Bookshelf: Book Tracker & List 4+

I downloaded this app out of curiosity to see how it holds up against many other apps I have tried and I have to say that it’s impressive. I was surprised to see that they even allowed you to import your reading list library, which I did. I have about 500 books and I imported them all into Bookshelf with no problem. The only issue for me was, all the imported books were categorized by Bookshelf’s category system but were instead put into “collections” which I originally created on my Readinglist account. It’s a positive that they were able to import your custom categories for sure. However I would like for there to be an option to categorize all the books I imported with Bookshelf's category feature. Because when I add a new book, whether it’s to the wishlist or to the library it automatically creates a category. That way you can keep track of which categories you read the most and so on. Please create a feature or a button that allows us to “categorize all in library” or something like that.

Other than that this app is amazing and I can say that this will be my only book tracking app I use.

I like the app. I’ve used it since the start of the year. I got a discount for an annual subscription for $5 and so I figured at that price I might as well get the app. At first it was great. The UI is decent. Although a few of the decisions are weird. Like why is settings in stats? And why do I have to pause and finish tracking to discard it? Anyways, the tracking is nice and I enjoyed using it.

Then after a few months, the app started getting buggy. Sometimes I would track on the app and when I pressed done, the tracking timer would reappear. So I’d have to do it again. Sometimes, the app would just plain delete one of my tracking entries. Lately, I’ve had to close the app and reopen it to even get the tracking to complete.

All that is annoying but bugs are inevitable, I get it. I’m a developer myself. However, upon reaching out to the dev (multiple times) in order to report on these bugs and give him evidence and clips so that the dev could work on it, I got nothing. No response. I think I reached out 3 times about all those issues with nothing. When the bug is with one of your main app features, I feel like that should be a priority. At the very least respond in order to reassure the user that the bug is being worked on. In any case, I’m moving on to a different app. Was good until all the bugs starting showing up.

Love this app and just recommended it to my book club after a few weeks of use! Here’s why: I recently joined a book club and not all of the books are page turners; but I wanted to stay engaged and on track. I also read my own non-fiction selection in the morning and the book club, fiction selection at night. Therefore, I wanted a way to track books read, time read per day/time it took to read each book.

I tried apps like Good Reads and a few others and found them to be glorified digital bookstores (with a horrible, glitchy, and clunky user experience).

This app is easy to use, has a clean interface, and I love the in-app reading timer/notes feature 🙌🏽! As someone who reads daily and reads multiple books at once, I found it more than worth it to upgrade to the paid experience. I’ve selected all of my books outside of the app thus far, so I haven’t used it for discoverability yet; but I’m hoping the app exceeds my expectations in that area as well!