About In The Book Club

Sadie is the reason this exists. She goes through books faster than anyone I know, and every app she tried got something wrong: clunky, slow, stuffed with things she did not want, missing the things she did. So I started building one for her, she told me what was annoying, and we went back and forth on it until it was something she actually wanted to open. That is still how it gets made. She is the first person to use every feature, and plenty of them exist because she asked for them.

What the app does

You keep shelves for what you are reading, have read, and want to read. You log progress by page or percent, rate in half stars, write reviews, and keep notes only you can see. You set a reading goal for the year and build a streak. And you can read alongside other people: book clubs and buddy reads are a real part of the app, not an afterthought, so you can read the same book as a friend at your own pace and talk about it as you go.

What it costs

The app is free, and the free version is the real thing rather than a trial: shelves, goals, streaks, clubs, buddy reads, lists, messages, barcode scanning, and importing your Goodreads library all cost nothing. There is an optional subscription, BookClub Pro, that adds a reading insights dashboard, book recognition from a photo of your shelf, extra themes, and no ads. It is $9.99 a month or $49.99 a year in the US, and you can cancel any time from Settings. Two people pay the bills here, so the app is paid for by the readers who use it rather than by selling anything about them.

Coming from another app

Importing a Goodreads library is free and always will be. Export your library as a CSV from Goodreads, import it here, and your shelves, ratings, reviews and read dates come across. Anything that cannot be matched to a book gets listed for you instead of quietly dropped, so you know exactly what did and did not make it.

Your reading, your data

Direct messages are encrypted at rest. A moderator can read a message only if it has been reported, and every one of those reads is gated and recorded. Your shelves and profile are private unless you choose to share them, and you can delete your account and its data from inside the app. The privacy policy has the full detail.

The boring part

In The Book Club is operated by Leporati Holdings, LLC, registered in the United States. That is the whole company: the two of us.