer a question that should have been simple: do I already own this one?
Sometimes she found the photo. Sometimes she bought the book anyway and found out at home. Every reader with a big library knows that feeling. Dean just happened to be the kind of person who could do something about it.
One night shift
Kelly is a police officer, and night shifts are long. One night in December 2025, with Kelly out on shift and the house to himself, Dean opened his laptop and started building her a bookshelf that would fit in her pocket.
The very first line of code was saved at 11:32pm. It was called Bookmark from the very first night: a way to hold your place in your own library, so that nobody would ever have to scroll through their camera roll in a bookshop again. Through the small hours it took shape. Scan a barcode and the book landed on her shelf. Type a title and the answer came back in a second: yes, you have it. Or no, go on then.
He showed her the app that night. She has been its first user, its first tester and its most honest critic ever since.
That is the part of the story that has never changed. Every feature since has started the same way: a reader ran into something annoying, and someone who loved them decided to fix it.
From one night to now
Eight days later, version 1.0 was submitted to the App Store. Then the refining began, and it has not really stopped. What started as a shelf grew into everything a reading life needs, one late night at a time.
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December 2025
A shelf in a pocket
11:32pm one December night: the first commit. By the time it reached the App Store it already held a library, a wishlist, preorders and subscriptions, the essentials for one very organised reader.
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January 2026
Version 1.0, then a sprint
Goodreads import, home-screen widgets with countdown rings, a full reading statistics dashboard, a reading timer, multi-barcode scanning, a TBR randomiser and the very first bookshelf view with spines. Within the first month came the feature-request board, where readers vote on what gets built next.
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February 2026
Reading is better together
Social profiles and follows, then book clubs with proposals, votes, schedules and discussion threads. Version 2.0. On another late night at the end of January, work on the Android app had quietly begun.
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March 2026
The shelf gets real
Photograph your spines and sprayed edges and share them with the community so everyone's shelf looks right. The virtual bookshelf was rebuilt with stacks, zoom and themes, and Bookmark for Android reached readers.
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April & May 2026
Built for the details
ARC tracking, a guided book-club flow with invite links and QR codes, a preorder catalogue with vendor logos, a curated subscription picker, dozens of new genres, and this website.
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June 2026
By readers, for readers
A community Special Editions catalogue curated by contributors, a marketplace for special-edition resale, and wishlist match alerts so the edition you have been hunting finds you.
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July 2026 onwards
Everywhere you read
Multi-device cloud sync, a reading timer that lives on the Dynamic Island, and spoiler-safe chapter discussions in book clubs. Now on version 3 across both platforms, and counting.
Shaped by a community
Within the first month, Dean added something small that changed everything: a place inside the app where readers could request features and vote on each other's ideas. From that moment Bookmark stopped being one person's gift and became a community's project.
Their fingerprints are all over the changelog. Dozens of new genres and sub-genres. Decimal series numbers for the 2.5 novellas. Bookshelf sizes and themes. Quarter-star ratings, because sometimes a book really is a 4.25. Spoiler-safe book-club discussions that unlock chapter by chapter. A catalogue of special editions that readers photograph, submit and curate themselves.
Today that community shares the spine and edge photos that make everyone's shelves look right, runs book clubs inside the app, keeps the preorder and subscription catalogues honest, and gathers on Instagram, which is where the next feature usually gets its start. We could not have built this without you, and we would not want to.
Bookmark is still, at heart, the app Dean built for Kelly one night in December. It just has a lot more readers on the shelf now. Thank you for being one of them.
Kelly & Dean