Book/Read

A personal reading tracker with barcode scanning, metadata lookup, and sync.

This app exists because my wife looked at the mountain of professional, multi-million dollar options on the market and decided none of them were quite as good as something I could cobble together in my spare time. So, to mitigate the risk of being replaced by a more compliant AI husband, here we are.

Features

Scan ISBNs with your camera: Simply point your iPhone's camera at a book's barcode to quickly add it to your library.
Retrieve book data automatically: The app uses the OpenLibrary.org APIs to fetch detailed information about your books, including title, author, cover image, and more.
Track your books: Keep a record of the books you've read, want to read, who recommended it and any other notes.
Sync across all your devices: Your book library stays up-to-date between your iPhone, iPad, and now Mac.

Important Notice for the General Public

You are NOT the target audience: This app was built for a user base of exactly one (1) wife, four (4) relatives, and maybe three (3) friends who were too polite to say no.
The Entitlement Buffer: This app is not free. This is a deliberate barrier to entry designed to repel the entitled masses who enjoy leaving one-star reviews because an app doesn't predict the weather or validate their life choices.
The Trespasser’s Fee: If you ignore this warning and buy it anyway, congratulations—you’ve just donated to my "Tolerating the Internet" fund. Your money will be spent on a beverage to help me cope with your existence. (Here's the mandatory Privacy Policy)
Feedback Policy: Unless we're living together, your opinion is statistically irrelevant. If you find a bug, tell your own partner about it; I’m already busy enough being told what’s wrong with the app by mine.

Let's Review

If you aren't on the authorized list of people allowed to eat the good snacks in our pantry, please move along. There are thousands of other apps made by people who actually want your money and input.

Thank you for understanding.

However, if you insist...

Available for iOS, iPadOS, & macOS

The Mac Version

After years (felt like years anyway) of iOS exclusivity and approximately zero demand from the Mac-using public, Book/Read has arrived on macOS. We've skipped straight to version 1.7 to give the impression of a rich and storied history. There is no 1.0 through 1.6 for Mac. We don't talk about that.

What's New in 1.7

The immediate cause of this update was my wife holding up a copy of "The Q" by Beth Brower and asking, with the patience of someone who has been married to a software developer for a very long time, why the app she was specifically promised would track her books could not find this particular book. I had no good answer. I had a couch, and I had incentive.

Turns out OpenLibrary — a noble, free, community-maintained archive of human knowledge — doesn't have every book. Shocking. Apparently decades of volunteers cataloguing the accumulated output of Western civilization still missed a few titles. So I added Google Books as a fallback, because one institution isn't enough.

Search now queries both OpenLibrary and Google Books simultaneously, presenting results in clearly labeled sections so you can compare and choose whichever one got the author's name right. Books remember where their data came from, and "Refresh Book Details" is smart enough to go back to the same source instead of wandering off to ask someone else.

A "Powered by Google" badge was added to the detail view because Google's terms of service asked nicely, and I am nothing if not compliant with the terms of service of multi-trillion dollar corporations.

The app still costs too much. That's intentional. It's working.