Help
Frequently asked questions
What this is, where the books come from, and what happens to what you track.
The basics
- What is Loreful?
- A reading tracker built around series and shared universes rather than single books. It keeps what a world contains, the order worth reading it in, and what you have already read — so "where do I start with the Cosmere" and "which Discworld books are left" are one question with one answer.
- Do I need an account?
- Not to look around. Universe, series, book, author and term pages, search and the atlas are public. An account adds the personal half: marking what you have read, ratings, stats and your Voyage.
- Is it free? Are there affiliate links?
- Free, and there is nothing to buy. No ads, no affiliate links to retailers, no tracking sold to anyone — none of it today, anywhere on the site. If that ever changes, every such link will be marked as one and the terms will say so before it happens.
Universes, series and reading orders
- What is a universe, and what is a series?
- A series is one publication sequence — Mistborn: Era One. A universe is the shared world several series and standalone books belong to — the Cosmere, the Discworld, Middle-earth. Most worlds are read as a universe and tracked as one; the universe index is where they start.
- What is the difference between publication order and recommended order?
- Publication order is a fact: the books sorted by the year they first appeared. Recommended order is a judgement, and it only exists where it says something publication order does not — an interleave across several series, a chronological preference, a prequel moved out of the way. Where the best sequence is the published one, there is no second order to pick.
- Who writes the reading orders?
- An order marked ✦ is ours, and it carries its reasoning on the page it appears on — every book in it is one we actually carry, checked title by title before it ships.
- What if a world has no reading order yet?
- You can still read it in order: publication order is there wherever there are books to order, on series and universe pages alike. A recommended order is written one world at a time, and only where it would say something publication order does not — so a world without one is usually a world that reads fine as published, or one we have not got to yet. A few are start-anywhere by nature, and those pages offer entry points instead of a single invented line. Want one for a world you care about? Ask: data@loreful.app.
Where the data comes from
- Where does the catalog come from?
- Open bibliographic data that anyone can check: ISFDB for series, books and publication data, Wikipedia for author biographies and many descriptions, Wikidata for the shared worlds themselves, Open Library for editions and covers. Every source, its licence and what we owe it is on Data sources & licenses.
- Where do the covers come from?
- Each cover is shown from the source that publishes it — ISFDB, Open Library or Wikimedia — and Loreful neither copies nor hosts any of them. A rights holder can have one taken down at any time: contacts@loreful.app.
- A book or series is missing — how do I add it?
- Signed in, there is a Suggest a book or series button wherever you hit a gap — an empty search, an empty shelf — and it takes a title and an author. There is no open submission form beyond that: everything else comes in by mail, and this draft lays out what to send. The more of it you fill in, the sooner it lands:
- Title
- Author
- Year
- ISBN or a link (ISFDB / Open Library / Wikipedia)
- Series / universe it belongs to
- What is missing or wrong
- Where you saw it (page URL)
- Something is wrong. How do I report it?
- Every universe, series, book and author page has a quiet "Something wrong?" link — a wrong year, a book in the wrong series. It takes a sentence and no account. For anything bigger, or for a takedown, write to us with the same lines the request draft asks for — above all, which page you saw it on.
Descriptions and chips
- Where do the descriptions come from?
- Two places, and the line under the prose says which. Most is quoted from a public source, and the credit beside it names that source. The other kind reads "Summary by Loreful, from public sources" — written for Loreful, for a book the open databases never described.
- A summary is wrong or spoils the book. What now?
- Tell us and we will fix the record: the "Something wrong?" link on the page itself, or the correction form. A summary is data like any other field here — it can be corrected, replaced, or removed.
Your shelf, your stats, your Voyage
- How does tracking work?
- Mark a book Want to read, Reading, Finished, On hold or Dropped, and rate it out of ten if you want to. When you finish something you can say when — today, a date, just the year, or "don't remember" — so importing a decade of old reading does not pretend it all happened this afternoon. Series and universes have no separate switch: their progress is the books inside them.
- What is on the stats page?
- What your library says about your taste, your rhythm and your progress — the shape of what you read, the eras you live in, and how far into each universe you are. Every mark on it is a door back into the catalog. It is your data only: Loreful shows no "N readers are reading this" anywhere, by design.
- What is the Voyage?
- Your reading year as a short film. It flies along the months you finished books in, lights the worlds you have visited, places your authors and your genres, and ends on a card worth sharing. It is made from your own library, and nobody else's.
- Who can see my shelf, my stats and my Voyage?
- You, always. Everyone else, only if you choose: a profile is private by default, and a private one is simply not there for a visitor. Make it public and a visitor sees your handle, your display name and the shelves you chose to show. Stats and the Voyage follow that one setting — there is one thing to get right instead of four.
- Can I export or delete my data?
- Both, from Settings, without asking anyone. Download my data gives you a ZIP of spreadsheets covering everything tied to your account. Deleting your account erases your login, profile, read states, ratings and tracked series — immediately, not on a queue. The privacy policy spells out the small print.
Finding your way around
- What does search cover?
- Universes, series, books and authors, all in one list, with tabs to narrow it to one kind. Search is the fastest way past the indexes when you already know the name.
- What is the atlas?
- A star map of the catalog. Every shared universe is a star; worlds that read alike sit together as a constellation named after the best-known world in it; the colour is the mood of the books. It looks the same for you as for everyone else, which is what makes "up and left of Dune" a thing anyone can say.
- What is Discover?
- Finding a book by how you want to feel rather than by name: pick the moods, themes and shelves you want — and the ones you do not — and get one ranked list mixing standalone books, series and whole universes. No account needed.
- What are those chips under a book?
- Terms, on three axes — genre, theme and tone — and each one has a page of its own with its definition, its neighbours on the same axis, and the universes, series and books that carry it. Try grimdark, found family or hopeful.
Privacy, in one paragraph
- What do you store, and who else sees it?
- Your email, what you have read, your ratings and the series you track — that is the product, and nothing beyond what the pages need is collected. One cookie keeps you signed in. There is no Google Analytics, no ad pixel, no advertising profile, and your IP address is not stored — not even hashed. Nothing is sold, and your shelves stay yours until you make them public. The long version, including your rights and how to exercise them, is the privacy policy.
Still stuck
- How do I reach a human?
- contacts@loreful.app — one inbox, actually read. About says who is on the other end of it, and the site map lists every page on the site if you are looking for something this page did not answer.