Bookshelf: Book Tracker & List

I like the app. I’ve used it since the start of the year. I got a discount for an annual subscription for $5 and so I figured at that price I might as well get the app. At first it was great. The UI is decent. Although a few of the decisions are weird. Like why is settings in stats? And why do I have to pause and finish tracking to discard it? Anyways, the tracking is nice and I enjoyed using it. Then after a few months, the app started getting buggy. Sometimes I would track on the app and when I pressed done, the tracking timer would reappear. So I’d have to do it again. Sometimes, the app would just plain delete one of my tracking entries. Lately, I’ve had to close the app and reopen it to even get the tracking to complete. All that is annoying but bugs are inevitable, I get it. I’m a developer myself. However, upon reaching out to the dev (multiple times) in order to report on these bugs and give him evidence and clips so that the dev could work on it, I got nothing. No response. I think I reached out 3 times about all those issues with nothing. When the bug is with one of your main app features, I feel like that should be a priority. At the very least respond in order to reassure the user that the bug is being worked on. In any case, I’m moving on to a different app. Was good until all the bugs starting showing up.

I love this app. But the search engine is such a disappointment, finding books is horrible. The results don’t match at all what I type in the search bar, for example I was looking to add “The song of Achilles” to my wishlist and I typed it exactly like that and the results where all Arabic books that literally have no correlation with the book and the LAST result was the book I was looking for. Another example is when I was looking for Neil Gaiman’s “The Sandman” and there where literally 0 results for it, it was all, again, books with 0 connection with the one I was looking for. However, I look it up for a second time another day and it did appear but only one version, one would think that the whole series or books related to it would appear but no. You have to be really specific to find the volumes, which, in my opinion, is not ideal. I looked it up a third time on another day and the results where different so apparently the results vary on the day. Additionally, you can’t even search by author’s name, only by book titles. I tried playing with the region and languages to see but that doesn’t even seem to work since I said earlier, I had Arabic books in my results and I had the language on English. I don’t know if it something that only happens to me but I really hope that it is and the devs would help me, if not then they should definitely work in that because the app is perfect and I love it but that is the only thing I don’t like.

I downloaded this app out of curiosity to see how it holds up against many other apps I have tried and I have to say that it’s impressive. I was surprised to see that they even allowed you to import your reading list library, which I did. I have about 500 books and I imported them all into Bookshelf with no problem. The only issue for me was, all the imported books were categorized by Bookshelf’s category system but were instead put into “collections” which I originally created on my Readinglist account. It’s a positive that they were able to import your custom categories for sure. However I would like for there to be an option to categorize all the books I imported with Bookshelf's category feature. Because when I add a new book, whether it’s to the wishlist or to the library it automatically creates a category. That way you can keep track of which categories you read the most and so on. Please create a feature or a button that allows us to “categorize all in library” or something like that. Other than that this app is amazing and I can say that this will be my only book tracking app I use.