No, all sources are ones you create and private to your account by default. So if a friend of mine recommends a book, I can add the book to my list along with adding a custom source for that friend/noting the reason they recommend it so I can remember to talk to them about it if I do read it.

If that friend ends up joining BookPocket and adding me as a friend, I can then connect them to the source I created and we can set privacy settings for what’s shared between us. But sources are inherently custom and could be a person, podcast, library, etc. I was already doing this with tags in my last book tracker, like #recommendation #recommendation-sarah would go on a book that Sarah recommended to me, so I could use those tags to surface books actual humans recommended to me. This just pushes that a step further and allows me to add notes both on the person and the recommendation about why they recommended it, and open up new vectors for prioritizing/yearly stats.

The core idea is to be able to prioritize my reading based on recommenders/sources I trust and tend to like their recommendations the most (and those I shouldn’t prioritize) rather than AI/algorithm based recommendations.