Goodreads: Book Tracker & More

Review by eFreeware

If you read steadily and like keeping a record of it, Goodreads is the app I would point you to first. It is a free Android app in the Books & Reference category, and its job is to hold your reading life in one place: the books you want to get to, the one you are partway through and everything you have finished. The developer describes it as the largest site for readers and book recommendations, and the numbers behind it are large, with more than 75 million members said to have shelved over 2.2 billion books.

What that means in practice is a catalog you can search, rate and review, plus a set of shelves that keep your own list in order. You can scan a book's cover to pull up reviews and drop it onto your Want to Read shelf, follow what your friends are reading, and join a Reading Challenge if you want a target to work toward. There are ads in the app, and it is free to use.

The app has been on Google Play since April 2011, and it carries a 4.6 average from more than 220,000 ratings, with over 10 million installs. Those are the kind of figures that suggest a lot of people have made it part of how they choose and remember books, which is the strongest argument for trying it if you are one of them.

Shelves, ratings and the shape of a reading year

The core of the app is the shelf. You search the catalog, mark a book as something you want to read, move it to currently reading when you start it, and then to read when you finish. Along the way you can rate and review it, which feeds both your own record and the reviews other readers see when they look the book up.

Status updates are the smaller, more regular piece of this. If you are partway through something, you can post where you are, which turns a private list into something closer to a running diary. I like the idea of that for anyone who reads a few books at once and wants to remember which one they put down and why.

The Reading Challenge sits on top of all of it. You set yourself a number of books for the year, and the app tracks your progress against it. It is a simple idea, and it is the feature I would expect to matter most to readers who need a nudge to pick up the next book rather than a place to file the last one.

Cover scanning and recommendations

Two features do most of the discovery work. The first is the scanner: point your camera at a book's cover and the app reads the reviews for it and lets you save it to your Want to Read shelf. That is a quick way to handle a bookstore or a friend's shelf, where you are holding the physical book and want to know whether it is worth your time before you commit.

The second is recommendations. The developer says these are personalized to your tastes, which in a catalog this size is the only realistic way to surface anything useful. You also get featured books and genres to browse, which is the more passive route into the same catalog.

Seeing what your friends are reading is the third thread, and for many readers it is the one that actually drives the next purchase. A recommendation from someone whose taste you know carries more weight than a generic list, and the app is built to let you pass books along the same way.

Groups, messages and the social side

Discussion happens through messages, reviews and groups. Reviews are the public layer, attached to individual books and visible to anyone who looks them up. Groups are the more conversational layer, where readers gather around a shared interest and talk about what they are reading.

This is where the app becomes more than a list. If you enjoy talking about books as much as finishing them, the group side gives you somewhere to do it without leaving the same app you use to track them. If you would rather keep your reading to yourself, the tracking features work without any of that.

Recommending books to friends closes the loop: you find something, you finish it, you pass it on. That cycle is what the app is designed around, and it is the part I would expect regular users to lean on most.

What it asks of you, and what to weigh

The app is free, and it carries ads. The app has no in-app purchases. For a service this size, that is a reasonable arrangement.

The bigger consideration is what kind of reader you are. Goodreads rewards people who keep their shelves current: rate the book, move it along, post the occasional update. If you finish a book and immediately forget about it, the app has less to work with, and the recommendations and friend activity that make it useful will thin out.

It also leans social by design. The catalog, the reviews and the groups are all shared spaces, and the app is at its best when you are using them alongside other readers. That is a feature rather than a flaw, but it is worth knowing that the app's center of gravity is a community, not a private notebook.

The most recent update is described as bug fixes and other improvements, so there is nothing new to weigh here beyond the app as it stands.

Readers who keep a list will get the most from it

The clearest fit is someone who reads regularly and likes a record of it. If you enjoy looking back at what you finished last year, or you want a target to aim at, the shelves and the Reading Challenge give you both without much effort. The cover scanner is a genuine convenience for anyone who spends time in bookstores or borrows from friends.

The second fit is the reader who chooses books on other people's recommendations. Seeing what friends are reading, reading their reviews and passing books back to them is the app's social core, and it works best for people who already have a few readers whose taste they trust.

If you read occasionally and do not care to log it, the app will feel like more bookkeeping than it is worth. It is built for people who want their reading organized and shared, and it does that job across a catalog large enough that almost anything you pick up will already be there.

A dependable home for a reading habit

Goodreads is the app I would suggest to anyone who wants their reading tracked in one place and does not mind a few ads along the way. The combination of shelves, ratings, reviews, cover scanning and the Reading Challenge covers the practical side of a reading habit, and the friend activity and groups cover the social side.

It is not for everyone. The app assumes you will keep your shelves up to date and that you are at least somewhat interested in what other readers think. If you want a private list with no community attached, this is more than you need.

For the reader who finishes a book and wants somewhere to put it, who likes a yearly target and who enjoys trading recommendations, it is an easy install. Start with your current book, add a couple you have been meaning to get to, and the rest of the app will make sense from there.

What's new in version 2.76.0 Build 0

This release contains bug fixes and other improvements.