For years my reading lived in two apps. A traditional book tracker held the books themselves: everything I’d read, and a to-be-read list that quietly grew to thousands of titles. My notes app held the part I actually cared about, which was who had told me about each one and why.
I tried to close the gap with tags. When a friend recommended something, the book got a tag with their name in it, like recommendation-sarah. That got me surprisingly far. By the time I moved on, I had more than seventy of those tags, one for every person whose suggestions I wanted to remember.
It was still clunky. A tag is a word stuck on a book. It couldn’t tell me that Sarah had sent me three books and I’d loved all of them, and the reason she gave me was sitting in a note in a different app. I usually went looking for it in a bookshop, phone in one hand, scrolling through old notes for a name.
So I built the app I kept wishing for. In BookPocket, the person who recommended a book is part of its record. Their name and their reason sit right on the book, and once you’ve read it, your rating sits there too. After a while, you can see whose taste matches yours, which turns out to be a pretty good way to choose what to read next.
BookPocket is still small, and I’m still building it. You can see what’s coming on the roadmap. If something’s broken, or you have an idea, email support@bookpocket.app. It comes straight to me.
My to-be-read list is still longer than I’ll live to read, by the way. But now I know exactly who to blame for a lot of them.