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 does not compete with 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 from models that process them. Suggestions on Lignina come from what you actually read and the people you follow, not from a commercial deal.
Books have context.
Author, publisher, edition, format, translation. Everything matters. Lignina does not 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 advertising, no hidden tracking, and no selling your data. Lignina is supported without tricks: with an optional membership with transparent pricing, and a small commission from bookstores when you choose to buy a book through its links, which are always clearly marked. What is recommended to you does not depend on either.
Who's behind it
Lignina was founded in 2021, in Spain, and there is only one person behind it. I'm Óscar Ardèvol. I read, design, and code, and I grew tired of platforms that treat books as products and readers as data.
I'm building Lignina because it is 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 small heartache. So that the shared excitement—having read the same thing as someone else, having thought about it in a different way—is possible again, even if you are in different cities and don't know each other yet.