Tome Book-Tracking App to Shut Down on May 29

Tome, a book-tracking app and book lovers community built on the back of the BookTok community, is closing its doors. The app will officially shut down on May 29, at which point its servers will be shut off and its website will also shut down. BookTok consists of creators who discuss and review books on TikTok.

Tome offered readers a place to chronicle and rate their books, get recommendations, add photos of things like favorite quotes or memes, and share playlists that match the book's vibes. Tome's community consisted of 100,000 readers. In a statement, the company said its community of 100,000 readers wasn’t able to reach the scale needed to keep up with the expense of running a social app that supported memes, GIFs, and video.

The company said that in the end the service wasn’t financially viable to keep running. TechCrunch reported that Tome had to compete against several other book trackers with a similar vibe. The competitive landscape includes apps such as Fable, Margins, Bookly, StoryGraph, Bookmory, Pagebound and TBR.

Tome hints at that environment in its announcement of the closure. The post also advises Tome users on how to download their data, including posts and images and a spreadsheet of their reading updates. The app was one of many that caters to a growing demographic of Gen Z readers who create book-related content on social media.

That group began mainly as women promoting their favorite “romantasy” titles but has since grown to include readers of all types. The space to leverage that community to take on the still-reigning book-tracking champion Goodreads may be a bit too crowded now. Tome said the app will officially shut down on May 29.