ABOUT THESMALLBOOK

10 TheSmallBook Originals, written in-house, credited Unknown. Seven set in India: The Chai Stall CEO (the tapri that out-thinks the chains), The Queue (what India stood in line for in 1991), Mandi Math (how markets really move), The Tiffin Code (the system that never misses), The Wedding Economy (the biggest industry nobody runs), The Cricket Balance Sheet (the business under the game) and The Monsoon Portfolio (investing by the rain). Three from the wider world: Right Idea, Wrong Decade (timing), The Quiet Giant (how big organizations die politely) and The Rented Kingdom (owning your ground on platforms). Every one carries 10 or 11 lessons, real examples, honest caveats and its own generated cover, and every one is wired to the Graveyard. The library is now 460 books and 3,138 lessons, all free.

The case file grows a 14th document, and it is the hard one. THE TICKET: a facilities maintenance ticket from the night of the 14th, with the badge log beside it. It proves the shed man stood inside the sealed office minutes before the camera died, and it raises the question the whole file was missing: who rents a truth? The case is now 15 pages; veterans will want to re-read the emails.

The Originals get their mark. Every in-house book now wears a ✦ THE SMALLBOOK ORIGINAL band in the reader and on its page: written by us, credited Unknown, found nowhere else. The tune-up also got smarter: it asks what you want to fix first, then builds your shelf from that.

The NEW badge got generous. 60 books carry it this week: the ten originals plus the fifty real books from the last two rounds (the desi-first 22 and the founders 28), so the whole recent shelf reads as new, newest first. And the tune-up now opens with 1 or 2 books picked from your answers, then the fresh arrivals, chip on the new ones. Counts move together: 460 books, 3,138 lessons, 315 autopsies, swept across every page, meter and the og image.

28 new books, full depth. Desi Disruptors (the insight playbook behind Vicks, Maggi, Fogg and Ceasefire), It Happened in India (Future Group), Bhujia Barons (Bikanervala), For the Love of India (Jamsetji Tata), India Uninc, The Marwaris, Dhandha, Losing My Virginity (Branson), Delivering Happiness (Zappos), Onward (Schultz), Iacocca, My Years with General Motors (Sloan), Jack: Straight from the Gut, Made in Japan (Morita), The HP Way, The Smartest Guys in the Room (Enron), Liar’s Poker, Too Big to Fail, Den of Thieves, Barbarians at the Gate, The Toyota Way, Turn the Ship Around!, The First 90 Days, Hooked, Inspired, The Cold Start Problem, Obviously Awesome and Lost and Founder. Real chapters, named examples, honest caveats, and every quote checked: nothing invented, no AI slop, no em dashes anywhere in the new pages.

4 new graves. Ceasefire (created a category, then left it and nobody came), Virgin Cola (fought a distribution war with a marketing army), Air India (the Maharaja grounded by the state, bought back after 68 years) and Payless ShoeSource (sold shoes cheaper than everyone and went broke twice). The Graveyard now autopsies 315 failures, and every new book carries its graveyard connection.

TSB Gold, laid honest. A FREE vs GOLD side-by-side now sits on the Gold page: all twelve premium features in one table, status chips that tell the truth (LIVE NOW, IN PRODUCTION, COMING SOON), and the math at the bottom. The free library stays free; Gold only adds.

The NEW tag moved. The fresh 28 carry the “new” badge; the previous batch lost it, as it should. Counts move together: 450 books, 3,035 lessons, 315 autopsies, swept across every page, meta, meter and the og image. Covers for all 28.

22 new books, full depth. The Big Billion Startup (Flipkart), Simply Fly (Air Deccan), The Maruti Story, TCS under Ramadorai, two by Subroto Bagchi (The Elephant Catchers, The High Performance Entrepreneur), three by Rashmi Bansal (Arise Awake, Follow Every Rainbow, the Anu Aunty story), Dreamers, Recasting India, The Anarchy, Ambani & Sons, Tata Log, Bottle of Lies, Half-Lion, Breakout Nations, Amazon Unbound, Grinding It Out, Empire of Pain, House of Cards and When Genius Failed. Real chapters, named examples, honest caveats: nothing missed out, no AI slop, and no em dashes anywhere in the new pages.

3 new graves. Alma Mater (the t-shirt wave that crested), Tata Docomo (per-second billing won the users and lost the money) and the License Raj (the economy that died of waiting in 1991). The Graveyard now autopsies 311 failures, and every new book carries its graveyard connection.

Counts move together. 422 books, 2,811 lessons, 311 autopsies, swept across every page, meta, meter and the og image. Covers for all 22: real artwork where the public record had it, house-style typography where it did not.

Draw on the page itself. The pen button now opens a tiny ink tray — four inks, three nibs — and you draw straight over your words, no window, no taping in. Pen off (or turning the page) saves the ink exactly where you drew it. Photos pinch bigger and smaller with two fingers, and the notebook cover finally shows your notes as notes: title, first line, page count, tap to open. The YOU section carries a proper notebook card now, badge and all.

Speak, and it types. A dictate button sits in the shelf — the same voice typing the writer uses, ten languages, straight into the page. The page-turn finally looks like a page turning: the arriving sheet swings in off the rings.

EXPORT AS FILE grows a READER LINK. Your note becomes a small standalone page with a real ebook page-turn, a header, and the small book brand — uploaded as one file and shared as a link. Four a month free, unlimited with Gold. The share card got redesigned too: one cream sheet, a red margin, the brand quiet in the corner. And the reading-thread experiment in messages is gone; recommending a book stays.

Inside a note, the top-left is MENU now — it opens the notebook, and the YOU link sits beside it. The toolbar scrolls like shelves and carries a font book: fifteen hands and faces, from Homemade Apple to Bebas. The camera button is gone; the photo button already does that job.

Drawing happens on the page itself. No more pop-up window: a transparent sheet floats over your paper, you draw with lines right where the drawing will live, and DONE tapes it in place. And like Word, pressing Enter after a quote line returns you to normal writing — a quote never leaks into the next sentence by itself.

Photos can be dragged now: press and hold one for half a second, it lifts, drop it anywhere. The free watermark became a quiet signature instead of a shout, and Gold writers export without it. The studio finally puts an author in the byline instead of gluing it into the sentence, and whatever you framed there mirrors back into the page preview.

The studio can no longer refuse to compose. Picking an Inspire Desk image and exporting is now tested end-to-end in a real browser, and even a photo whose source blocks exports is silently re-fetched as a blob before giving up. The last-resort message finally tells you exactly what to do instead of "re-pick and pray".

The notebook banner obeys the truth. It reads your session the moment the page builds and keeps checking, so a signed-in reader never sees "these pages live on this device" again, even if auth boots slowly or an extension interferes.

The case grows morning anchors. The chats now carry 7:45 AM (the leak is loose, the press is calling) and 8:15 AM (Arjun's "I will handle it" — to a question Vikram never asked). The map rows for both are in. Some times matter. Some are just morning.

Verdicts are sealed now. What you post is read by the Founder alone; the wall only shows that you dared, as blurred tiles with nothing to sniff. His desk lists every verdict with names, emails and handwriting sheets, so the winner can be reached directly. WhatsApp is gone; a camera button snaps your sheet in-app; and you leave an email so the prize can find you if you win.

The notebook got a body. Pages turn with a paper curl, voice notes sit as small chips, photos resize with a tap, drawings save as drawings, and exports come out clean as PDF, Word, PNG or a shareable card. Guest notes follow you into your account.

Also: the graveyard countdown now always offers a full week (the 8h 30m window is gone), the case rules say it straight — pen and paper first, map everything — and the timeline carries the exact clock times that matter.

Document 13 is "The Noise." Nine true things that happened that month, and almost none of them matter. That is the point: a real file is mostly lives being lived, and the Founder grades the argument, not the name. The bottle exhibit testifies now too: read its label, then read document 07.

Photos in the file. The product shot from the launch kit opens the case; the Bhiwandi shed and the seized relabeled crates sit in the shed register. Every exhibit is captioned.

The notebook is dressed down. One dark cover, one hairline, calm grey ink. No gold, no noise. It reads like an object you own, not an effect.

The closing day always gives a full week. On Thursdays themselves, the clock counts to next Thursday, never tonight.

The notebook looks the part. A proper cover with a spine and stitched seams, a hand-written contents page, quieter paper, a calm toolbar, and your guest pages follow you into your account when you sign in.

Cheat sheet page two is now the work page. Page one stays loaded with the book. Page two is light: the identity line, the five steps with tick boxes, where it breaks, and a full ruled writing area for the week. Print page two, work the week, repeat.

The case closes Thursday 9 PM now, and every clock in the app says so.

Solved cases now stay forever. When a case closes it moves to the Case Museum on the Graveyard page: still fully playable, verdict and all, prize or no prize. The folder on the Graveyard now carries a clock too, counting down to Thursday 9 PM.

Your Year in Books. After one full year of reading, a page appears in YOU with your numbers for the year: lessons, finished books, streaks, notes, cases. One card, downloadable, shareable. Until then it is not there at all, exactly as it should be.

Cheat sheets earn the print. Tick boxes on the five steps, lines to write when you started and finished the book, and a My Notes strip at the bottom. Print it glossy, work it with a pen.

You said the little cover animation was too much. It is gone. Picking up a book opens it straight, with one calm settle, nothing in the way. Everything else from v278 stays.

Your Notes is a notebook now, not an app screen. Ruled paper, a red margin, ring binding, pages you turn. A note holds as many pages as it needs. Photos, voice notes and drawings go right on the page. It saves as you write, a note leaves only when you delete it, and export gives you one clean file.

The Case File is live. A manila folder on the Graveyard page with a CONFIDENTIAL stamp. Inside: thirteen documents on one dead company, a phone call you can listen to, and no answer key. Send your verdict privately to the Founder, or post it on the public wall for every reader. A real prize goes to the winner, announced by the Founder when the case closes.

Reading Journeys, renamed and sharpened. Kill the Overthinking. Never Broke Again. Laser Focus: The 7-Day Lock-In. Top the Class, Skip the Tuition. Zero to Founder. The Great Indian Money Stories. The Idea Machine. Win Friends, Win Big. The Iron Discipline Month. Your First ₹1 Lakh.

The Idea Autopsy lives in YOU now, rebuilt from zero. A banner that glows like the graveyard door: cross-examine your startup idea against 308 case files, four meters, a verdict in plain words, fixes that name the grave that paid for the mistake, an ordered scale-up plan, and live proof from the public record. The old audit and the wire are gone from the graveyard page; the corpses lead there now, alone.

The first lock. Free readers see the meters, the verdict and a blurred glimpse of the fixes. The full treatment, every fix, the plan, the family history of failures like yours, the OSINT proof, unlocks with Gold or the launch batch (the first 500 claims are free).

Onboarding questions became a chapter book. Every question is now a page, spine, ghost chapter number, the question underlined in yellow, and the pages turn in 3D as you answer.

This changelog learned manners. You see the newest updates first; the rest arrive when you tap SHOW MORE, no endless wall on your phone.

Onboarding completes; it is never skipped. The extra doors and the cross are gone, one GET STARTED carries you through all seven questions, and finishing opens the app with a clear 15-minute free taster. The clock only runs while you’re actually looking at the app, and a refresh doesn’t refill it.

At 5 minutes a polite pop-up: 10 left. At 10: five left. At 15 the gate, sign in (30 seconds, free) and your shelf, streak, @name and everything you read today stay yours forever.

The graveyard leads again. The 308 corpses and the search open the page; AUDIT YOUR IDEA and THE WIRE now sit below the graves on dark case-file boards that belong to the graveyard. Search has no DIG button, typing is the search.

Nothing borrowed, nothing extra. The reader is the full story, the case-study-page detour and the “images displayed from…” credit line are gone; grave photos simply carry our stamp, THE FACE OF THE GRAVE. The wire speaks in our voice (“tuning the wire… THE WIRE IS LIVE”), sources stay linked on the items themselves. Login inputs: the show-password eye sits dead-centre, tabs never clip, the 13+ tick is bigger and nudges you if it’s the one thing missing. Profiles centre on one axis. Motion everywhere it earns its place, floating shapes, breathing onboarding, card entrances, all silenced by reduced-motion.

Onboarding is now a page, not a pop-up. First visit opens a full-screen tune-up with a numbered timeline, one question per screen, and three doors: GET STARTED, CUSTOMISE MY SHELF, or “Use the app right now”, nobody is trapped by a quiz. The same full-screen experience reopens from You → Re-tune.

The YOU window has rooms. Settings are five departments, My activity, Look & feel, Notifications & sound, Privacy, Account & keys, each opening its own aligned window with a back button. MY ACTIVITY shows the reading ring (how much of the library you’ve read), lessons/books/badges counters, and the bold streak cards.

Profiles rebuilt to the reference card. Colour banner with shapes, centered photo and name, @handle, bio and links, follower pills, three round buttons up top (message / share / copy) and ONE big black SUBSCRIBE button, or 🔒 Request to follow on private accounts, with Requested ⏳ state and cancel.

Every grave shows its face. Opening any of the 308 autopsies quietly fetches the company’s photograph from the free public record (Wikipedia, keyless), plus a small gallery when the article carries more, display only, credited, linked back, and hidden gracefully offline. v263’s premium circular login card and the button-less Graveyard, cards that read like stories, audit and Wire in one flow, are all part of this ship.

One TheSmallBook channel. The shelf no longer repeats the five stories the official account already published, they appear once, under the channel’s name, in the feed and on its profile page. The channel’s profile now shows its complete work: the published posts plus the 23 library stories still coming. Every library story’s byline links to that channel page.

The full site audit ran, 46 findings, all fixed. Like the paid scanners do: share previews (og:title / description / image) were missing on thirteen pages, chat shares and story links showed blank cards; nine pages had no proper heading for search engines; three hidden form fields had no accessible name; the internal OG builder shipped with no title, language or viewport; and two book covers weighed 670 KB where 150 now does the same job. Every page now passes the audit, and the audit tool itself ships with the app so it can never quietly rot again.

The library now posts as TheSmallBook. Every library story carries the app’s own name, tick and logo, one channel, always posting, exactly like a real author page.

Hooks. All 28 stories lead with a question that sounds like the reader’s own 2 AM, “Would you keep posting if nobody clapped for four years?”, on the shelf cards and as the headline of every burst. The title and the book sit underneath.

The account card is complete. First name, last name, a real @username (checked live while you type, lowercase, unique, held by the database, SQL #12), a reader name people see, email, password, and below it, the required 13+ tick with the terms. The birthday stays: the tick is the promise, the birthday is the proof.

The sign-out gap is closed. Readers who joined with Google can set a password on the same account (You → set a password), and the sign-in page says exactly that. Nobody has to lose their shelf.

Quote mode, honest about everything. Three real bugs: a card could be composed twice (tiny text inside a big frame), a photo that failed to upload vanished silently into a text-only post, and a duplicated field in the publish payload. All fixed, failed uploads now stop the publish with a clear message and keep your photo. And one clear CONTINUE button instead of three same-looking choices.

Create an account, sign in again anywhere. Until now the only way in was Google. Now the sign-in page has CREATE ACCOUNT and SIGN IN tabs: your name, email and a password (8+ characters), and you can log back in on any phone or laptop, no Google needed. Forgot the password? One tap emails you a reset link. Five wrong tries cool the form down instead of letting it be bashed. The You sheet now offers email sign-in too. Everything else, progress sync, streaks, posting, DMs, works exactly as before.

The 13+ gate. Creating an account asks your birth month and year; under 13 is stopped in the browser, before anything is sent anywhere. Only the birth year is kept, never the full birthday.

The security pass. A 21-point shipping checklist was audited line by line. Fixed: a leftover code path that could have shipped a Google client secret to every visitor (removed, the slot no longer exists), uploads that were never checked for type or size (now validated before they leave your device), and a like button that could be double-tapped into fake counts (a one-like-per-reader index in the database). Story titles, comments and profile names are now length-locked inside the database, not just in the form, and every page sends a strict referrer policy. Supabase owners run the new SQL #11 (supabase/sql/hardening-v253.sql) once, it is re-runnable and proven against real PostgreSQL.

Ask the Library no longer looks like a settings page. The answer is a designed block now: your question sits above it as a quoted strip, the reasoning sits in a bordered card with the app’s yellow spine, and the sources below are real cards, cover, book, the lesson it came from, the category and the reading time. Sources are grouped under numbered heads (“From the library · 4”, “From the graveyard · 1”) instead of arriving as one long wall. And every cover is now read from the book itself, seven books whose covers are not .jpg had been showing a broken image in every answer.

The story shelf was empty for a reason worth explaining. The library’s own stories, fifteen of them, well written, sitting in the codebase, were loaded by no page at all. Nobody had ever seen one. They are thirteen more now, twenty-eight in all, each tied to a real book on the shelf, and they load where they belong: the Stories page shows them as proper cards with a Library Story badge, no fake like buttons, and a Read it → that opens the full piece. Ten of them carry a real quote card as the cover, drawn in this app’s own type and palette, not stock art. A brand-new visitor to an empty community no longer lands on “no stories yet”; they land on a shelf.

The Quote Desk finds. Studio designs. The desk used to repeat Studio, its own font picker, and a “find a photo” button that opened a second sheet on top of the first. That is gone. The desk now does the two things only it can do: find a line and find a photo, both right there on the sheet, and it previews your card in the shape you will actually post, 4:5, 1:1, 9:16 or 16:9, with the true crop. Frames, filters, backgrounds, fonts and export stay in Studio, once, where they belong. One job, one place.

Research hands you writing, not links. Searching a topic used to return sources, a Wikipedia link, a dictionary entry, some book covers, and you still had the blank page in front of you. Now the research tab leads with Ready to use: what the library’s own lessons actually say about your topic (real summaries, insertable in one tap), the citable facts pulled out of the Wikipedia extract one line at a time, and three openers so the first sentence is never the hardest part. Then the voices, the full readable books and the links, below, for going deeper.

And the small thing that was annoying you: the reader’s card on a book page, the cheat-sheet and Fuel buttons, no longer touches the pair of coloured buttons below it. There is 56 px of clear space at every width, and the alignment harness now fails the build if that gap ever collapses again.

Own messages are readable in dark mode again. A dark-mode pass had painted the yellow “you” bubble the same near-black as the page while the text stayed dark, your own words were invisible. Fixed, along with two sibling bugs the same audit found (pink tiles and unlocked badges).

Voice notes: press the mic and let go, it keeps recording (locked), with a green LOCKED badge, a live timer and the audio bars still dancing. Tap the mic to send it while locked, or Delete. Slide up to review instead, or hold-and-travel for the old send-on-release. Switching apps no longer kills a live note, it locks it. A 2:00 locked note sends itself rather than throwing a “too short” error.

Messages: the edit / delete-for-me / delete-for-everyone buttons now appear only on a long press, so tapping a voice note to listen never pops them up by accident. The + lives inside the composer capsule now (one soft disc that rotates as it opens) instead of floating next to it, and it is labelled “Send a book”, because that is what it does.

Quote section, much simpler: one sheet does everything. Open Quote Desk → type your line, or tap a topic for live quotes, or search. Pick a photo and it lands in the preview right there, no second window, nothing to go “back” from. “Why this line hit you” now sits under the card, on the page, where readers meet it. Studio opens only if you choose a baked-in card.

The font you pick is the font you keep. The page preview used to snap back to the old default the moment you left Studio; now the card and the page always agree, and the published quote carries the same layout.

No watermark inside the app. Framing, composing and publishing are clean for everyone. Only a download on the free plan carries the credit, redesigned as a small dark sticker with the brand dot, sized to the export. Gold has no chip anywhere. Dictation is gone from the Quote section, on purpose.

Last seen & read receipts (You): two switches. Show “last seen” or stay invisible; show that you read a story or keep it to yourself. The online dot lights up when someone was here in the last 90 seconds, and a writer finally sees “read by N” on their own story.

Private accounts, handled properly: nobody disappears from ♥ People any more. A private reader shows a lock; following them sends a request, they accept or decline from People or Notifications, and only then does the follow become real, no row is ever written into someone else’s account.

Store logos: the fake text-labels are gone, and the tiles are the real thing now. Sixteen brands wear their own app icon, Netflix, KFC, Duolingo, Zomato, Perplexity, Amazon, Uber, Adobe, Myntra, Nykaa, Meesho, Ola, ZEE5, SonyLIV, JioHotstar, Domino’s, Pizza Hut, Blinkit, Zepto, Lenskart, EatClub. Where a mark is a long wordmark nobody could read at 52 px, you get a bold brand-colour monogram instead of a smudge. Every tile is measured against its own square, so nothing floats. Two that were simply broken are fixed: the Uber mark was black on a black tile, and the Amazon file was a white rectangle on a white tile. The old placeholder files were deleted, and the service worker now precaches exactly the tiles the store links to, so the offline store shows logos, not holes.

Fixed: the odd text in the links on a profile. Small lines like {"k":"peek","v":1789830203108} were showing up under people's links. They were never links, they are this app's own presence, privacy and follow-request records, which share the same column as your links. The profile page was printing the whole column, so the machinery was on show. Now only real links are shown, in the profile header and in the edit box. Saving your profile also keeps those records instead of wiping them, before this, editing your links quietly reset your last-seen, your privacy switches and any follow request waiting on you. Any account that already collected the mess cleans itself up on the next visit.

Cheat-sheets, rebuilt from scratch. The old button printed the whole page, that is where eleven pages with blanks came from. Now it builds a designed, full-colour two-page A4 PDF. Page one: the real cover, the big idea, the five ideas that matter, a diagram of how they hold each other up, and every remaining chapter compressed to one line each. Page two: your 5-step plan, where it breaks, two lines worth keeping, and three books to read next. Backgrounds are per-category, so a money book does not look like a psychology book. It is measured to fit, two pages every time, for all 400 books, with nothing clipped and never a blank third page. Free for your first four books; Gold is unlimited and carries no credit line.

The buttons moved to where you have actually finished. “Get the 2-page cheat-sheet” and “Fuel this breakdown” used to sit at the top, before you had read a word, that is not when anybody wants either. They now sit in one card after the lessons, the quotes and your 5-step plan: the moment the book is behind you. The card is in the same 1100px column as the rest of the page and its own margins are balanced at every screen width, so it lines up with the text instead of hugging the edges.

The Fuel sheet looks like it belongs here now. Amount picker (₹199 / ₹499 / ₹999), a UPI button that fills in the amount you chose, a one-tap copy of the UPI id, a WhatsApp button, and a preview of the line your name will appear on: “This breakdown was fuelled by your name”. esc or a tap outside closes it.

Private accounts are server-backed now. A new SQL file (supabase/sql/follow-requests.sql) turns follow requests into a real feature: the Accept works instantly from any device, you cannot follow yourself, you cannot ask twice, and nobody can forge a request in someone else's name. The app checks for the table and falls back to the old handshake by itself if you have not run it, so nothing breaks either way. Setup guide: docs/SQL-SETUP.md.

Graveyard: tombstones have real depth (highlight, inner shadow, engraved epitaph in the category colour), cards press under your thumb, and the category strip is clipped like a ripped marker.