Do you love books? Do you love your phone? Well, why not download some great apps that give you so much more bookish content to read, discover and enjoy.
I love downloading different apps to use, not sure why, it’s a bit of an addiction. I usually have over 140 apps or so on my phone including the ones installed on my phone already. There are a lot of apps I have on my phone that I only use around once a month or so but still keep on there for those very rare occasions.
Therefore, I’ve downloaded plenty of different apps that are perfect for book lovers. There’s obviously a lot out there that we could use so I’ve narrowed these down to the ones I either actually use or could see other people getting genuine use out of them.
All of these apps are available for both iOS and Android as I can see a lot of people who view my Instagram and blog use both, so I didn’t want to exclude anybody from this list. SO here it is, my list of the apps I think every book lover should have.
If you have ever read a book and used the internet, you’re likely to have heard of Goodreads. It’s the biggest online book-reviewing platform there is. But why?
It has probably the largest selection of books in its directory for you to choose from. Having been purchased by Amazon a few years ago, its library has likely increased further.
It offers a community feel and gives you the opportunity to follow Authors directly, follow your favourite Book-Youtuber or blogger or just follow your friends to see what they’re all reading and reviewing.
It’s not the only platform to offer this but was likely one of the first – Goodreads features something called “shelves”. These shelves allow you to place books into different categories with a few coming as standard. These include ‘Currently Reading’, ‘Read’ and ‘Want to read’. This allows people to let others know where they are with their books and also helps you keep track.
Finally, Goodreads integrates very well with the Kindle series. I believe if you use the Kindle app on an iOS device when you start a book, it will automatically track that you’ve started that book and I know for a fact it marks it as “read” when you finish the book on any device. It also synchronises your reviews with Amazon and Goodreads so you don’t need to feel any obligation to review twice.
I can’t mention Goodreads without talking about its number one contender at the moment, StoryGraph. StoryGraph offers many of the features that Goodreads does: book reviews, book tracking, a huge selection of books and recently they’ve introduced a community feature too.
The feature that sets StoryGraph apart from Goodreads is the deep and fantastically presented personal stats you get for all of the books you read. You get pie charts and graphs for everything: your favourite book-length, your favourite genre, what sort of book you like to read, how many total pages you’ve read and so much more. You can find some really fascinating things about the books you prefer to read and then possibly use that to choose something a bit different.
You’ll note on the app stores that StoryGraph has a higher rating than Goodreads. This is because there’s a growing discontent around Goodreads and its lack of any form of updates. I myself have experienced a fair few bugs, one is that I’ll add a copy of a book as “Reading” mark it “Read” but then see another version of the book marked as still “Reading”. Or a similar instance where I mark a book as “Read” and two copies will mark as “Read” and up my books read list by two. StoryGraph is fresh and new and so has none of these bugs as of yet, making it feel like a much freshers version of Goodreads currently. If you’d like to see a proper comparison between them, you can read my Goodreads vs StoryGraph article.
Leading on nicely then is the Kindle app. This is a must-have for anybody who wants to keep their reading portable. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been waiting in a queue (especially supermarket queues over the past year) or I’ve nipped to the gents and have decided to whack out my phone and see if I can squeeze in a quick chapter.
The Kindle app for your phone allows you to also synchronise your content across any Kindle-based device with an internet connection. Start Jade City on your Samsung S21, pick it up later on your iPad and read finish the chapter on your Kindle paperwhite. Also, it works wonderfully with Audible, which many would suggest is the best audiobook platform you can get involved with.
I’ve mentioned before that Audible is a platform that I don’t think I could live without. Do I wish they gave you more than one credit a month? Yes. But do I see how this would make no business sense as audiobooks are often more expensive than the monthly fee? Unfortunately so.
Audible as a service allows you to get one audiobook a month for free – which is great if you read a lot of epic books that can often cost £10+ to listen to.
Audible is also incredibly due to their smart Whispersync technology – essentially a terrible name for the platform’s ability to synchronise your eBook with your audiobook – start Outlander before you get out of bed, then pick up your headphones, open Audible and tap Play and it’ll pick up from wherever you were (to the nearest page anyway – it’s not THAT smart).
If you’re somebody who isn’t as bothered about reading all of the latest hits and just likes reading then the app Wattpad comes highly recommended by many bloggers and book lovers.
Wattpad offers up original short stories written by people directly within the app. You can follow specific authors, you can like stories and you can comment on them. It allows a place for those keen to write and read a place to put their content and read their content.
This is probably too easy of an option – Twitter could be on the list of apps for any group of human beings who enjoy things. Twitter, for many, has become the place for them to keep up-to-date and read opinions and news from their favourite sources.
I use Twitter to follow football, news, technology and of course books. By this I mean I follow bloggers, authors and some of the apps above to provide me with updates on their features and content.
I have my own Twitter account for my blog that you’re more than welcome to follow. Of course, I tweet a lot of bookish content but I also highlight a lot of other blogs as part of my blogger spotlight series and also offer plenty of other blogging advice and tips and tricks.
