Hi Product Hunt,
DreamBooks started because I became obsessed with children’s books when my son started listening to me read. I loved going to the library and bringing books home. Librarians sometimes told me that we were in a golden age of children’s literature, and it honestly felt that way.
At the same time, trying to find books online always felt wrong to me. Amazon throws you into the marketing and advertising space. Library websites can be slow and complicated. Neither feels like the children’s corner of a library, where the covers are out of sight and the whole thing feels like an art gallery. That experience was missing on the internet, and I wanted to create the closest thing to it.
The first version actually started on top of OpenLibrary. I spent a lot of time there trying to create a real layer of just children’s books, and I also worked on improving some of the data. But after a while I realized I needed more control over the cover, structure, and cleanup, so I created my own pipeline that pulls from various sources and turns them into a cleaner canonical book record.
The way I think about dreambooks is in three pillars.
The first is Beautiful browsing. I wanted everything to be minimal, front and center covered. You can browse by age, grade, lexical level, series, awards, authors, and curated lists, but it’s not just about filtering. This makes discovery feel visual and inviting.
There has to be another. Focused on debt. I didn’t want it to feel like another place that basically forces you to buy books. You can link your library, browse DreamBooks, and then borrow from your branch with one click. I wanted it to be easy to discover something great and then actually get it through your library, whether it’s your catalog, Libby, or Hoopla.
The third is A social reading journey. You can create profiles for your kids and track an easy reading journey: want to read, want to read, and finished. I am very concerned about the fact that children’s reading is different from adult reading. Sometimes the parents read to the child, sometimes they read together, and sometimes the child reads by himself. I wanted the product to make room for that. I also wanted reading to feel celebratory, so when a child marks that they’ve read a book by themselves, there’s confetti on the screen 🎉 Communities are also already part of the product, because I keep thinking about what happens when a child can see what their friends or classmates are reading. Maybe that will give them a little push to pick up the next book.
If you check it out, I’d especially love to hear what you find delightful, confusing, and what would make it more useful for your family, classroom, or library.