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Discussion on: I challenged myself to read every day, and it changed my life 📚

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zankyr profile image
zankyr • Edited

Out of curiosity, what are the features of the MyBook app, since you are using both GoodReads and MyBook?

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derlin profile image
Lucy Linder • Edited

Well, the best feature is that it is my doing, and it has an octopus logo :)

But more seriously, I tailor-made MyBooks to fit only one use-case: tracking my books read. Compared to GoodReads:

  • a clean and compact view of all the books, along with author and date read - GoodReads view is paginated and doesn't go straight to the point
  • ability to sort by read date, date of publication, or alphabetically (both ascending/descending)
  • personal notes attached to each book, which are not public in any way - I like the privacy
  • very fast search, in all fields (personal notes included) - GoodReads search is quite slow, and I am not sure you can only search in one of your lists
  • book and metadata saved: each book has title, author, date read, GoodReads ID (and link to GoodReads page), number of pages, publication date.
  • everything (notes and metadata) are stored in a simple JSON that you can either export or sync in DropBox. This makes it easy to build other apps and tools on top of it, and DropBox ensures backups are taken care of :)
  • If the internet goes down or GoodReads disappears, I still have my JSON file! I can even edit it manually if I wish to.
  • other nice features, such as a direct link to Google search to get other information

Bonus: the metadata are fetched automatically from GoodReads, you do not need to add them manually. Just search the title, clic on the right book in the result list, and fields get populated for you. I use goodreads-metadata-fetcher for that - a library in Kotlin I created and maintain myself → docs source

I put it on the play store once, but never updated it. If other people are interested, the source code is on GitHub and I can definitely improve a bit the repo to add a readme and an automated apk build, let me know!

preview

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zankyr profile image
zankyr

It looks very interesting, I’ll definitely take a look.

Thanks for sharing.