Tome to shut down as book-tracking market crowds

Tome, a book-tracking application and community platform, is officially closing its doors on May 29, at which point its servers will be turned off. The company announced the upcoming shutdown, stating that the service “wasn’t financially viable to keep running.” On that date, both the app and its website will stop working entirely. To assist its user base during the transition, the platform is advising users on how to download their personal data, which includes their posts, images, and a spreadsheet of their reading updates, before the final closure.

The platform had built its user base on the back of BookTok—a community of creators on TikTok who discuss and review books. This social space originally grew around readers, primarily women, promoting “romantasy” titles—a portmanteau of romance and fantasy—before expanding to include readers of all types. Tome sought to capture this demographic by offering features where readers could chronicle and rate books, receive recommendations, add photos of favorite quotes or memes, and share playlists matching a book’s atmosphere. However, the space to leverage this social media community to compete with the dominant book-tracking platform Goodreads may be a bit too crowded. Tome faced competition from a wide array of alternative book-trackers with a similar vibe, including Fable, Margins, Bookly, StoryGraph, Bookmory, Pagebound, and TBR.

Tome’s community of 100,000 readers ultimately proved too small to support the operational costs of a social application. In a blog post announcing the closure, the company noted that the platform was unable to reach the scale required to keep up with the expenses of hosting user-generated content like memes, GIFs, and videos. Separately, the book recommendations site TBR—which is distinct from the book-tracking app of the same name—is also shutting down in June. This recommendations site’s closure marks another exit in the niche space.

Why it matters

Tome’s closure illustrates the difficulty of competing against established incumbents like Goodreads in the crowded book-tracking app market, as the company failed to achieve the scale required to sustain its operational costs.