Customer Letter · Assignment 05
Dear Mr. Cook,
My name is Chisara. I'm a 28-year-old professional living in Austin, Texas, and I want to tell you about the moment Apple Books gave me my book club back.
I used to be a reader. Genuinely. In university, my friends and I would stay up until 2am arguing about characters like they were real people. Then life happened. Different cities, different time zones, different schedules. The book club quietly died. We kept saying we'd restart it. We never did. Coordinating five people across three time zones for a two-hour Zoom call once a month turned out to be harder than any of us wanted to admit.
Then iMessage Book Clubs launched, and I want you to understand what actually changed.
It was not the feature. It was the friction that disappeared.
My friend Yemi sent me an invite on a Tuesday afternoon. I accepted it in ten seconds. By Thursday, all five of us were inside the same book: no Zoom link, no scheduling poll, no "wait, who's buying the book?" Just a shared reading room sitting quietly inside the app I already used every day. We read at our own pace. We reacted when something hit us. Marcus highlighted a passage on page 16 at midnight his time and by morning the rest of us had left three comments underneath it. That conversation lasted four days. No one had to be online at the same time.
What the feature understood, and what I did not know I needed, is that the best book clubs are not really about the meeting. They are about the ongoing, low-pressure conversation that a great book makes possible. The iMessage Book Clubs feature did not try to replicate a Zoom call. It replaced the thing we actually wanted, which was the feeling of reading alongside people we love.
I have since started two more clubs. One with my mother and my aunties back in Nigeria. One with colleagues from my MBA program. The spoiler protection means nobody has to wait for anyone. The progress bars mean we always know where everyone is without having to ask. The passage threads mean the best moments in a book become shared memories instead of private ones.
I am writing because I think you should know that this feature did not just improve an app. It repaired something I had quietly given up on.
Thank you for building it.
Warm regards,
Chisara Duru
Austin, Texas