Four Reading Tracking Apps

Reading Time: 4 minutesFor years I have been tracking my reading, whether by Goodreads or Audible but more recently, within the last four months, or so, I also started using Bookmory, booktracker and a fourth one but I don’t remember the name. The one whose name I forgot was abandonned because it forgot my login information after an app update and I couldn’t be bothered renewing it, especially as I was been nagged to pay a monthly fee.

Before you tell me that developers need to live, and that by paying for an App I help them improve the app that I like using I will remind you that every single app wants from 20-31 CHF per year. That’s not much when you use one or two apps, but it’s a gigantic amount when you use ten apps. Would you want to pay 300 francs per year for ten apps? I don’t.

Goodreads used to be an independent app that I enjoyed using. It was quick, clean and reliable, but eventually Amazon bought it so it became part of a monopoly company, rather than an indie developer. I like that I can see how many books, and even how many pages I’ve read. I don’t like that I’m giving data to Amazon for free, when they monopolise book sales, especially in English. I don’t like that they bought Audible but I like Audible so I have not jumped ship yet, but I could, because with Audiobookshelf running from a Pi I have my entire library in one place.

## Book tracker

Book tracker gives you features like the library to see all your books, some statistics, quotes, how many books you’ve read, how many you’re currently reading and the number of books you’ve read. It measures progress with a percentage. You can press + 1 until you get to the current progress amount. You also have a reading timer for when you’re reading either physical books or books in written format, rather than audio.

I paid 25 CHF for a lifetime of use with this app. I had not see whether I would stick with it but at 25 CHF I took the risk.

## Bookmory

Bookmory is an app that wants 31 CHF per day. For that price it shows no ads, unlimited text extraction, daily statistics – timeline, unlimited stats and unlocked themes. That’s for 31 CHF per year, every year, for years. It’s 3.50 CHF per month, so the price of one coffee per month. It’s not the ocean to drink, to use a french expression, but as I said, when you have 10 or more apps at 30 CHF per year each it becomes 300 CHF per year. That’s almost a new iphone SE per year.

What I like about this app is that you can track books by page number, by percentage or by read time. When you’re reading a physical book it’s easy to find the page number. When you’re reading a kindle book it’s easier to find the read percentage. If you use the Audible app it’s easier to get the read time. With Audiobookshelf you have both the read time or the percentage.

In my experience it’s easier to remember a number between 0-100 than hh:mm:ss like with audio books. It’s also faster.

## Bookshelf

In my opinion one of the worst thing that apps can do is prevent me from saving data from their app to my iCloud account. The reason for this is simple. I am paying for iCloud so the app is forcing me to pay to use something that I have already paid to use, mainly my own cloud storage. The second thing that I don’t like is that it either costs 30 CHF per year at half price or 72 CHF per year at full cost. The redeeming feature is that for 60 CHF per year you get the app “for life” which could be a decade, or it could be a year or two, depending on how well the app does. The cost, if paid per month, is 6 CHF per month.

Although minor, when trying to add two or three books they were not found in the database. For 72 CHF per year I would expect not to face this problem.

### Potentially interesting Features

The daily reading goal is measured in minutes rather than as a percentage or page number. I am not sure how it was tracked as the app lost its data and I forgot about it until writing this blog post. I have logged that I read 10 books this year and it extrapolated that at the current rate I would read twenty four this year. The trends for the last seven days are currently empty as I just re-installed the app.

## And Finally

Goodreads is a good book tracking app. It’s because it is owned by Amazon that I am less interested in using it. It has also become buggy and slow in recent years.

Book Tracker is the cheapest app. You can use it for free with all functionality, but you also have the option of paying 25 or 28 CHF for full access to the app for life, with no monthly plans. It works well but if you track page turns with one book and reading positing as a time or percentage with another then you will have two different sets of data so the streaks will be broken constantly. This isn’t critical, as, to me, the interesting thing is to read books, not keep reading streaks. Reading 20 books in a year is more interesting than reading 300 days in a row.

Bookmory is nice because it encourages you to backup, for free, regularly. This means that the likelihood of losing your data is almost inexistant. You can see the books you’re currently reading, as well as info on how many days it has taken you to read a book. I am on Day 48 for Poland by Michener, 63 for The Three Body Problem, and so on. The stats aren’t that good with this app.

If you go to the achievement page you can see all the books you have read, in reverse chronological order, from latest read book to oldest read book.

Bookshelf has great potential but by losing data two or three months ago, after encouraging me to pay for simple iCloud backups to my own cloud I lost interest despite thinking that it looked like the best app. I will have to revisit the app.