BookAbout

Home page
Sign up page
Find a book page
Explore page
Chat page
Profile page

Inspiration

We know how the pandemic has made people feel isolated and lonely. We wanted to build a project that could really encompass the theme of this year's hackathon, #BuildingBridges. One of the problems book lovers face is finding people with similar interests to discuss their preferred genres with. We wanted to solve this predicament by creating a web application that allows readers to fellowship in a community meant for them. We settled on the idea of a book club web application for book lovers to communicate with each other from around the world. Depending on your interest, you can find people and communities with similar interests to interact and discuss with. If you like historical fiction, you will find someone or a group of people who also enjoy that genre to discuss your favorite books. Same for any other genre.

What it does

Our goal is to give book lovers a platform to build friendships with others like many book-related websites do not. BookAbout is a web application that allows users to create profiles, find other profiles based on similar interests, join book clubs, and, most importantly, chat about everything book-related. After all, BookAbout is all about the community.

How we built it

We conceptualized BookAbout on Figma and built it using ReactJs, Auth0 for the authentication, and Twilio for the chat page.

Challenges we ran into

We wanted to integrate a chat room into the web app but experienced some difficulties.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are primarily proud of our idea and the prototype we created in under 24 hours!

What we learned

We learned how to use Figma and also how to integrate auth0 authentication into our web app.

What's next for BookAbout

We would like to add more features like the ability to publish thought-pieces and opinions about books you've read and also a feature to find book clubs and libraries closest to your location.