Monitor Your Reading Habits With Bookly
iOS: I love reading, I love. When I was a kid, I was that kid who used to go to the library and – no kidding – go through a huge stack of books in one sitting (mostly the Choose Your Own Adventure books that I liked). I wish I had more time to read now, but I’m sure a little fun in my literary pursuits can help.
The Bookly iOS app (sorry Android fans) lets you apply an insane amount of tracking stats to your book collection. Its free version contains many useful features for organizing your physical book collection, keeping track of reading time, and getting useful statistics about the types of books you like to read and how long it takes you to view them. It even gives you an estimate of when you can finish your current romance based on your estimated pace. Heck, you can even mark when you’ve lent someone a book from your collection (and track who has it).
Its pro version is (annoyingly) locked behind a subscription because everyone has to make money, but I’d almost consider spending $ 30 on a yearly membership. It gets rid of the pesky Bookly ads and more importantly, it lets you track more than ten books at a time.
Getting started with Bookly
Adding a title to your Bookly collection is easy. With the My Books tab open in the application, simply click on the plus sign in the upper left corner. You can find the book you are reading online, but it was easier for me to use the book’s ISBN scanning app – its barcode – to automatically fill in all the key details. Take a picture of the cover, if the app doesn’t pull it in for you, hit Save Book and start reading.
And by “start reading” I mean that you should now click the “Start Reading” button under one of your books when you start your reading session. The app will keep track of how long you read, and by entering the page you want, you get a small estimate of how long it might take you to finish the book at that speed. You can add any thoughts that come to your mind as you read the book, as well asany brilliant quotes you want to remember for later.
I found it helpful to use an app to track your reading goal – how many hours you want to devote to a printed (or digital) page in a month. The app can help nudge you so you don’t fail, and you can set an even more ambitious annual goal if you know you want to read a certain number of books. Unfortunately, this feature is locked behind the Bookly pro subscription, which costs you $ 2.50 a month if you opt for an annual subscription.
Otherwise, Bookly is filled with annoying ads – its only weakness. But I will tolerate occasional (almost frequent) tiny video ads to better understand my reading activity. It also means I can stop using the random mess around the bed as bookmarks.
Do you have an iOS or Android app that you really like? Tell us about it: david.murphy@lifehacker.com .