About Lignina
The books that matter most are the ones someone recommends to you.
Lignina is the community where every read finds its readers.
The internet offers you rankings, bestseller lists, algorithms that calculate what you should read. But the books that truly change you are the ones that someone, with eyes that had already loved them, placed in your hands.
Lignina doesn't compete with the big platforms by trying to recommend better than they do. It exists so you can find the right people.
How it works
- 01
Build your library
Add what you have read, what you are reading, what you want to read. Import your history from other platforms if you have it.
- 02
Connect with readers
Follow people whose tastes interest you, authors you admire, publishers that release what you like.
- 03
Share and discover
Write reviews, create lists, mark your favorites. Discover what others are reading and get recommendations based on what you already enjoyed.
What I believe in
A library is personal.
Your reading, your lists, your reviews. Yours. With control over what you share with the world, what you leave for your followers, and what you keep just for yourself.
Community curates better than the algorithm.
The best recommendations come from people who know books, not models that process them. Lignina's suggestions come from what you actually read and the people you follow, not from a commercial deal.
Books have context.
Author, publisher, edition, format, translation. It all matters. Lignina doesn't treat a first edition the same as a reprint, nor an audiobook the same as a hardcover. Books deserve to be understood in all their diversity.
The reader is not the product.
No ads, no hidden tracking, and no selling your data. Lignina is funded without tricks: by an optional membership with the price in plain sight, and by a small commission from the bookshop when you choose to buy a book through its links, which are always marked as such. What gets recommended to you depends on neither.
Who's behind it
Lignina SA was founded in 2021, in Spain, and there's just one person behind it. I'm Óscar Ardèvol. I read, design, and code, and I got tired of platforms that treat books as products and readers as data.
I'm building Lignina because it's the tool I wanted to use: a personal library that is also a conversation.
A brief philosophy
We read to understand. To understand characters, other lives, ourselves. Reading is one of the most intimate forms of attention we can give: hours, sometimes days, voluntarily surrendered to someone else's mind.
And yet, reading is almost always experienced in solitude. We finish a book and often there is no one to tell about it. We think something brilliant about a novel and it stays in our head.
Lignina exists to solve that little pain. So that the shared joy—that of having read the same thing as someone else, of having thought about it differently—becomes possible again, even if you are in different cities and don't know each other yet.