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The 13 Best Book Review Sites and Book Rating Sites

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Nobody likes to spend money on a new book only to face that overwhelming feeling of disappointment when it doesn't live up to your expectations. The solution is to check out a few book review sites before you hit the shops. The greater the diversity of opinions you can gather, the more confidence you can have that you'll enjoy the title.

Which book review and book rating sites are worth considering? Here are the best ones.

1. Goodreads

Goodreads is arguably the leading online community for book lovers. If you want some inspiration for which novel or biography to read next, this is the book review site to visit.

There's an endless number of user-generated reading lists to explore, and Goodreads itself publishes dozens of "best of" lists across a number of categories. You can do a book search by plot or subject , or join book discussions and reading groups with thousands of members.

You can participate in the community by adding your own rankings to books you've read and leaving reviews for other people to check out. Occasionally, there are even bonus events like question and answer sessions with authors.

2. LibraryThing

LibraryThing is the self-proclaimed largest book club in the world. It has more than 2.3 million members and is one of the best social networking platforms for book lovers .

With a free account, you can add up to 200 books to your library and share them with other users. But it's in the other areas where LibraryThing can claim to be one of the best book review sites.

Naturally, there are ratings, user reviews, and tags. But be sure to click on the Zeitgeist tab at the top of the page. It contains masses of information, including the top books by rating, by the number of reviews, by authors, and loads more.

3. Book Riot

Book Riot is a blog. It publishes listicles on dozens of different topics, many of which review the best books in a certain genre. To give you an idea, some recent articles include Keeping Hoping Alive: 11 Thrilling YA Survival Stories and The Best Historical Fiction Books You’ve Never Heard Of .

Of course, there's also plenty of non-reading list content. If you have a general affinity for literature, Book Riot is definitely worth adding to the list of websites you browse every day.

Bookish is a site that all members of book clubs should know about. It helps you prep for your next meeting with discussion guides, book quizzes, and book games. There are even food and drink suggestions, as well as playlist recommendations.

But the site is more than just book club meetings. It also offers lots of editorial content. That comes in the form of author interviews, opinion essays, book reviews and recommendations, reading challenges, and giveaways.

Be sure to look at the Must-Reads section of the site regularly to get the latest book reviews. Also, it goes without saying that the people behind Bookish are book lovers, too. To get a glimpse of what they’re reading, check out their Staff Reads articles.

5. Booklist

Booklist is a print magazine that also offers an online portal. Trusted experts from the American Library Association write all the book reviews.

You can see snippets of reviews for different books. However, to read them in full, you will need to subscribe. An annual plan for this book review site costs $184.95 per year.

6. Fantasy Book Review

Fantasy Book Review should be high on the list for anyone who is a fan of fantasy works. The book review site publishes reviews for both children's books and adults' books.

It has a section on the top fantasy books of all time and a continually updated list of must-read books for each year. You can also search through the recommended books by sub-genres such as Sword and Sorcery, Parallel Worlds, and Epic Fantasy.

7. LoveReading

LoveReading is one of the most popular book review sites in the UK, but American audiences will find it to be equally useful.

The site is divided into fiction and non-fiction works. In each area, it publishes weekly staff picks, books of the month, debuts of the month, ebooks of the month, audiobooks of the month, and the nationwide bestsellers. Each book on every list has a full review that you can read for free.

Make sure you also check out their Highlights tab to get book reviews for selected titles of the month. In Collections , you'll also find themed reading lists such as World War One Literature and Green Reads .

Kirkus has been involved in producing book reviews since the 1930s. This book review site looks at the week's bestselling books, and provides lengthy critiques for each one.

As you'd expect, you'll also find dozens of "best of" lists and individual book reviews across many categories and genres.

And while you're on the site, make sure you click on the Kirkus Prize section. You can look at all the past winners and finalists, complete with the accompanying reviews of their books.

Although Reddit is a social media site, you can use it to get book reviews of famous books, or almost any other book for that matter! Reddit has a Subreddit, r/books, that is dedicated to book reviews and reading lists.

The subreddit has weekly scheduled threads about a particular topic or genre. Anyone can then chip in with their opinions about which books are recommendable. Several new threads are published every day, with people discussing their latest discovery with an accompanying book rating or review.

You'll also discover a weekly recommendation thread. Recent threads have included subjects such as Favorite Books About Climate Science , Literature of Indigenous Peoples , and Books Set in the Desert . There’s also a weekly What are you Reading? discussion and frequent AMAs.

For more social media-like platforms, check out these must-have apps for book lovers .

10. YouTube

YouTube is not the type of place that immediately springs to mind when you think of the best book review sites online.

Nonetheless, there are several engaging YouTube channels that frequently offer opinions on books they've read. You’ll easily find book reviews of famous books here.

Some of the most notable book review YouTube channels include Better Than Food: Book Reviews , Little Book Owl , PolandBananasBooks , and Rincey Reads .

Amazon is probably one of your go-to site when you want to buy something. If you don’t mind used copies, it’s also one of the best websites to buy second-hand books .

Now, to get book reviews, just search and click on a title, then scroll down to see the ratings and what others who have bought the book are saying. It’s a quick way to have an overview of the book’s rating. If you spot the words Look Inside above the book cover, it means you get to preview the first few pages of the book, too!

Regardless of the praises or criticisms you have heard from other book review sites, reading a sample is the most direct way to help you gauge the content’s potential and see whether the author’s writing style suits your tastes.

12. StoryGraph

StoryGraph is another good book review site that's worth checking out. The book rating is determined by the site's large community of readers. Key in the title of a book you're interested in and click on it in StoryGraph's search results to have an overall view of its rating.

Each book review provides information on the moods and pacing of the story. It also indicates whether the tale is plot or character-driven, what readers feel about the extent of character development, how lovable the characters generally are, and the diversity of the cast.

13. London Review of Books

The London Review of Books is a magazine that covers a range of subjects such as culture, literature, and philosophy. Part of its content includes amazingly detailed book reviews. If you feel that most modern book reviews are too brief for your liking, the London Review of Books should suit you best.

You'll gain insight into the flow and themes of the story, as well as a more thorough picture of the events taking place in the book.

Read Book Reviews Before You Buy

The book review sites we've discussed will appeal to different types of readers. Some people will be more comfortable with the easy-to-interpret book rating systems; others will prefer extensive reviews written by experienced professionals.

Although it’s easy to be tempted by a gorgeous book cover, it’s always best to have a quick look at the book reviews before actually buying a copy. This way, you can save your money and spend it on the books that you’ll be proud to display on your shelves for a long time. And check out recommendations, as well, to help you find what's worth reading.

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Goodreads vs. BookSloth: Reading Tracker App Comparison

Introduction.

Two things I miss the most during the pandemic are fun and human connectivity, the absence of which have been exacerbated in these colder months. Books are something that I, along with many others, turn to for solace or entertainment. Books offer a place to escape, gain deeper understanding, and find connection during difficult times, like this pandemic. Significantly, thanks to technology, reading doesn’t have to be a completely solitary activity. A few reading tracker apps have emerged with social features. This article will compare two of them: the more established Goodreads and BookSloth , a newer platform.

Before setting out to write this article, I was already a Goodreads user. From my Goodreads account, I added all of my books into BookSloth so that my library for recommendations would be as similar as possible. There has been some chatter about being able to automatically import your Goodreads bookshelves into BookSloth in the future, but that doesn’t seem to exist yet (although you can export your Goodreads library to a .csv file).

Goodreads is a well-known reading tracker app and website launched in 2007. In 2019, it had 90 million users . Amazon purchased Goodreads in 2013, causing some users to want to distance themselves from the app. In addition to ownership, the app and website have some features that users aren’t thrilled with, such as the absence of half-star ratings, search issues, and a clunky interface.

BookSloth was founded in early 2018 in Puerto Rico by Xiomara Figueroa and Lincy Ayala. The creators were inspired to develop a reading tracker app in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria when they turned to books for comfort in the absence of cell service, internet, and electricity. They wanted to create an app that would allow readers to connect and build a community around books after experiencing that difficult situation.

A notable difference from the start, BookSloth is only available as a mobile app. For this review, I focus on comparing BookSloth to the Goodreads app, although Goodreads is also available on the web. I compared the iOS versions of the apps because that is what I had access to, but both are available for both iOS and Android., although some users have pointed out that there are missing features on the Android version of the Goodreads app.

Figure 1: Goodreads and BookSloth logos. Source: Goodreads and BookSloth .

The Library

Because BookSloth is newer than Goodreads and lacks an API to some of the larger datasets (like Amazon Books), it has some missing titles. While importing my library, there were about 20 results missing—mostly poetry and essay collections—out of my 105 books. Historically, I have not had any trouble finding the titles I’m reading on Goodreads, except for maybe a few poetry collections from independent presses.

If you find that a title is missing, BookSloth allows you to fill out a Google Form, linked from the search results, to request that it be added. Apparently, BookSloth uploads new books every 1-3 days. Because of this use of crowdsourcing, there appear to be a few mistakes in a some entries. One of my books, In the Dream House, was listed twice: one without the cover image and one with the incorrect author. While BookSloth is in its infancy and its library is still being built, by being an early adopter, you can help build a new platform.

Building Your Library

Goodreads notoriously allows users to build “shelves” to organize their books. It has preset shelves classified as “Want to Read,” “Currently Reading,” and “Read,” but you can also create and name your own shelves. (For example, I have a “Favorites” shelf.)

BookSloth does not have the “shelving” metaphor and limits users to categorizing books as “Currently Reading,” “To Be Read,” or “Read.”

Ratings & Reviews

Both Goodreads and BookSloth allow users to rate and review the books they read, but they differ in the specifics.

Goodreads allows users to give books one to five stars—no half stars—and leave a 15,000 character review . This 15,000 character ( about 2,400 word ) limit lets users write pretty extensively. BookSloth also has a five star ranking system and lets users assign half stars. Additionally, users can identify what aspects of the book they liked from a list of qualities. The qualities are story, writing style, world building, characters, romance, perspective, artwork, plot, inspiring, insightful, practical, and educational (a few of the icons shown below). BookSloth also limits users to a mere 2,000 characters for reviews, requiring them to distill their opinions.

Figure 2: Screenshot of BookSloth’s icons for book qualities. Source: Author.

User INterface

Overall, the BookSloth app provides a more enjoyable visual experience. It has a very clean design, integrating a fun purple and turquoise color scheme and a lot of colorful icons, as seen above. The screenshots below show a sample book description page.

Figure 3: Screenshots of book description for “There There,” by Tommy Orange, on the iOS version of BookSloth. Source: Author.

The Goodreads app has a more plain design and utilizes a beige color scheme throughout, reminiscent of book pages. The main graphics on the app are pictures of book covers. The screenshots below show a sample book description page.

Figure 4: Screenshots of book description for “There There,” by Tommy Orange, on the iOS version of Goodreads. Source: Author.

Based on reading app reviews and other articles about Goodreads, the app’s outdated UI seems to be one of the biggest pain points. In this article , Syvie Stephanie imagined a redesign based on user research. Notably, several elements of the Goodreads redesign—including the use of icons and less segmented pages—reminded me of the current BookSloth interface. If UI is your main priority in an app, BookSloth is definitely the preferred choice.

BookSloth also has dark mode capabilities that mirror devices’ settings, at least on iOS. The Goodreads app does not adjust to dark mode.

Social Features

Each app’s goals affect their social features. Goodreads’ seems to be aimed at helping you keep up with what your existing friends are reading while BookSloth tries to help users discover a new reading community with similar tastes.

The hub of social activity on Goodreads is its homepage, which functions similarly to a newsfeed on other social media sites. There, users can see updates from friends and those they follow, including new reviews they’ve written, new books they’ve marked “to-read,” and progress they’ve made on books. Users can like and comment on all of these updates. One annoyance is that this newsfeed also informs users when the people they follow become friends with new people, which clutters the otherwise book-focused feed.

BookSloth’s social features are concentrated on the app’s “Community” tab. There, users can post or respond to others’ discussion posts. The posts that appear on users’ discussion pages are not isolated to those they follow—it’s a discussion board of all users. People can classify their posts as a “recommendation,” “ask,” or “other,” so users can sort their feeds by category. With this approach to socialization on the app, BookSloth encourages users to connect to new people who may have similar tastes in books. BookSloth does also allow users to follow and be followed by other users. In the search bar, you can choose to search for other users, invite friends to the app, and also view BookSloth’s suggestions for people to follow, which are based on the number of books you have in common.

Discovering New Books

A benefit of Goodreads is that it has a more developed search bar: users can search by title, author name, ISBN, or use their phone cameras to scan the cover of a book. On BookSloth, users can only search by book title. Both apps allow users to search through genres to find books.

Figure 5: Screenshot of BookSloth’s search bar. Source: Author.

Figure 6: Screenshot of Goodreads’ search bar. Source: Author.

Discover Pages

Both apps have “discover” pages for users to visit and see what books are popular amongst users and in the world at large. The BookSloth discover page includes a list of personalized recommendations. Goodreads also provides personalized recommendations in the app’s “More” tab, but some users have noted that they wish this was more centralized. The Goodreads Discover page includes things like “Featured Lists” and “Most Read This Week,” which is based on the app’s analytics.

A priority of BookSloth’s Discover page seems to be exposing users to books they may not have discovered on their own, particularly those in categories that have been historically underrepresented in literary circles. On my Discover page currently, I have categories of “Books by Black Authors,” “Celebrating Pride,” and “Hispanic Heritage Books.”

Final Thoughts

Personally, I would love to use BookSloth over Goodreads because of its cleaner design, but I don’t think I’m ready to give up being able to see my friends’ updates on Goodreads. I would also be hesitant to stop using Goodreads altogether since BookSloth is missing some of the books I’ve logged there.

If you’re new to using reading tracker apps and looking to build a new reading community, I would definitely suggest downloading BookSloth. I would also encourage existing Goodreads users to try BookSloth like I am. One way to get its community and library to grow is for more people to join and request the books they like be added.

I don’t think either app is better than the other—it more depends on what features you value more. I plan on having both apps on my phone, keeping my library on Goodreads and using it to check up on what friends are reading and using BookSloth to discover new titles and maybe get into some bookish discussions.

Figure 7: Infographic comparing Goodreads and BookSloth. Source: Author.

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Essay: Preparing for a Less Arrogant America

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What We’re Learning About Harris’s Foreign Policy

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Preparing for a Less Arrogant America

A close reading of two books by authors who advise kamala harris reveals a vision for a humbler approach to foreign policy..

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Stay informed  with FP’s news and analysis as the United States prepares to vote.

Over the past three and a half years, U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris has faithfully echoed her boss, U.S. President Joe Biden, by invoking pretty much the same hegemonic worldview that every American president has embraced since World War II. As Harris put it in a 2023 speech —quoting a favorite phrase of Biden’s—“a strong America remains indispensable to the world.”

But the United States may be downgraded to a humbler status if Harris is elected president in November, based on the thinking of her chief advisors.

In their written work, Harris’s national security advisor, Philip Gordon, and deputy national security advisor, Rebecca Lissner, have sketched the outlines of a new worldview in which Washington frankly acknowledges its past excesses and dramatically lowers its ambitions. Or as Lissner put it in An Open World: How America Can Win the Contest for 21st Century Order , the 2020 book she coauthored with another Biden administration official: The United States should give up on strategic primacy and the “increasingly obsolete post-Cold War ‘liberal international order.’”

Instead of seeking to remain the unquestioned hegemon, the United States should seriously downsize its global role, wrote Lissner and her co-author, Mira Rapp-Hooper, who is currently Biden’s National Security Council director for East Asia and Oceania. It’s past time for Washington to discard the “messianic” goal of transforming the world in its image—the United States’ basic policy approach going back to Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Harry Truman. Instead, it should ratchet down to a much narrower role: merely preserving an open global system in which the United States can prosper.

From left: Rebecca Lissner, a deputy national security advisor to Harris, and policy advisor Ike Irby speak with communications director Kirsten Allen before departing the airport in Houston, Texas, on Aug. 1. Kevin Lamarque/AFP via Getty Images

“As the unipolar moment wanes, so too must any illusions of the United States’ ability to craft order unilaterally and universally according to its own liberal preferences,” Lissner and Rapp-Hooper wrote. “Insisting upon the United States’ international leadership role but departing from reliance on primacy as the cornerstone of a messianic liberal mission, a strategy of openness departs from post-Cold War liberal universalism, Cold War-style containment, and the traditional alternative of retrenchment.”

An Open World: How America Can Win the Contest for 21st Century Order , Rebecca Lissner and Mira Rapp-Hooper, Yale University Press, 216 pp, $26, September 2020

This new approach would mean a lot of accommodation of autocratic and illiberal regimes and a discarding of ideological crusades or containment strategies—all in the pragmatic interest of keeping trade open and bolstering cooperation on critical issues such as climate change, future pandemics, and artificial intelligence regulation. To put it simply, Lissner and Rapp-Hooper argued that policies of containment and hegemony should be supplanted by the far more modest goal of ensuring an “accessible global commons.” The United States has one critical task left as the “indispensable” superpower, they wrote: It is “the only country that can guarantee an open system.”

Gordon would likely agree—at least about leaving behind, at long last, the messianic strain in U.S. foreign policy. His own 2020 book, Losing the Long Game: The False Promise of Regime Change in the Middle East , is a fierce dissection of various failed U.S. efforts in the region dating back 70 years to the CIA-orchestrated ouster of Iranian President Mohammad Mossadegh.

Though he lumped in Afghanistan—which is technically in central Asia—with the failed U.S. interventions in Egypt, Iraq, Iran, Libya, and Syria, Gordon was right to see a common theme: regime change almost never works. And like the proverbial lunatic who tries the same thing over and over thinking he might get a different result, U.S. policymakers never seem to learn the right lessons, he argued.

In every case, from 1953 (Mossadegh), to two disastrous episodes in Afghanistan (the 1980s and post-9/11), to the catastrophic invasion of Iraq in 2003, and to fitful efforts in Egypt, Libya, and Syria after the 2011 Arab Spring, Gordon identified a pattern.

U.S. National Security Advisor Philip H. Gordon speaks with Vice President Kamala Harris during a meeting with Caribbean leaders at the Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles on June 9, 2022. Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images

“As different as each episode was, and as varied as were the methods used, the history of regime change in the post-World War II Middle East is a history of repeated patterns,” he wrote, “in which policymakers underestimated the challenges of ousting a regime, overstated the threat faced by the United States, embraced the optimistic narratives of exiles or local actors with little power and vested interests, prematurely declared victory, failed to anticipate the chaos that would inevitably ensue after regime collapse, and ultimately found themselves bearing the costs—in some cases more than a trillion dollars and thousands of American lives—for many years or even decades to come.”

Gordon noted that critics, especially the few remaining neoconservatives in Washington, would argue that in some cases regime change had worked very well. This is most notably true in the case of postwar Germany and Japan. But he argued persuasively that these were unique circumstances: two highly advanced countries after a devastating world war. And had it not been for the strange annealing effect of the subsequent 40-year-long Cold War, even the successful transformations of Germany and Japan might not have worked as completely as they did because U.S. patience would have grown thin very quickly—as it has in subsequent cases. A faster U.S. withdrawal from Europe and Japan might well have undercut the effort to fundamentally change Berlin and Tokyo.

Losing the Long Game: The False Promise of Regime Change in the Middle East , Philip H. Gordon, St. Martins Press, 370 pp, $29, October 2020.

Grim and exhaustive as Gordon’s assessment is, it actually understates the case for change. That’s because, added all together, these failed U.S. attempts at transformation contributed mightily to the growing obsolescence of the current liberal international order that so concerns Lissner and Rapp-Hooper.

The history that Gordon recounts is a history that keeps on giving. Today the number-one menace keeping the United States tied down in the Middle East is the very same Islamic Republic of Iran that rose to power fueled by its opposition to the American “Great Satan,” produced by the 1953 coup and empowered by the 2003 invasion of Iraq. In fact, a U.S. Army study completed in 2018 found that “an emboldened and expansionist Iran appears to be the only victor” in George W. Bush’s Iraq war—the exact opposite of what Bush and his neoconservatives sought.

The vicious spiral set in motion by these misguided policy choices undermined U.S. legitimacy—or its primacy, to use Lissner’s and Rapp-Hooper’s term—as global overseer. The unnecessary and fraudulently justified invasion of Iraq, and the drain on U.S. resources and attention that resulted, laid the groundwork for Washington’s 20-year failure in Afghanistan (which led to Biden’s declaration in August 2021 that he was putting an end to “major military operations to remake other countries,” which of course put the president in accord with Gordon’s advice). The Iraq catastrophe also exposed U.S. military vulnerabilities on the ground in the worst way, tutoring Russia, China, and the rest of the world in how to outmaneuver and fight what was once considered an unassailable superpower. Moreover, the Iraq and Afghanistan debacles projected an image of panicky U.S. retreat, from which Russian President Vladimir Putin may have drawn encouragement to invade Ukraine. (Putin also invoked the unilateral U.S. invasion of Iraq to justify his own aggression in Ukraine.)

As counterinsurgency expert David Kilcullen wrote in his book, The Dragons and the Snakes: How the Rest Learned to Fight the West , also released in 2020, the rising challenge to U.S. hegemony from countries such as China and Russia is linked to the United States’ “ repeated failure to convert battlefield victory into strategic success or to translate that success into a better peace.” Over the past two decades, the lone superpower has allowed itself to get bogged down in a “seemingly endless string of continuous, inconclusive wars that have sapped [its] energy while [its] rivals prospered,” Kilcullen wrote.

And so the postwar international system, at least as once conceived, went down the tube as Beijing and Moscow began to declare that U.S. hegemony was no longer acceptable to them.

Beyond that, these failures helped to create the deep divisions in the American polity that led Lissner and Rapp-Hooper to conclude that traditional U.S. leadership is no longer tenable. Together these titanic errors of policy also helped to discredit the political establishment in Washington and open the way for former U.S. President Donald Trump and his “America First” neo-isolationism.

There were, to be sure, other U.S. failures that undermined U.S. legitimacy as global leader, Lissner and Rapp-Hooper wrote—especially the 2008 financial disaster generated by Wall Street greed and the fecklessness of Washington regulators. But it’s clear that—far more than any fundamental flaws within the international system itself—it was largely the excesses of America’s postwar agenda and the arrogance with which it was pursued that squandered the world’s trust.

Gordon didn’t go quite as far as Lissner and Rapp-Hooper in his conclusions. Known as a passionate trans-Atlanticist—he served as assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs in the Obama administration—Gordon acknowledged that “the regime change temptation will never go away.” He wrote: “The bias of American political culture, resulting from the country’s record of achievement and belief in its own exceptionalism, is to believe every problem has a solution.” Rather than reconfiguring U.S. policy entirely, he suggested that in most cases when it comes to rogue regimes “the best alternative to regime change looks a lot like the Containment strategy that won the Cold War.”

Harris arrives for an address by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky during a joint meeting of Congress at the U.S. Capitol in Washington on Dec. 21, 2022. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

So where does this all leave us? There’s no use trying to unwind history and restore the old system. In many ways, despite their different conclusions, Gordon’s and Lissner’s books fit together like two big pieces of a puzzle: Thanks to the policy disasters detailed by Gordon (in which he took part, as a National Security Council official under then-President Barack Obama), some sort of humbler approach, along the lines proposed by Lissner and Rapp-Hooper, may be needed. And this strategy will likely be bipartisan to some degree.

Indeed, in their writings there is little doubt that Gordon and Lissner—the two chief foreign policy advisors to the woman who could soon be the next U.S. president—are in the process of codifying, perhaps for decades to come, the anti-interventionist impulse becoming ingrained in both political parties.

If Trump is elected instead of Harris, of course, he’s unlikely to embrace Lissner’s strategy of openness—at least not openly. (Trump continues to rhetorically demean U.S. allies and tout new tariffs as his main foreign-policy instrument.) What Trump is likely to do, however, is to continue to downgrade the United States’ global policeman role. Trump was instrumental in setting in motion the withdrawal from Afghanistan and, as Gordon wrote, also eager to pull out of Syria. Indeed, it is striking that after five years of dithering by Obama over whether to help the Syrian rebels, it was Trump who best put his finger on the problem. He questioned why the United States was helping to topple Syria’s dictatorial leader, Bashar al-Assad, when, as Gordon quoted Trump as saying, “Syria was fighting ISIS, and you have to get rid of ISIS. … Now we’re backing rebels against Syria, and we have no idea who these people are.”

Lissner and Rapp-Hooper’s prescriptions may be ambitious, but at the same time they are refreshingly modest in scope. Nothing has gotten Washington into more trouble over the decades than its continuing eruptions of hubristic policy. These extended from Wilson’s quixotic desire to make the world “ safe for democracy ” after World War I to then-Defense Department official Paul Wolfowitz’s uber-hawkish defense policy guidance from 1992, which embraced a frank post-Cold War policy of preventing the rise of rival military powers. It was this sort of thinking by Wolfowitz and his fellow neoconservatives that later helped justify the Iraq War.

Lissner and Rapp-Hooper’s open world concept also jibes with the changing calculus of our times: In economic terms, the divide between left and right wing is all but gone; instead, as Fareed Zakaria wrote in his 2024 book, Age of Revolutions , for the two political parties the old left versus right divide has been replaced by a struggle between those who want to keep the United States open to the world versus those who want to close it down more than ever. It is no accident that trade skeptics on the progressive left in the United States have come to lionize Trump’s former trade representative, Robert Lighthizer, for his tariff policies. (In his 2023 book, No Trade is Free , Lighthizer makes a point of thanking U.S. union leaders and acknowledging Lori Wallach—a progressive trade expert—as “a longtime friend and co-conspirator.”)

So Lissner and Rapp-Hooper may have chosen just the right battlefield to die on—or not. If we can salvage some degree of openness, we can save something of the old system. As they wrote: “Openness does not, of course, incorporate the totality of American strategic objectives. Other threats, like nuclear proliferation, disease, or terrorism, may menace vital U.S. interests. Yet closed spheres of influence—whether exercised regionally or in particular domains—present the greatest danger to the United States’ security and prosperity” because they preclude necessary international cooperation.

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The Civil Rights Movement and Kamala Harris’s Foreign Policy

Black Americans have always sought international connection in service of promoting freedom.

Another fundamental problem that Lissner and Rapp-Hooper hint at is that the United States may no longer be up to the task of fully managing the international system it created. There is a growing mismatch between the complexity of this world system and the level of knowledge in the U.S. populace because of laggard education and dysfunctional political systems. Americans may simply no longer understand the system—how global free trade works, how military alliances keep them safe—well enough to maintain it. At the very least, Americans now have very little sympathy for that system.

The United States’ domestic polarization may also wreak havoc on some of the solutions Lissner and Rapp-Hooper propose. The authors propose a plan to “harness the private sector for national advantage” and bring the tech sector and Washington closer together. “The next administration should consider elevating the Office of Science and Technology Policy to a National Emerging Technology Council (NETC) on par with the National Security Council and National Economic Council,” they write. Yet the leaders of the United States’ tech sector have long tried to keep their distance from Washington—especially on defense policy–except for a few oddball pairings such as Elon Musk and Donald Trump.

Perhaps the most fundamental question is whether the international system is really as obsolete as Lissner and Rapp-Hooper suggested. Yes, many problems the duo analyzed four years ago remain, including the increasing irrelevance of the World Trade Organization. But some of their views are dated. Lissner and Rapp-Hooper tended to echo the fears of Biden’s national security advisor, Jake Sullivan, and Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell, who warned in a 2019 essay in Foreign Affairs , “Competition Without Catastrophe,” of the menace of “China’s fusion of authoritarian capitalism and digital surveillance.” Similarly, Lissner and Rapp-Hooper wrote that “China is at the forefront of a new model of ‘techno-authoritarianism’ that could confer considerable competitive advantages.” Yet in the four years since the book’s publication, it’s become far clearer that China under President Xi Jinping has only fallen behind thanks to this new model, with its economy seriously stagnating and Xi pleading for more foreign investment.

Moreover, in the wake of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Washington has been forced to revert, to some extent, to its old role of global enforcer. This has proved especially true as the European Union has fallen behind the U.S. economically. As the Carnegie Endowment concludes in a new report that highlights how difficult it is to bring about strategic change in U.S. foreign policy, “the administration’s response to that crisis has been to expand America’s security role in Europe and thereby create a new status quo.” Much the same can be said of the United States’ role in the Middle East following Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, as Biden found himself sending carriers and submarines to the Mediterranean and forced to defend Israel from the air.

Lissner and Gordon arrive to attend a state dinner in honor of Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida at the White House in Washington, D.C., on April 10. Ting Shen/Pool/Sipa USA

Yet we are also clearly moving into some kind of a new anti-interventionist era wherein Washington’s default mode—regardless of who occupies the White House—will be to stay out of global conflicts wherever and however possible. And it seems likely that if Harris wins, Gordon and Lissner will be major players. Gordon, to be sure, is more of a traditionalist who would be reluctant to tamper too much with the United States’ global security role. But it’s noteworthy that Lissner had a significant role drafting Biden’s national security strategy—and yet she chose to join the vice president’s staff in 2022 to influence policy for the next generation.

Asked whether Harris embraces Gordon’s and Lissner’s views, an aide to the vice president said only that Harris “is advised by a range of people with diverse views, and their previous writings reflect their personal views. Anyone looking to understand the vice president’s worldview should look at what she has said and done on the world stage.”

As for Harris’s current superior, perhaps Biden’s most enduring legacy—one that a President Harris would surely continue—will be that he sought to conduct a sort of halfway-house foreign policy that bridges the global policeman era and this new era of restraint. Biden has also attempted to find a workable compromise between the old consensus on globalization and the emerging cross-party consensus in favor of protectionism and industrial policy. As foreign-policy expert Jessica T. Mathews argued in Foreign Affairs , Biden has “unambiguously left behind the hubris of the ‘unipolar moment’ that followed the Cold War, proving that the United States can be deeply engaged in the world without military action or the taint of hegemony.”

U.S. President Joe Biden and Harris host a signing ceremony for the “Consolidated Appropriations Act,” which includes billions in humanitarian, military, and economic assistance to Ukraine, in Washington on March 15, 2022. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

At the same time, however, since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Hamas’s attack on Israel, Biden has often gone back to invoking the old postwar view of the United States’ role, calling the United States the “arsenal of democracy” (FDR’s phrase) and declaring that “American leadership is what holds the world together.”

And given the ongoing crises around the world—especially in Europe, the Middle East, and possibly East Asia if the Taiwan issue heats up—it’s highly questionable whether the United States can adjust downward when there is no other major power that even comes close to approaching Washington’s global sway. If it can, then maintaining global openness may be a worthy—and perhaps achievable—goal.

Michael Hirsh is a columnist for Foreign Policy. He is the author of two books:  Capital Offense: How Washington’s Wise Men Turned America’s Future Over to Wall Street  and  At War With Ourselves: Why America Is Squandering Its Chance to Build a Better World . Twitter:  @michaelphirsh

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Samsung Galaxy Book4 Edge Adds Snapdragon—And That’s A Good Thing

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Put simply, it has been a long time since the computing space has been this exciting. The TL;DR version of what’s going on is Qualcomm—the company that (most likely) made the processor (and/or modem) in your phone—has officially set its sights on the computing world. It developed the Snapdragon X Elite processor, which claims to bring enormous processing power into a laptop that can run video editing software in a snap while lasting throughout your workday and beyond on battery. And it’s in Samsung’s newest laptop, the Samsung Galaxy Book4 Edge .

The Samsung Galaxy Book4 Edge is one of the first laptops to use the Snapdragon X Elite processor. ... [+] Here's how it performed.

It’s more than just a fancy new chipset, though. The Samsung Galaxy Book4 Edge is one of the first laptops to run the Snapdragon X Elite processor available on the market. I’ve been using that laptop to do my job for the past week, and I’m ready to share some thoughts. Read on for my full review.

Samsung Galaxy Book4 Edge

Adam has been a leader in the tech media field for over a decade, with bylines at a number of different publications. When he's not hosting the Benefit of the Doud podcast, he's busy getting his hands on as many phones, tablets and laptops as possible. He regularly uses both iOS and Android (six-month rotation for each), and he fully embraces technology. He hasn't carried cash money since 2018, and pays for everything with his phone wherever possible.

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I’m a tech journalist living and working in New York City. As a Midwestern transplant, I worked at the University of Iowa English Department before diving head-first into tech journalism. I have spent over four years learning everything there is to know about consumer technology with a special focus on smart home.

My bylines include ZDNET, PCMag, Decider, Lifewire, NBC, and many more. After hours, you can find me packing my tech and grabbing my boarding passes, reading the latest nonfiction releases, or gaming on my MSI Stealth rig.

CPU: Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite X1E-80-100 | RAM: 16GB LPDDR5X | Graphics: Qualcomm Adreno | Storage: 512GB SSD | Display: 14-inch AMOLED 3K or 16-inch AMOLED 3K | Resolution: 2,880 x 1,800 | Refresh rate: 120Hz | Battery: Up to 18 hours | Weight: 2.6 pounds

• Those who value longevity and battery life
• Those looking for a productive machine with a spacious screen
• You absolutely need Google Drive compatibility
• You want to play AAA games

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The 8 best memory foam mattress toppers to make your bed cozier, samsung galaxy book4 edge: design, premium in every way.

The hardware of the Samsung Galaxy Book4 Edge is top-notch; the aluminum chassis evokes a premium feel that you’d get with any high-quality laptop. Samsung calls the colorway “Sapphire Blue” but it looks silver to me. There’s subtle branding on the otherwise unmarred lid, which passes the one-handed opening test.

The exterior of the Samsung Galaxy Book4 Edge is sleek and the hardware feels premium.

Once you open the lid you’re treated to a palatial keyboard, including a number pad. The power button doubles as a fingerprint sensor for Windows Hello, and it’s fast and accurate. The touchpad is massive—it feels like you could land a small plane on it. That’s lovely, except when you have the option checked to use the lower right-hand corner of the trackpad as a right click, you have to move quite a bit to the left to not trigger a right click. It can get annoying at times.

But overall, that’s not a bad thing. The trackpad is large enough to move your cursor anywhere you want on the screen. The keyboard is tight and punchy with lovely pitch and travel. There’s a row of function keys across the top of the keyboard with the usual shortcuts—volume, keyboard backlight, brightness, etc. The typing experience is quite good—among my favorite laptop keyboards of all time, but you need to like chiclet-style keyboards.

Meanwhile, on the sides, you get a good amount of I/O. There’s a full sized HDMI 2.1 port, 2 USB-C (4.0) ports, one USB-A (3.2) port and a microSD slot, along with a headphone jack. For a laptop that is only 12.3mm tall closed, that’s an impressive amount of ports. Inside, there’s the aforementioned Snapdragon X Elite E84100 12-core processor, 512GB of storage and 16GB of RAM.

Samsung Galaxy Book4 Edge: Display

Simply put: gorgeous.

Samsung is a great display manufacturer, and that remains true here. While there are two options, a 14-inch and a 16-inch, I tested the 16-inch display. The expansive 16-inch AMOLED panel has a 16:10 aspect ratio. It’s a 3K panel with a resolution of 2,880 x 1,800. It’s easily large enough for side-by-side apps if need be. Video looks amazing, with exceptional viewing angles, and is complemented by decent speakers with a fair amount of bass.

The laptop's expansive screen is ideal for using apps side-by-side.

The only oddity I noticed with the screen was when I was working outside. Every now and then, the screen would flicker. It happened inside as well, but not as frequently, and it only happened while I was running the laptop in power efficiency mode (which we will discuss in more detail later). It’s certainly not a dealbreaker, but it seemed odd.

Samsung Galaxy Book4 Edge: Software

Most, but not all of the software you need.

One of the big questions leading into buying a laptop like this is whether or not it will run all the software you need. The laptop ships with Windows 11 out of the box, and you can download apps like Slack, Telegram, Discord, Chrome and more. It’s just like picking up an x86 computer and installing all the apps you need. For apps that have been compiled for ARM, you’re good to go. For apps that aren’t, the ARM processor can run them in emulation, and for the most part, you won’t notice the difference. But there’s one key app that I rely on that simply will not work.

I use Google Drive as part of my normal workflow, and that app simply will not run on this laptop. For those not familiar, the Google Drive app automatically syncs files to and from Google Drive. Most of what I do normally, I can do in a browser, but there were some activities I couldn’t. It constituted a minor disruption in my work, but I was able to work around it by manually uploading the files I needed. Of course, this isn’t Samsung’s fault, but it’s something to be aware of.

AI On Board, With Mixed Results

Of course, the headline of the Snapdragon X Elite is the AI-processing NPU. The Samsung Galaxy Book4 Edge comes with a copilot button that launches a web app container for Microsoft Copilot. From there, you can generate text, ask questions and the like—all the normal things you can do with Copilot. I’d like to see some tighter integration here so that you’re not just getting a glorified web app, but that’s on Microsoft at the moment, not Samsung.

You can generate AI images with Microsoft Paint, like a tattooed, rocker chicken.

On the laptop, Microsoft Paint also has a Cocreator function, which can generate images based on your text prompts. Image generation is not terribly fast, but it works. It allowed me to create a photo of a chicken with tattoos playing heavy metal music, so really, I can’t complain too much.

Samsung Galaxy Book4 Edge: Performance And Battery Life

Some discrepancies to claims.

I have absolutely no complaints performance-wise. When the laptop isn’t plugged in, I set the battery consumption to its most efficient. When it wasn’t, I turned up the performance and ran benchmarking tests to see how strongly the Snapdragon could perform. The most notable test I ran, Geekbench, returned 2,816/13,647 and 2,854/15,312 single and multi-core scores, respectively. Those are not bad.

On the battery side, the results were mixed. I typically work 10-hour shifts, and this laptop got me through a full work day with no problem. My typical workflow involves around a dozen Edge tabs, Slack, Discord, Telegram and occasionally a YouTube music web app playing in the background to the latest pair of wireless earbuds I’m testing. For a couple of those days, I also added the 16-inch Arzopa Z1RC portable monitor that had its own power source, so the computer only needed to handle graphics.

On the days I paired it with the second display, the battery lasted around eight hours, but with just the laptop itself, I made 10 hours—but just barely. All that sounds great, and it is, but the promises made by Qualcomm back at Snapdragon Summit in October involved laptop battery life measured in days , not hours. That is definitely not what’s happening here.

I also should point out that in my week with the laptop, I didn’t have the chance to try any gaming. I’m not much of a gamer to begin with, but either way, if you’re a hard core gamer, you’re going to want to skip Snapdragon X Elite-powered laptops at the moment. It’s not quite there yet for gamers. Once more AAA titles start getting compiled for ARM, that will likely be a different story, but these are very early days for the Snapdragon X Elite. Games should look elsewhere for a great gaming laptop —for now.

Samsung Galaxy Book4 Edge: Verdict

The Samsung Galaxy Book4 Edge is a very powerful laptop that lasts a long time away from the charger. Software support is coming along very well, with that painful exception of Google Drive. But the Snapdragon X Elite processor represents something of a sea change in the industry. Apple going with its own ARM-based processors started the trends, and Qualcomm further legitimizes the idea that ARM processors are no longer for phones and tablets. Windows on ARM has been around for a while, but for possibly the first time, we finally have some ARM architecture that can really push out some heavy-duty work, and that’s exciting.

It’s still early, but there are a lot of indications that consumers will start having to make the choice between ARM and x86, and if one of those choices is the Samsung Galaxy Book4 Edge , there will be little to complain about. If Qualcomm is bringing the power, then Samsung is bringing the style, and that’s a potent combination and one that I’m looking forward to exploring further.

How I Tested The Samsung Galaxy Book4 Edge

I used the Samsung Galaxy Z Book4 Edge as my main laptop for a week, working on various projects from word processing to photo editing. I cross-tested apps, including Google, Microsoft and more to check its compatibility with a range of features and needs. I also monitored its battery life, noting how much was lost when unplugged from a charger based on my multitasking and YouTube video playback tests.

For the processor, I installed Geekbench and ran multiple tests to check its performance. Additionally, I ran multiple windows and applications, including Microsoft Copilot and Photoshop, to see how the processor handled under heavy multitasking.

My Expertise

I’m a Chicago-based freelance reviewer and have been writing about consumer electronics for over a decade with a particular focus on laptop innovation. In addition to testing some of the latest laptops like the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Fold , I’ve also tested most smartphones on the market over the last several years, including the Google Pixel 8 Pro . I also have compared top devices, from the Oneplus 12 versus the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra to the iPhone 14 versus iPhone 15 . And, of course, I’ve tested each phone’s software, comparing Android versus iPhone to help you make informed buying decisions.

When I’m not testing the latest and greatest flagship phones, I’m hosting the Benefit of the Doud podcast/YouTube channel with my co-host Clifton M. Thomas and editing technology news articles for SlashGear. In addition to Forbes and SlashGear, I have bylines at Android Central, Reviewed.com, Android Authority, Lifewire and more.

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21 Best Goodreads Alternatives for Ethical Book Tracking

This article is a part of an ongoing series on how to minimize or eliminate Amazon use from our lives. We’re highlighting the best Amazon alternatives for those with ethical, moral, or environmental qualms with the trillion-dollar company.

Goodreads is fine. It’s a simple tool that allows you to keep track of how many books you read from year to year, connect with other readers, and discover more books to add to your queue...

The only problem is that, since 2015, it’s been owned by Amazon — the multinational megacorporation with a number of environmental and ethical concerns. 

This is a problem for anyone concerned about handing over their data to Amazon — or for anyone working to completely divest from Amazon tools.

(For those who fall into that camp, we’ve already written guides on alternatives to: Prime Video , Audible , Amazon books , Amazon Kindle , and Amazon shopping .)

While there’s nothing inherently wrong with using Goodreads — I have 93 books logged on Goodreads this year alone — it’s natural to be curious about non-Amazon alternatives.

In my own quest to divest from Amazon wherever I can, I’ve put together a comprehensive list of all of the platforms I’ve tried and recommend — with everything from direct competitors to social networks, plus some out-of-the-box options, too.

First, a few reasons why you might consider switching away from Goodreads:

• Amazon profits off of data — and everything you do on Goodreads gives them more data to work with.
• Many authors report experiencing bullying and extortion on the platform. (If you’re a book lover, we’d really encourage you to be a human-who-writes-those-books lover, too.)
• Goodreads subtly encourages you to buy books from Amazon and Audible… but you could be checking out books from your local library or supporting an independent bookstore.
• Goodreads has lots of ads and all of that ad money goes back to Amazon. 
• Ever since Goodreads was acquired by Amazon, users have reported that it’s been largely neglected and, at this point, lacks features that are now standard from competitors.

The Ultimate Guide To Goodreads Alternatives —

The storygraph.

The StoryGraph is a website and app that allows users to discover and share books. Users can create a virtual bookshelf, rate and review books, and participate in online book clubs and discussions. The StoryGraph is a new platform that aims to be a more inclusive and community-focused alternative to Goodreads.

True to its name, The StoryGraph is known for its compelling graphs, turning your book data into helpful visuals. If you’re a data nerd like me, this is an especially enticing feature.

One thing that I found really helpful is that the platform makes it easy to import your entire Goodreads history to The StoryGraph — ensuring you don’t have to manually re-create years of book progress.

Most notably: The StoryGraph focuses on providing personalized recommendations based on a user’s preferences and interests. (Goodreads’ approach to book discovery is much more general and less personalized.) 

​​→ Check out The StoryGraph

Booksloth is a mobile and web app that makes it easy to log the books you read and discover new books based on personalized recommendations. 

As you log books, you can go beyond the traditional star-rating by rating books based on, for example, characters or worldbuilding.

It’s clear the platform has invested in its community-focused features; creating discussion boards to chat about books and allow you to connect with other readers (in a text message-type format). 

You can create a profile that looks a lot like Instagram for books. And you can also create and share book lists, which is a very helpful feature for anyone who has friends asking them what they should read next. 

​​→ Check out Booksloth

Basmo’s primary goal is to help users “create a reading habit in no time.” 

The app includes features that feel like writing in the margins of your book or highlighting your favorite quotes — all without actually pulling out a pen or highlighter. You can log your emotions as you read to help you reflect on how a book is impacting you. Digital annotaters, unite!

Like Goodreads, Basmo makes it easy to keep track of the books you’re reading, you’ve completed, and want to read — all on a digital bookshelf. 

Basmo also features annual challenges — which makes achieving New Year’s resolutions easy! You can focus on how much time you want to read — or how many books you’d like to complete.

I actually originally found the platform on TikTok and was amazed at how many positive comments people had left about the app. I tried it out and it hooked me. Absolutely worth a download.

​​​​→ Check out Basmo

While Libib is a cataloging tool meant to be used by libraries, schools, and organizations — it’s a really incredible tool for anyone with a big collection of books.

You can keep track of the books you own, the books you read, and even the books you loan out to friends — all in a comprehensive library management system. You can even take it further by tracking your DVD, vinyl, and board game collections.

If you want to get really nerdy about it, check out this TikTok about how one book lover uses a barcode scanner to add all of her books to Libib just like a library or bookstore.

​​→ Check out Libib

Bookly is all about tracking reading sessions — not just books. Every time you read, open up the Bookly app to start your reading timer. This will help you keep track of your reading speed — which will tell you how much time it will take you to finish your book and other valuable data.

I also like that the timer feature keeps me motivated to stay focused on actually reading (instead of accidentally checking my notifications).

Bookly offers personalized reports with all of your reading stats — and helps motivate you to treat reading like a workout. As you read, you can save thoughts and quotes — and see how you’re measuring up against your goals.

​​→ Check out Bookly

Likewise is the perfect app for anyone looking to track and discover all kinds of media in one place. The app can help you manage books, movies, TV shows, podcasts, and more.

As you add more media that you’ve read, watched, or listened to, Likewise learns what you like and offers better and better personalized recommendations. The app  also makes it easy to connect with community and find content about media. 

​​→ Check out Likewise

#Bookstagram & #BookTok

This one is a bit more out-of-the-box:

Bookstagram and BookTok are terms used to describe the community of book lovers and readers who share their passion for books on Instagram and TikTok, respectively. 

Bookstagrammers and BookTokkers, as they are often called, typically post pictures and videos of books, book-related items, and their own reading experiences on their accounts, and often use hashtags to connect with other book lovers. 

Bookstagram and BookTok are known for their vibrant and creative communities, and are seen as a way for readers to discover new books, share their love of reading, and connect with others who share their interests. At this point, it’s not uncommon to walk into a bookstore and see a shelf with a sign that says, “As seen on TikTok.”

Many people have begun using Instagram and TikTok as the primary place they track the books they’ve read. By posting a photo, video, screenshot, or review of every book you read on your dedicated book-related account, you can effectively create a complete database of the books you read and love.

Even if you don’t want to step in front of the camera, following other creators is a fantastic way to find new book recommendations. You can even create folders on your respective apps to save posts and curate your own TBR list, with the help of a diverse reading community.

(And who knows — if your account picks up enough steam, you’ll likely get publishers DMing you to send you free books to review!)

Notion, Airtable, or Google Sheets

Sometimes you just want to take things back to basics. Rather than using a high-powered app to track your reading, you can simply put together a database or spreadsheet to keep track of the books you read.

This is especially beneficial if you want to track custom metrics, like how many of your books were written by women authors or Indigenous authors. You can even use tags to organize books into curated lists.

It definitely takes a lot more manual action — but if you already love nerding out about databases and spreadsheets, you know this has the potential to be worth the effort.

→ Check out the Notion book tracker template

LibraryThing

LibraryThing boasts its ability to help you “create and track a library-quality catalog” of all of your books (and other media). You can track the books you’ve read — or just manage your home library. 

The platform’s database pulls from the Library of Congress (and hundreds more places) and pulls in a ton of data for each listing.

You can also connect with a community of book lovers through groups and message boards — which seem to stay pretty active. 

​​→ Check out LibraryThing

While BookTrip is primarily an online magazine for book news and reviews, the website has one fantastic feature we can’t help but recommend: My Nightstand.

As you read articles and reviews on BookTrib, you’ll see a small green button that simply says “Nightstand.” Tap that, and BookTrib will automatically add whatever book you’re reading about to… your nightstand — a list of books you’d like to read. 

Within a week of reading BookTrib stories, I’d already discovered a dozen books that piqued my interest — and added them to My Nightstand. This feature is perfect for book discovery and simple tracking.

​​→ Check out BookTrib

Google (which is, of course, another multinational corporation with its own concerns) has, under-the-radar, created its own simple way to help you keep track of the content you consume. (As long as you’re on your phone, that is.)

From the mobile version of Google.com or the Google app, you can simply search for an author or book (or even an entire genre). Then, you should be able to tap to add the book to your reading list or mark it as already read.

You can also search (again, only on mobile) for “what to read” to find and update your reading lists. This also works for movies and TV shows. Over time, it’ll show recommendations too. (More details on the Google Help page .)

To be honest, I haven’t been able to make this work with every book, as the option to add it to my list doesn’t always show up. Google has a history of launching apps or tools only to discontinue them later — so I’m not ready to go all-in on this yet.

But, if this does end up working out in the long run, it could be a really simple way to log your reading history and — especially — easily add new discoveries to your to-read list.

Your Library

An underrated way to keep track of your reading history is through your library’s website! Most libraries use a software (for mine, it’s BiblioCommons) that allows you to log into your account and add books to your reading history and other lists — whether or not you checked them out from the library. 

It may not be the most comprehensive tool out there, but there’s something special about logging into your library to log the newest book you’ve read.

Last but not least, if you just want to log books as you read them, there’s nothing more simple than an ongoing note in your Notes app. Just type out the name of the book you just read and move on with your day. Add a few star emojis at the end if you want to get fancy. 

You can even take a screenshot and post to Instagram at the end of the year. Easy. 

Final Thoughts —

Based on my experience using Goodreads alternatives, I have a few final thoughts and recommendations:

• The StoryGraph is the platform most poised to be a Goodreads-killer. It has all of the same benefits and features of Goodreads — just better. I especially think it’s better at providing data and insight about my reading habits — and recommending books I wouldn’t otherwise find.
• The only thing that Goodreads still wins on is community. More of my friends use Goodreads than any other platform combined. I really value seeing what my friends are reading (and love when they comment on what I’ve read) and for that reason, I’m going to have a hard time fully quitting Goodreads anytime soon . (But definitely feel free to send your bibliophile friends this article, so they can jump on a new platform, too!)
• If I had to pick a runner-up to The StoryGraph, I’d ultimately find a deadlocked tie between Basmo, Booksloth, and Bookly (wow, that’s a lot of b-words). They’re all great for different reasons, and have great design and simple apps.
• If you want to track more than just books (like movies and shows), I think Likewise is the way to go.
• And lastly, I really can’t speak highly enough of just picking a place to keep track of your books and sticking with it. No platform is perfect, but you’ll find the most success with just staying with a routine. For two years I posted an Instagram Story for every book I finished, and saved it to a Highlight. For a period of time I logged the books I read in my Notes app. You can even simply text the same friend every time you finish a new book. There’s no wrong way to do it.

More Alternatives —

I’ll also note that, during the course of writing this article I stumbled across a number of other platforms that I haven’t yet been able to formally review yet.

I’ll include them here and continue to update this article over time:

• Lit Hit. — A young app that allows you to swipe left and right on books
• Anobii — Intentionally positions itself as an independent alternative to Goodreads
• BookBrowse — Seemingly comprehensive tool, but its design aesthetic feels older than Goodread’s already-old vibe
• BookLikes — While other blogs recommend BookLikes, it doesn’t appear to be very active or up-to-date
• TBR (Tailored Book Recommendations) — Pay them money to have a literary expert mail you three books they think you’ll love
• Oku — A gorgeous, minimalist design and lots of features! I’ll definitely try this platform next.
• BookWyrm — This proudly anti-corporate and decentralized platform can connect with other decentralized platforms like Mastodon ‍
• Hardcover — Another beautifully-designed platform with plenty of features (and Goodreads import capabilities)! I’ll be trying this one soon, as well.

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'Wood vaulting': A simple climate solution you've probably never heard of

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• Driving and road transport
• Driving and motorcycle tests
• Car driving tests

Learner drivers warned about the risks of driving test cancellation finders

The Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency (DVSA) is encouraging learner drivers to only use the official GOV.UK website to book and manage their driving test.

DVSA has published new guidance to help learner drivers stay safe online when they book and manage their driving test.

Some learner drivers are turning to unofficial websites and apps to find an earlier driving test because waiting times are longer than usual in some areas. Earlier appointments are sometimes known as ‘cancellation appointments’.

DVSA does not run, approve or endorse any cancellation finder apps or services.

GOV.UK is the only official driving test booking service.

The risks of using unofficial websites

When you use an unofficial website, you might not get important emails from DVSA about your test - including if the DVSA needs to change your test date.

A DVSA review of several unofficial cancellation finders and apps found that none of them had a privacy notice that complied with data protection law.

This meant that privacy notices are missing important information. This includes:

• not saying who was collecting your personal data or giving their contact details
• not explaining the rights you have to access, rectify or delete your personal data
• not explaining the legal basis for processing your personal data
• not saying how long they would store your personal data

You should never give your personal data to any person or organisation unless they explain all of these things.

Take these 3 steps before considering using an unofficial service

DVSA has published new guidance to help learner drivers avoid the risks of using unofficial cancellation finders and apps.

Check you’re really ready to take an earlier test .

Check how the service will use your personal data .

Check how much the service will charge .

You can complain to:

• the Information Commissioner’s Office if you think a privacy notice is incomplete or missing - or if the company has misused your data
• the Advertising Standards Authority if you think you’ve found misleading claims about charges or service feature on an unofficial website

If you think you’ve been a victim of an online scam or fraud

Contact Action Fraud if you think you’ve lost money or been hacked because of an online scam or fraud and you’re in England or Wales. You can:

• report online - either sign up for an account or continue as a ‘guest’
• call 0300 123 2040

If you’re in Scotland and you’ve lost money because of an online scam or fraud, report the crime to Police Scotland .

Keep your personal data safe

Loveday Ryder, DVSA Chief Executive, said:

GOV.UK is the only official way to book your practical driving test. Using GOV.UK will keep your data safe, help you stay informed and save money. You should always keep your driving licence number secure. It could be invaluable to those looking to steal your identity. DVSA does not run, approve or endorse any cancellation finder apps or services and we encourage learners only to book their driving test when their instructor agrees they are ready.

The driving instructors’ National Associations Strategic Partnership (NASP) said:

NASP wholeheartedly supports any campaigns and guidance which works to dissuade learners from using third party booking apps. Taking shortcuts to queue jump and book an earlier test could come back to bite you, by losing your money, your test slot and even the potential loss or misuse of your personal data. Don’t take the risk, use the proper booking channels, listen to the advice about making sure you’re ready for test and becoming a licensed driver, and get and take your test the correct way.

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16 best e-book reader apps for Android in 2024

Published on April 3, 2024

Finding the right e-book reader apps (also called eReaders) can be difficult. There are a variety of e-book types and plenty of file formats to deal with, and then there are different kinds of books (novels, comics, etc.) that make the whole experience a little complicated. However, with the right app, you can turn any phone or tablet into an e-book reader fairly easily.

Additionally, the technology has kind of plateaued a little bit. Thus, e-book reader apps are about as good as they’ve ever been, and we don’t see them getting much better without some serious innovation in the future. The good news is that whatever you pick should last you a long time as long as the developer remains active. Here are the best e-book reader apps for Android.

The best e-book reader apps for Android

Amazon kindle, foxit pdf editor, google play books & audiobooks, moon plus reader, pocketbook reader, prestigio book reader.

• Ebook Reader

Price: Free / In-app purchases ($0.49 – $4.99 per item)

eBoox is a good book reader for Android with a high rating on the Play Store. It supports many formats, like fb2, epub, pdf, and more, and offers easy access to your books from your phone, SD card, cloud, or browser without any ads. eBoox has a good, neat, and clean UI, which makes comfortable reading possible. Other features include instant page loading and file syncing across Android devices. There’s also the facility to explore online book directories to discover new reads effortlessly. The only thing that this one’s missing is an option for local backup and an in-built dictionary. We do hope the developers add these features, but even without them, it’s a great app.

Price: Free

AIReader is one of the newer e-book reader apps, comparatively speaking. It also supports much older versions of Android. That’s becoming a bit rarer these days. The app also supports most common e-book formats, including EPUB (no DRM), RTF, MOBI, PRC, and many others. The interface comes with customization options, auto-scrolling, page-turning animations, and various view modes for your comfort. The app is free to use, but you can buy one of the various donation versions if you want to.

Price: Free / In-app purchases ($1.99 – $11.99 per item)

Amazon Kindle is one of the most obvious e-book reader apps. It has one of the largest and most consistent e-book stores on the internet. Additionally, the app has a ton of reading features, cross-device syncing, and even a large collection of free books. The UI is riddled with ads. However, the actual book-reading part is free of any such nonsense. There are also a variety of customization settings while reading. It’s a rock-solid option for book availability alone. You can also download books for offline use if needed. E-book prices vary.

Barnes & Noble Nook

Nook is yet another competitor to Amazon, Kobo, and Google Play Books. Unlike most, this one actually has physical book locations. You can visit Barnes & Noble, the parent company of Nook. The eReader is about as standard as it gets. It comes with customized reading options as well as support for books, comic books, manga, and more. Like most, it also offers cross-device syncing. It even supports magazines and newspapers. It’s a rock-solid experience, actually. The prices for different e-books may vary.

Lithium is another app on our list. It is an EPUB reader app that makes reading ebooks easy and enjoyable. It automatically detects your books and offers features like highlighting, note-taking, and different themes for comfortable reading day or night. It has a clean Material Design interface and no ads; it provides a good, hassle-free reading experience. Lithium Pro is available for just $1.99 and offers additional features like syncing your reading progress, notes, more highlight colors, and customizing themes with your favorite colors. There might be occasional problems with the highlighting feature, but overall, it’s a nice, ad-free app that checks all the boxes.

Price: Free / In-app purchases ($10.99 – $15.99 per item)

Foxit is one of the most popular PDF reader and editor apps. It’s a good mixture of productivity and reading. The app supports basically all types of PDF files. Additionally, it offers annotation features, form-filling features, and ConnectedPDF for privacy. For reading, it can read PDFs out loud and also supports audio and video stuff. It has probably the best cross-platform support of any e-reader or PDF app. You can find Foxit on Windows, Linux, Mac, iOS, and Android. That’s the big five!

Librera Reader is a lightweight and free app for reading books on Android devices. It supports a ton of ebook formats, like PDF, EPUB, MOBI, and more. This one even has a read-aloud feature using text-to-speech. There are many other features, like customizable themes, library organization, note-taking, and advanced settings for reading. It also includes special modes for musicians and language learners. There are usual bugs here and there, with the UI malfunctioning at times, but the developers are working hard to make this app as comfortable as ever. Overall, it’s a great, versatile app.

Price: Free / In-app purchases ($0.01 – $1,200.00 per item)

Google Play Books & Audiobooks is a competitor to e-book reader apps like Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook. It’s a virtual bookstore. The selections include books, magazines, and all sorts of other stuff. It supports several e-book formats, comic book formats, and other types of e-book formats. You can even upload your books to the cloud and read them anywhere. That gives you a really good storage option that you can access on any device with an internet connection. Some other features include book rentals, a rapid skim mode, and a quick bookmark feature. The app is free, but many of the books cost money. The prices for the e-books may vary.

Price: Free / In-app purchases ($0.05 – $400.00 per item)

Kobo Books is another online bookstore like Amazon, Nook, and Google Play Books. The app is extremely basic. It seems like all it can do is read purchased books from the service. However, the service does support both audiobooks and normal e-books. Other features include cross-device syncing, downloading for offline use, and a Night Mode for late-night reading. The discovery features are actually pretty decent as well. The app is free to download. Books cost money, obviously.

Price: Free / In-app purchases ($0.99 per item)

Moon Plus Reader is definitely one of the best e-book reader apps out there. It supports a wide range of e-book formats, including EPUB, PDF, MOBI, most comic book formats, and more. It even has OPDS support. The app also includes over ten themes, gesture controls, auto-scrolling, EPUB3 support, and cross-device syncing via Dropbox. It’s one of those e-reader apps that has all the right bells and whistles. You can remove ads for $8.99 by purchasing or upgrading to the pro version.

Libby, by OverDrive

OverDrive is an excellent e-book reader, and it’s not because it supports your current library. OverDrive connects you to your local library, and you can actually borrow e-books you don’t own for free, just like you can at your local library. It includes some neat features, like no late fees, and it’ll remember where you left off the next time you read. It doesn’t have a lot of the power-user features of other e-book readers. However, it is one of the truly great and legal sources of free e-books.

Ploter is an up-and-coming ebook reader app. It’s a cloud library that contains your ebooks. It works similarly to YouTube Music or Apple Music. You upload your ebooks to the service and access them from the app wherever you are, as long as you have an Internet connection. It works with most ebook and audiobook formats. It also works cross-platform with Windows and Kobo-branded ebook readers.

You get 500MB of free storage, which the developer estimates is around 200 ebooks worth. They plan to add premium tiers with more storage later on, but it hasn’t launched yet as of the time of this writing. It’s new, so there are bugs, but we like the idea, and we hope the app does well in the future.

Price: Free/ In-app purchases ($0.99 – $294.99 per item)

PocketBook is another one of the older e-book reader apps. Don’t let that fool you, though. This app has enough features to justify its existence here. That includes support for most common e-book file types, comic books, and even Adobe DRM and PDF. You can highlight text, export notes, lock your screen orientation, and more. There is also OPDS support for those who need it. The highlight of this one is its price. There aren’t a ton of completely free e-book readers these days, and this app is easily among the best in that category.

Price: Free / In-app purchases ($0.99 – $99.99 per item)

Prestigio changes its name almost every year. However, it’s still one of the better e-book reader apps. The app supports over 25 languages, has text-to-speech functionality, and has 50,000 books available for download. Additionally, the app can sync across devices (account required). Some other features include a night mode, various customization options, and a decently modern UI. The app is free. You can pay to remove ads. There is also an optional donation button if you want to support development.

ReadEra is a surprisingly popular e-book reader app. It has all of the basics, including various reading modes and support for PDF, EPUB, Word, MOBI, FB2, DJVU, TXT, and the super rare CHM formats. It doesn’t require any services or anything like that. There is also a split-screen mode where you can read multiple books or documents at the same time. However, we really only recommend that on larger-screen phones or tablets. This one is surprisingly good and easy to use. The UI looks nice as well. We’re also relatively certain that this one is entirely free.

EBook Reader

Ebook Reader is another great app on our list. This one not only lets you read your locally stored PDF or EPUB files but also offers you the option to download books. For your convenience, they have user-created book collections so that you don’t have any trouble finding your favorite books. The app lets you read in landscape mode as well as portrait mode. It has easy navigation tools and a simple UI. The text size is adjustable, and there’s online synchronization for notes, highlights, and your current reading progress. It’s not anything fancy, but it’s good for a free reading app.

If we missed any of the best e-book reader apps for Android, tell us about them in the comments! You can also click here to check out our latest Android app and game lists!

Thank you for reading!

• Published Aug 15, 2024

Announcing mandatory multi-factor authentication for Azure sign-in

• Content type
• Best practices
• Data professionals

Learn how multifactor authentication (MFA) can protect your data and identity and get ready for Azure’s upcoming MFA requirement. 

As cyberattacks become increasingly frequent, sophisticated, and damaging, safeguarding your digital assets has never been more critical. As part of Microsoft’s $20 billion dollar investment in security  over the next five years and our commitment to enhancing security in our services in 2024, we are introducing mandatory multifactor authentication (MFA) for all Azure sign-ins.

The need for enhanced security

One of the pillars of Microsoft’s  Secure Future Initiative (SFI) is dedicated to protecting identities and secrets—we want to reduce the risk of unauthorized access by implementing and enforcing best-in-class standards across all identity and secrets infrastructure, and user and application authentication and authorization. As part of this important priority, we are taking the following actions:

• Protect identity infrastructure signing and platform keys with rapid and automatic rotation with hardware storage and protection (for example, hardware security module (HSM) and confidential compute).
• Strengthen identity standards and drive their adoption through use of standard SDKs across 100% of applications.
• Ensure 100% of user accounts are protected with securely managed, phishing-resistant multifactor authentication.
• Ensure 100% of applications are protected with system-managed credentials (for example, Managed Identity and Managed Certificates).
• Ensure 100% of identity tokens are protected with stateful and durable validation.
• Adopt more fine-grained partitioning of identity signing keys and platform keys.
• Ensure identity and public key infrastructure (PKI) systems are ready for a post-quantum cryptography world.

Ensuring Azure accounts are protected with securely managed, phishing-resistant multifactor authentication is a key action we are taking. As recent  research by Microsoft shows that multifactor authentication (MFA) can block more than 99.2% of account compromise attacks, making it one of the most effective security measures available, today’s announcement brings us all one step closer toward a more secure future.

In May 2024 , we talked about implementing automatic enforcement of multifactor authentication by default across more than one million Microsoft Entra ID tenants within Microsoft, including tenants for development, testing, demos, and production. We are extending this best practice of enforcing MFA to our customers by making it required to access Azure. In doing so, we will not only reduce the risk of account compromise and data breach for our customers, but also help organizations comply with several security standards and regulations, such as Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

Preparing for mandatory Azure MFA

Required MFA for all Azure users will be rolled out in phases starting in the 2 nd half of calendar year 2024 to provide our customers time to plan their implementation: 

• Phase 1 : Starting in October, MFA will be required to sign-in to  Azure portal ,  Microsoft Entra admin center , and  Intune admin center . The enforcement will gradually roll out to all tenants worldwide. This phase will not impact other Azure clients such as Azure Command Line Interface, Azure PowerShell, Azure mobile app and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools. 
• Phase 2 : Beginning in early 2025, gradual enforcement for MFA at sign-in for  Azure CLI ,  Azure PowerShell ,  Azure mobile app , and  Infrastructure as Code  (IaC) tools will commence.

Beginning today, Microsoft will send a 60-day advance notice to all Entra global admins by email and through  Azure Service Health Notifications  to notify the start date of enforcement and actions required. Additional notifications will be sent through the Azure portal, Entra admin center, and the  M365 message center .

For customers who need additional time to prepare for mandatory Azure MFA, Microsoft will review extended timeframes for customers with complex environments or technical barriers.

How to use Microsoft Entra for flexible MFA

Organizations have multiple ways to enable their users to utilize MFA through Microsoft Entra:

• Microsoft Authenticator allows users to approve sign-ins from a mobile app using push notifications, biometrics, or one-time passcodes. Augment or replace passwords with two-step verification and boost the security of your accounts from your mobile device.
• FIDO2 security keys provide access by signing in without a username or password using an external USB, near-field communication (NFC), or other external security key that supports Fast Identity Online (FIDO) standards in place of a password.
• Certificate-based authentication enforces phishing-resistant MFA using personal identity verification (PIV) and common access card (CAC). Authenticate using X.509 certificates on smart cards or devices directly against Microsoft Entra ID for browser and application sign-in.
• Passkeys allow for phishing-resistant authentication using Microsoft Authenticator.
• Finally, and this is the least secure version of MFA, you can also use a SMS or voice approval as described in  this documentation .

External multifactor authentication solutions and federated identity providers will continue to be supported and will meet the MFA requirement if they are configured to send an MFA claim.

Moving forward

At Microsoft, your security is our top priority. By enforcing MFA for Azure sign-ins, we aim to provide you with the best protection against cyber threats. We appreciate your cooperation and commitment to enhancing the security of your Azure resources.

Our goal is to deliver a low-friction experience for legitimate customers while ensuring robust security measures are in place. We encourage all customers to begin planning for compliance as soon as possible to avoid any business interruptions. 

Start today! For additional details on implementation, impacted accounts, and next steps for you, please refer to  this documentation .

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The Epic Games Store Officially Launches on Mobile Devices

Worldwide launch on android, while only eu iphone users can access it..

We already knew Epic Games plans to release its digital storefront on mobile devices via the iOS App Store and Android's Google Play later this year. Months after the initial announcement, the prolific game and technology company announced today that the Epic Games Store is now available for iOS and Android devices.

In a press release, Epic confirmed that the Epic Games Store is available to download on Android devices worldwide, in addition to iPhones, but only for Apple smartphone owners based in the EU. Epic also provided steps to install the Epic Game Store on mobile devices, citing that the process is long "due to Apple and Google introducing intentionally poor-quality install experiences" plagued with complex settings, lengthy steps, and "scare screens."

As Epic previously confirmed during the State of Unreal earlier this year , the mobile version of the Epic Games Store (EGS), the digital storefront, is poised to become the "first-ever game-focused, multi-platform store," expanding its reach onto Android and iOS, alongside its already available apps on macOS and PC. Like the computer app and desktop version, mobile developers benefit "from the same fair terms," with an 88/12 split revenue share, among other incentives.

Fortnite is back on mobile devices

Beyond the release of the mobile version of the Epic Games Store, the company also revealed today that Fortnite is officially back on mobile devices through the company's digital storefront. In addition to launching on the Epic Games Store mobile version, EU Android and iOS owners can access Fortnite through the AltStore, a third-party digital storefront available thanks to the DMA.

This marks the first time Fortnite has been available natively on mobile devices after Apple and Google pulled the free-to-play battle royale app from the App Store and Google Play in 2020. Previously, if you wanted to play Fortnite on mobile devices after its removal, you could only play it via two cloud gaming services: Xbox Cloud Gaming and Nvidia GeForce Now if you wanted to play on Apple devices. While Android users could directly download the app or play on the aforementioned cloud streaming services.

Alongside Fortnite, Epic confirmed that Fall Guys and Rocket League Sideswipe are also available to download on Android devices worldwide and EU iPhones via the mobile version of EGS and the EU's AltStore. This is the first time Fall Guys has been made available on mobile devices, following its initial release in 2020 for PS4 and Windows and subsequent ports for PS5, Switch, and Xbox in 2022 .

"The tide is turning, and the mobile ecosystem is finally opening up to competition. We are grateful to the European Commission for making it possible to launch the Epic Games Store and offer our games to iOS users in the European Union," Epic Games Founder and CEO Tim Sweeney wrote in a press release. "Now, European iOS users and all Android users can access our store and games, as they've always been able to do on open platforms like PC and Mac. The fight is far from over, but this is tangible progress for developers and consumers who can begin to benefit from competition and choice."

Taylor is a Reporter at IGN. You can follow her on Twitter @TayNixster.

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Ex-Trump insider Stephanie Grisham goes after former boss in DNC speech: Watch

Stephanie Grisham was among the first guests to speak on Tuesday at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

Grisham, who is no stranger to politics, served as the White House Press Secretary from July 2019 to April 2020 during former President Donald Trump's presidency.

Grisham said that she was a "true believer" in the former president, until January 6, 2021. She became the first senior staffer in the Trump Administration to resign after the violent riot/insurrection at the United States Capitol Building.

The Democratic National Committee convention is in Chicago from Monday, Aug. 19 to Thursday, Aug. 22. Vice President Kamala Harris on Thursday is scheduled to formally accept the party's nomination for the 2024 Election.

Who is Stephanie Grisham? What to know about the ex-Trump staffer's speech at the DNC

Who is Stephanie Grisham?

• Who is she : Aside from working as the White House Press Secretary for former President Trump and former First Lady Melania Trump's chief of staff, Stephanie Grisham was also served "as the as the spokeswoman for AAA Arizona, Arizona Attorney General Tom Horne, the Arizona House of Representatives Republican caucus, and then Arizona House Speaker David Gowan," according to Ballotpedia . In addition, Grisham worked on Mitt Romney's 2012 presidential campaign.
• What role she plays:  Grisham worked with many candidates that ran for office in the Republican Party. Now, she is switching parties to show her support for the Democratic Parties 2024 presidential nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris.
• Key quote:  "[Trump] has no empathy, no morals, and no fidelity to the truth. He used to tell me, 'It doesn't matter what you say, Stephanie, say it enough, and people will believe you.' But it does matter, what you [say] matters and what you don't say matters. On January 6, I asked Melania if we could at least Tweet that, while peaceful protest is the right of every American, there's no place for lawlessness or violence, she replied with one word, 'No.'"

Watch Stephanie Grisham's complete DNC convention speech

Democratic convention live updates: Barack Obama, Michelle Obama set to take the stage

When and where is the DNC

The  Democratic National Convention  will take place from August 19-22 in Chicago, Illinois.

The United Center, home of the Chicago Bulls and Blackhawks, will be the  main venue  for the DNC.

Chicago has hosted the Democratic Convention 11 times, most recently in 1996 when the United Center saw President Bill Clinton was nominated for a second time.

What's true and false? Sign up USA TODAY's Checking the Facts newsletter.

How to watch and stream the 2024 DNC

The convention will  air live on its website , from the United Center in Chicago between 6:15 p.m. and 11 p.m. Eastern (5:15 p.m. to 10 p.m Central) on Monday, and 7 p.m to 11 p.m. Eastern (6 p.m. to 10 p.m. Central) the other days.

USA TODAY will provide livestream coverage on YouTube  each night of the DNC, Monday through Thursday.

What are the themes for each night of the DNC?

The DNC announced nightly themes for the convention. The title of the convention is "For the People, For Our Future."

Here are the themes for each night:

• Monday:  "For the People"
• Tuesday:  "A Bold Vision for America's Future"
• Wednesday:  "A Fight for our Freedoms"
• Thursday:  "For our Future"

• Editor's Choice: Back-to-School Tech Gifts
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Our 8 Favorite Book Reading Apps of 2024

Your tablet is great, but these apps make reading on your phone a breeze

• Western Sydney University
• Payment Services

Book lovers no longer lack choices regarding quality e-book and audiobook apps. Here are some of the best book reading apps for Android and iOS devices.

Best Free Book Reading App: Media365 Book Reader

Massive library of popular and niche e-books.

Import your own e-book files for reading in the app.

Offline reading requires a Premium subscription.

Only for Android.

Media365 is a free reading app for Android that lets you read any of the books in its library in exchange for the occasional fullscreen advertisement. Authors can self-publish on the Media 365 platform, which is why so many niche and indie titles are available. Many mainstream books are also available, like the entire Harry Potter book series.

The Media 365 library stores e-books in 15 languages, while font size can be adjusted simply by doing a two-finger pinch on the screen. There’s also a text-to-speech function, which lets the app read books to you. You can also upload your ebooks with supported EPUB, PDF, AZW3, CBC, CBR, CBZ, CHM, FB2, LIT, MOBI, TCR, AI, and PUB formats.

Best E-Book Reader App for Amazon Prime Members: Kindle

Massive library of e-books to choose from.

Apps are updated on a very regular basis.

Windows version is more for computers than touchscreens.

Can’t buy ebooks within the iOS or Android Kindle app.

The official Kindle apps on iOS, Android, Mac, and Windows are Amazon’s way of letting its customers consume their Kindle e-books without having to buy a Kindle.

Users can read any Kindle-branded e-book on the Amazon website within the Kindle app. A variety of features set this app experience apart from its rivals, including the built-in dictionary, the ability to skip ahead without losing your place, and Amazon’s X-Ray tech, which reveals extra information on a book’s characters and world while you’re reading.

The Amazon Kindle apps aren’t perfect, though. The Windows Kindle app is designed more for traditional desktop computers than modern devices with touchscreens, and the iOS and Android versions don’t support e-book purchases. However, you can still purchase Kindle e-books on the Amazon website, and titles will sync to the Kindle app almost immediately.

Most-Available Reading App: Rakuten Kobo

Many options to customize reading experience.

Official Kobo app for most phones.

Audiobooks only in iOS and Android apps.

Facebook login buggy.

Rakuten’s Kobo is a major competitor to Amazon, with millions of e-books and a growing number of audiobooks on its platform. While there's no dedicated Windows or macOS version, users can download the separate desktop version of the app for use on PCs and laptops.

The iOS and Android Kobo apps are clearly where the company puts most of its attention, with each app offering an impressive variety of font sizes, styles, and color options to make the reading experience more personal and comfortable for individual users.

Best Reading App For Kids: Epic!

Lots of in-app gamification encourages reading.

Great classic and modern children’s books.

Requires monthly subscription after 30-day free trial.

Changing settings is a bit of a convoluted process.

Epic! is like a Netflix for kids, but instead of TV shows and movies, it supplies the user with a massive library of e-books and audiobooks . Parents can make unique profiles for each of their children, who can customize their profiles based on their tastes.

While many classic children’s books are available to download, there are also many modern releases, such as one series of books covering famous pop culture icons. Children can also choose from family-friendly comic books like Snoopy and The Smurfs , and view numerous short video clips.

Best iPhone E-Book Reader App: Yomu EBook Reader

Supports numerous file types.

Save e-books from any iOS web browser.

Settings menu is very hard to find after adding books.

Download links in the tutorial, not in the main menu.

The Yomu EBook Reader is a fantastic app for iPhone and iPad users who download their ebooks in various file formats, and want to bring them all together for a cohesive reading experience.

Yomu, Japanese for “to read,” supports all of the popular e-book file formats and those supported by Amazon Kindle. Users can import files to the app via a cloud service like iCloud , Dropbox, Google Drive , or OneDrive . Once you install the app, Yomu will appear as a source when saving e-book files from any iOS web browser app.

PDF E-Book Reading App: Foxit PDF Reader

Share PDF files directly to the app on iOS.

Reflow options allow small screen readability.

New PDF file creation requires monthly subscription.

Lack of back button makes app navigation confusing.

Foxit PDF Reader Mobile is one of the better PDF apps, and is an ideal solution for those who prefer to consume e-books in the PDF file format . Unlike many similar apps that display a PDF as is and require you to pinch and zoom to read its content, Foxit features a reflow setting that resizes and reorganizes the text on a page to fit perfectly on a mobile phone’s screen.

PDF files can be transferred to the Foxit app via Wi-Fi , iCloud, or Foxit’s own Foxit Drive service. Those using an iOS device can import downloaded files directly from the share feature while using other apps.

You'll need a monthly subscription is to take advantage of many advanced settings, but those looking for an app to simply read their PDF e-books will be fine with the free functionality.

Best Reading App on Nintendo Switch: Inky Pen

Many free comics from popular franchises.

Comics look great on the Nintendo Switch.

Monthly cost a bit expensive.

No Marvel or DC Comics series.

Most would think the Nintendo Switch is just for playing games, but its library of non-game apps has been slowly growing since its launch. One of these apps, Inky Pen, is a full-fledged comic book reading app that lets anyone read full digital issues from popular comic book series on their Switch.

Inky Pen does charge a monthly fee for unlimited access to its entire library, but there are an impressive amount of free issues available that will keep most comic fans entertained during long car trips or lazy weekends. What’s cool is the app works when the Nintendo Switch is docked so that a group can read comics on a TV.

Best Reading App For Google Users: Google Play Books

Very smooth reading experience.

Page turn animation looks fantastic.

Runs really well on cheap, low-end Android tablets.

Switches to Google Play app every time for more book info.

Has a much smaller selection than Amazon.

Google Play Books, as its title suggests, is Google’s first-party app for reading e-books and listening to audiobooks bought within the Google Play Store . The book selection isn’t as extensive as Amazon’s, but it’s still large enough to please the casual reader. Those who enjoy reading at least one book a day may want more.

The good thing is that Google Play Books isn't a subscription service. You can use it to enjoy a purchased e-book or audiobook one weekend, then ignore it without feeling financial guilt for not taking advantage of some monthly fee.

Google Play Books is an excellent reading app, especially for those immersed in the Google ecosystem. It’s a very solid reading experience overall, is stable and easy to use, and has some of the best page-turn animations out of all the book-reading apps.

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Audible Alternatives: The Best Audiobook Apps of 2022

Let these top-quality apps free you from the printed page and give you access to thousands of free books and library books.

My title is Senior Features Writer, which is a license to write about absolutely anything if I can connect it to technology (I can). I’ve been at PCMag since 2011 and have covered the surveillance state, vaccination cards, ghost guns, voting, ISIS, art, fashion, film, design, gender bias, and more. You might have seen me on TV talking about these topics or heard me on your commute home on the radio or a podcast. Or maybe you’ve just seen my Bernie meme . 

Our team tests, rates, and reviews more than 1,500 products each year to help you make better buying decisions and get more from technology.

Table of Contents

Storytelling began as a purely auditory art. Listening to a story can be an enthralling experience. And now, thousands of years after it first began, it can be a time-saving one. Audiobooks let you listen to novels, memoirs, and whatever else you like while you run errands, clean your home, or just lay down on the couch and close your eyes for a bit. Of course, they’re also essential for those who are visually impaired.

But before you press Play on that bestseller, you might want to first read up on choosing an app for your audiobooks. There are a lot of options out there and you might find that some are better suited to your needs and budget. 

We’ve put together a guide to a few favorites. There are choices for what are basically streaming services but for books, a couple of ways to use your library card for listening, and some apps that let you purchase books à la carte. Here are our top picks.

Recommended by Our Editors

Apple books.

The Apple Books app isn’t just for reading ebooks; it has a shop full of audiobooks available for download. It’s divided into handy lists according to genre, bestsellers, deals, and more. There’s also a section of free audiobooks, some of which are books in the public domain and others of which are more recent promotions. Books are purchasable one at a time. You can listen to a preview before you hand over your digital cash. Speaking of which, you pay with whatever payment method is stored with your Apple ID. You can play the audiobooks on an iOS device (including Apple Watch) and your Mac.

iOS , Android

Audible is the best-known of the audiobook apps, if only because it’s owned by Amazon. Because of its provenance, it has plenty of titles in stock—about 200,000 of them. Audible has two membership levels: Audible Plus ($7.95 per month) and Audible Premium Plus (starts at $14.95 per month). To join, you must have an Amazon account, though you do not need to be signed up for Amazon Prime. With each membership, you get full access to Audible Originals (audiobooks that are exclusive to Audible), podcasts, and some other content. You can purchase audiobooks with each, but with the premium subscription, you get credits that can be used toward them. Audible lets you listen on your phone, tablet, computer, Alexa, Sonos, or Kindle.

Audiobooks.com

Audiobooks.com boasts over 300,000 books, 10,000 of which are free. The service costs $14.95 a month and includes two audiobooks: one out of its regular catalog, and one from a new monthly list of VIP titles. You can purchase any additional books you want separately after that. Ten-minute samples of books give you a good idea if you want to commit to a purchase. The app has a section where you can store audio “notes” clipped out of audiobooks. The Audiobooks.com app works on iOS and Android and also includes podcasts and a small section of meditations.

Chirp Audiobooks

Chirp Audiobooks is perfect for those who don’t want a monthly subscription fee but still want a deal. Limited-time offers are all under $5 and frequently less. You can expect discounts of a few dollars on top titles. Chirp Audiobooks are playable on iOS, Android, and Alexa devices, as well as through a web browser on your computer.

Google Play Books

Google Play Books’ main focus is ebooks, but much like its counterpart Apple Books it also has audiobooks. There’s no membership fee, so you purchase books as you want them. You'll find slight discounts on lots of popular titles and some books (mostly those in the public domain) that are free. Google Play Books is available as an iOS and Android app and also through a browser on computers.

If you have a library card, you can probably listen to audiobooks on Hoopla for free. Hoopla has partnerships with libraries in the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, and if your library isn’t on their list, you can try emailing them at [email protected] . The audiobooks section of its app has all the features you’d expect, such as bookmarks and a sleep timer. Aside from audiobooks, Hoopla also has ebooks and even television shows. Hoopla works on iOS and Android as well as in browsers.

Kobo’s ebook-focused app also includes audiobooks. With a $9.99 monthly subscription, you get one audiobook of your choice per month and can then purchase more after that. You can listen to Kobo audiobooks on iOS and Android devices.

iOS, Android

Much like Hoopla, Libby lets you borrow from your local library. It works with about 90% of libraries in North America. The signup process is easy and you might even be able to sign up for a library card in the process through a zip code and phone number search. The audiobook player has a sleep timer, bookmarks, and the ability to adjust the playback speed. You can listen to Libby audiobooks on iOS and Android devices.

Plenty of good reading is in the public domain and LibriVox has lots of them (more than 50,000) in audiobook format read by volunteers. It’s really an act of love for literature all around. LibriVox has a sleep timer and lets you add bookmarks. You can play audiobooks on iOS and Android devices. You can also listen from a browser, but that only gives you the ability to play and pause.

Barnes & Noble used to have a standalone Nook audiobook app, which is now combined with its Nook app that also has ebooks. There are more than 300,000 audiobooks to choose from and purchase individually, as well as about 10,000 that are free. You can also join B&N Audiobooks for $14.99 a month, which entitles you to one book a month and savings on others. The audiobook app is available on iOS and Android devices and has all of the features you’d expect. You can also play your audiobooks through a browser.

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About Chandra Steele

Senior features writer.

I strive to explain topics that you might come across in the news but not fully understand, such as NFTs and meme stocks. I’ve had the pleasure of talking tech with Jeff Goldblum, Ang Lee, and other celebrities who have brought a different perspective to it. I put great care into writing gift guides and am always touched by the notes I get from people who’ve used them to choose presents that have been well-received. Though I love that I get to write about the tech industry every day, it’s touched by gender, racial, and socioeconomic inequality and I try to bring these topics to light. 

Outside of PCMag, I write fiction, poetry, humor, and essays on culture .

Read Chandra's full bio

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Further Reading

Best ebooks apps in 2021

The best ebooks apps for smartphones will help you find something good to read

Forget about dedicated e-readers — the best ebooks apps let you read everything from books to articles to comics directly on your smartphone or tablet. Apple's Books and Google Play Books already do a great job as stock apps, but specialist reading apps bring additional features to the fix — highly configurable settings, support for odd formats and read-all-you-can subscriptions just to name a few.

Check out more than a dozen of the best ebooks apps, from convenient, all-in-one marketplace-reader combinations to feature-packed and customizable standalone readers, as well as subscription-based unlimited reading services.

• Best Kindles : Get a top e-reader
• These are the best audiobook apps
• Where to get free ebooks

The best ebooks apps to download today

1. kindle (android, ios: free).

Amazon's Kindle app is a multi-platform e-book juggernaut, featuring marketplace, reader and library management features. More than 1 million titles are available in the Kindle store, from the latest bestsellers to free classics. 

A customizable display lets you set font size, brightness and other settings. Also, Kindle syncs your last page read, bookmarks, highlights and notes between devices and platforms. 

One of the best things about the Kindle app is Kindle Unlimited program. Through that program, Kindle users are able to access to thousands of audiobooks and e-books for a monthly fee. Overall, Kindle provides an excellent mix of usability, legibility, value and variety to feed your reading habits.

Download Kindle: Android , iOS

2. Realm (Android, iOS: Free)

It used to be known as Serial Box, but a name change to Realm hasn't changed the app's approach to getting a good story. You don't have to shell out for a complete audiobook, with Realm instead offering shorter, episodic content in bite-sized chunks of novels. If you've resumed commuting, Realm's installments are just about the perfect length.

You can pick from a range of genres — drama, fantasy, sci-fi and more. The first episode is usually free, with subsequent installments costing $1.99. You get both text and audio versions of a story, and discounts on the full version are available with a season pass. 

With offerings such as “The Witch Who Came In From The Cold”, “Bookburners” and “Tremontaine” and a highly configurable reader and audiobook player mode, Realm is an interesting take on digital books.

Download Realm: Android , iOS

3. Scribd (Android, iOS: $8.99/month)

While Amazon boasts of its Unlimited program, it wasn't first off the bat in providing an unlimited access program for books. Scribd offers an unlimited access program for ebooks, which was compared to a "Netflix for books." 

Scribd features a library of more than 500,000 books from 900-plus publishers across a variety of genres. The app features a customizable display as well as curated editorial collections, personalized recommendations based on your reading history and the ability to download books for offline reading.

Download Scribd: Android , iOS

4. tiReader (iOS: Free)

Think of tiReader as an all-in-one iOS ebook reader option for consuming your DRM-free ebooks, audiobooks, and digital comics. The app supports a broad selection of formats, such as epubs, PDFs, cbrs and cbzs, as well as photos, archives, and more. 

A customizable reader includes bookmarks, annotation tools, day and night modes, library management and search filters, as well as cross-device syncing. tiReader also includes cloud support for ebooks that you store online, as well as OPDS support for publicly available ebook libraries and public domain content. 

The free version of this top ebooks app lets you try things out with a five-document maximum in the library (you can keep deleting files if you want to add new books). The $4.99 in-app purchase upgrades you to the unlimited version of tiReader.

Download tiReader: iOS

5. Libby by Overdrive (Android, iOS: Free)

Why spend a ton of money on ebooks if your local library already has a digital media lending system? Libby takes Overdrive's popular digital media management system and lets users to borrow ebooks and audiobooks from participating libraries. 

Simply sign in with your library card and then you can browse your library's digital media collection, allowing you to search for titles, set holds, borrow ebooks and audiobooks with a tap, and return or extend a lend just as easily. 

You can preview books from the app, downloading borrowed titles or streaming them to your phone or tablet if you prefer to save space.

Download Libby: Android , iOS

6. FullReader (Android: Free)

FullReader is an all-in-one Android ebook reader, supporting numerous formats, such as epub, PDF, CBR and CBZ, as well as office files like RTF, .doc, .docx and even MP3s (great for audiobooks). Users can sort their files into collections or simply use the built-in file explorer, and the app also includes cloud storage support as well as OPDS compatibility for exploring libraries of free online content. 

The reader itself is clear and easy to navigate, with access to bookmarks, the table of contents, text-to-speech, and the ability to make notes and annotations. The app is free and ad-supported, with an in-app purchase disabling advertising.

Download FullReader: Android

7. Madefire Comics & Motion Books (Android, iOS: Free)

Like other comic readers, Madefire gives you access to enough comic books to choke Galactus. But some of them also move, along with adding lashings of atmosphere with 3D elements and audio.

These aren’t cartoons — you get traditional panel layouts. But parts of the image transition in a manner that draws your eye to certain elements. Your reading pace is slowed, helping you take everything in. And the action is joined by rumbles and dark music in the likes of Hellboy, or iconic transformation sounds in Transformers.

This may be a gimmick — and it’s unlikely to tear you from your comic reader of choice. But as a glimpse into a different way of presenting comic stories, Madefire’s well worth a look.

Download Madefire: Android , iOS

8. KyBook 3 (iOS: $14.99/year)

KyBook 3 is one of the best ebooks apps because this all-in-one e-reader supports DRM-free formats like epub, RTF, DJVU, PDF, CBR and CBZ. Whether you're looking to read poetry or prose, comic books or RPG rules, KyBook's likely to do a solid job. 

You can configure the viewer's fonts (including supplying your own font files), themes, and other layout settings like margins and line spacing. Readers can upload files through iTunes, or access their ebooks in supported cloud services like iCloud, Google Drive, Dropbox, and Yandex Disk. There's even support for OPDS catalogs, allowing you to access tons of free and public domain content online. 

A premium subscription — $14.99 for a year, though three-month options are available — allows you to sync your ebook metadata and files across devices.

Download KyBook: iOS

9. Comixology (Android, iOS: Free)

Comixology is one of the most popular digital comic platforms online, featuring titles from major comics publishers such as Marvel , DC and Image. Readers can buy their favorite issues and series from the Comixology website and read them in the app, which in addition to being a top ebooks option is also one of the best comic book readers . 

Of particular note Comixology's the Guided View mode, which is great for reading on a small screen. US customers benefit from an Unlimited mode that works as a "read-all-you-can" subscription. On the downside, you can't import in an existing comics collection or make in-app purchases on iOS.

Download: Comixology: Android , iOS

10. Chunky (iOS: Free)

If you already have a collection of DRM-free comics, you may want to check out Chunky instead of Comixology. Chunky is a free and feature-packed comics option for the iPad . 

On the technical side, Chunky supports CBR, CBZ and PDF comics, as well as metadata tags from ComicRack and ComicBookLover. A smart upscaling mode renders even low-res files as crisply as possible, while multiple view modes let you read however you like. There's even an auto-contrast/tint fix to adjust for faded comic scans. 

The app can download comics from your cloud storage services, such as Dropbox and Google Drive, straight into the app's self-organizing library. Plus, a parental lock allows you to flag and hide titles behind password protection. It's a fantastic free package whose only fault is a lack of iPhone support. For the cost of a $3.99 pro upgrade, the app can connect to Mac or Windows shared folders, FTP or SFTP servers, ComicStreamer, Calibre or Ubooquity libraries for sharing files in and out.

Download Chunky: iOS

11. Comicat (Android: $2.99)

For DRM-free comic reading on Android, check out Comicat, another app that blends a comic book reader with the best ebooks apps have to offer. This premium Android comic book reader gives you a ton of features and customizability for less than the price of a single comic issue. 

The app auto-scans your mobile device (or selected library folders) for comics in supported formats (such as CBR, CBZ, and PDF). It then automatically sorts them into series in a nice bookshelf view which you can manually organize. Once you're in the reader view, the interface is unobtrusive, with long press or slide controls bringing out options and settings. 

Comicat supports cloud storage folders, password protection, manga-style right to left displays, image enhancement to correct contrast, brightness, and saturation among other tweaks.

Download Comicat: Android

12. Moon+ Reader (Android: Free)

Moon+ Reader is a nifty Android e-book reader app known for its highly customizable interface. While it may not come with a dedicated marketplace, Moon+'s UI makes it stand out from the pack. You can set font styles and sizes, backgrounds, spacing, paging modes, autoscroll, multiple view modes and more. 

The app is free, but a $6.99 pro version is also available to remove ads and add PDF support, as well as other extra features. If you already have a sizable e-book collection and are just looking for an Android app to read with, then consider Moon+ for your e-book reading needs.

Download Moon+: Android

13. FBReader (Android, iOS: Free)

FBReader supports EPUB, RTF, DOC, HTML, MOBI and other formats on both Android and iPhones. While it doesn't feature an attached store like some other best ebooks apps, FB Reader makes up for it with its highly customizable nature. 

Users can tweak text fonts, size, hyphenation, text colors and backgrounds, margins, page animations and more. External dictionary support, a browser/downloader for finding books online, language localizations and plugin support for PDFs and library syncing round out an impressive free package.

There is a pro version of FBReader that sheds some of the limitations of the free version — you can store more than 10 books and the translation feature is enabled. That costs $6.99 of Android users and $4.99 on the iPhone.

Download FBReader: Android , iOS

14. Aldiko (Android, iOS: Free)

Aldiko is a neat e-book reader app that supports EPUB, PDF, and Adobe DRM encrypted e-books. A clean and customizable interface includes settings for text size, margins, page layouts, brightness, fonts, colors and more. 

A library management system allows you to easily sort your material by tags and collections. The core reader is free, but a Premium version includes the ability to add notes, highlights, notes and an ad-free experience.

Download Aldiko: Android , iOS

15. Kobo Books (Android, iOS: Free)

While not as well known in the US, Kobo is especially popular in Canada and France. Featuring a library of more than 5 million ebooks and publications, Kobo lets you access content from its online store while also letting you import your own content. 

The app supports numerous formats, such as EPUB, PDF, CBZ and CBR. Obligatory view and text customizations let you get comfortable, and the app syncs across devices and platforms.

Download Kobo Books: Android , iOS

16. Marvin 3 (iOS: Free)

Marvin is a feature-packed and extremely configurable iOS reader app for DRM-free EPUB files; it also supports CBZ and CBR comics. 

As a reader, Marvin boasts several great reading features, from a variety of fonts (including a specialty font for dyslexic readers), a night mode and customizable themes, highlighting, annotation and dictionary tools. You'll also find numerous format tweaks ranging from text justification, to paragraph indentation and spacing. 

In addition, you'll find a solid set of organizing tools, allowing you to sort into collections, choose from list or cover views, collection sorting and more. The app also supports iOS features like Split View on the iPad. There are also premium features require a $4.99 in-app purchase.

Download Marvin: iOS

• Best iPhone apps
• Best Android apps

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Craig Grannell has been writing about tech for longer than he cares to remember, and spends his days surrounded by black rectangles, cables, and countless devices going DING when a notification comes in. He’s written for a bunch of magazines and websites including Tom's Guide, TechRadar, Wired, Stuff and many others, and specializes in Apple, apps, games, design and retro. At some point, he’s hoping someone will pay him a full-time wage to write about Robotron: 2084 and Bubble Bobble all day.

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Fable Book Club App Review

Clare Barnett

Clare Barnett lives in Richmond, Virginia, with her husband and daughter. She delves into all genres but has a soft spot for fantasy, mystery, and memoir. When she’s not working her way through her to-read list, she’s reading and writing about bookish things. Twitter: @clarebar. Inquiries: [email protected].

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Once upon a time, joining a book club meant discussing the themes of a novel with fellow readers over drinks and snacks. For many bookworms like myself, in-person book clubs were a lowkey social outlet that led to new literary takes and more than a few friendships. Now, in the pandemic world, many startups are trying to digitalize the bookworm social scene. There are book sites that are social, like Goodreads and Storygraph, and social sites that have bookish elements (hello, #BookTok and #Booktube).

A third, new crop of platforms are digital book clubs that offer online space for community and discussion. One such platform, Fable, bills itself as a “social reading platform” where readers can join clubs moderated by celebrities, authors, and influencers from TikTok, or start their own clubs. One of Fable’s signature book clubs is hosted by Levar Burton, so the app is clearly wooing those of us raised on Reading Rainbow . I tested the free content on the site to see if Fable is worth joining.

Fable bills itself as an app, but you can sign up on the website or through the iOS or Android app. The basic account is free and gives you access to some of the book clubs, Folio recs, and books for sale through the app. Both the app and the website are sleekly designed with a mix of photographs and whimsical doodles that give the sense that this content is polished, but fun! To access the premium features, it’s $69.99 per year or you can buy access to premium book clubs à la carte, which range from $5.99 to $9.99 a month. At the time of this writing, Fable was not offering any free trials for premium content, so you’ll need to pony up if you want to join Levar Burton’s book club or any of the other “premium” book clubs. I personally was reluctant to part with my cash without a preview, so I decided to test drive the free content.

Once you’re signed up, you can edit your user profile, add a photo, pronouns, and whatever information you’d like others to know to a standard bio section. Your profile also shows followers and following, so other users can see just how influential you are. Given that popular BookTokkers have 100k+ followers, it seems strange that Levar Burton, our shining beacon for this app, has only 437 followers, including me, but I digress. Looking at my public profile, users can see the clubs I’ve joined, book lists I’ve made, and my reviews.

Folios and Reading Guides

This may be a book club app, but the content on the top of my Home Screen is for Fable Folios, what Fable describes as curated “recommendations from tastemakers.” Judging by its prominence on the app and website, Folios by authors, celebrities, and CEOs are a key feature on the app. The first to pop up is “Unapologetically Queer YA” from “BookTok Personality” @LiteraryLesbian. They have four recommended books, including Cemetery Boys and The Henna Wars , with blurbs saying why they recommended the book. You can buy each book through Fable, but strangely, only on their website. If you click “buy” in the app, they’ll send you a link to buy it, with the tag “We know it’s kind of a hassle.” Um, yes, it is.

One of @LiteraryLesbian’s picks, Crier’s War , has “Discussion Prompts” that you can access through the app, a PDF you can download with chapter by chapter questions about characters and plots. All the Folios are free to view, so if you want to know a handful of books David Sedaris or Jasmine Guillory recommend, they’re at your fingertips.

Join a Book Club

Now I’m on to my main attraction: the book clubs. I have the option to join a book club or create my own. The “Fable Featured Clubs” on the home screen are moderated by authors like Mary Kay Andrews, actors like Sean Astin, and BookTok stars like @chamberofsecretsbooks. The book clubs are either free or premium, with many of the celebrity ones (LeVar!) locked behind a paywall. Beyond the home screen, you can “Find clubs” and filter by genre, premium status, and free ebooks, while sorting by trending number of members or last activity. The most popular clubs like the “Romance and Coffee Book Club” have between 3,000 and 6,000 readers.

I decide to join “Chamber of Classic Books,” moderated by BookTokker Cameron Capello, because the club is free and offers the free ebook of Jane Austen’s Persuasion . The club has 307 readers and about a dozen posts, organized by section. It’s here that I discover one of the coolest features in the app — and I do mean discover like some buried treasure because there is no tutorial or anything to point me to it. When I download Persuasion for the app, I can choose to read with the book club, which means I can see other members’ highlights and responses to the discussion questions that pop up in a corner with a “Let’s discuss,” tab. If you don’t mind reading a book on your phone or tablet, it’s definitely a more social way to read. If this feature is available on all the book club books (including ones you have to buy), that is a cool selling point. But as I mentioned, the “social reading” experience, which I think should be a key selling point, isn’t demoed or explained on the site.

While I was disappointed that so many of the book clubs are premium, there are some free ones that look really interesting. For example, the “Authors Guild Banned Books Club” is moderated by the author of the banned book. At the time of writing this article, Fable has Jacqueline Woodson moderating discussion of her novel Red at the Bone . While the topic and author are amazing, the club seems to have the same low participation as many of the clubs I browsed. Despite having 2k members, there are only 20 comments in the “Kickoff” section. From perusing the app, this seems to be the average level of engagement, even for clubs with thousands of members.

I was also left wondering whether the ebook of Red at the Bone came with a discussion guide. Maybe! I couldn’t tell. And while, it probably is very cool to have the read along experience with Woodson, the app is not selling it very well, and there doesn’t seem to be much engagement amongst members.

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Create Your Own

Fable also has the option to create your own book club. You can pick one of their “Book Club Ready Picks” like Lily King’s Writers & Lovers , which comes with its own reading guide and Spotify playlist. Then invite your IRL friends, people from your Slack channel, or whoever else you’d like to read along with you. To access the “social mode” reading experience, you’ll have to buy the Fable ebook. If you opt not to buy the Fable ebook, you can still post and respond to comments on the forum and see the discussion guide as a PDF.

The Verdict

Overall, Fable has a slick but somewhat confusing interface. The free content is plentiful, but I don’t think it’s something I’d personally pay for. The user engagement in the moderated clubs seems hit or miss, and even after spending several hours on the app, I’m still not sure if I found all the features. If you already have a bookclub that you’d like to make virtual, creating your own book club on Fable might be a great option, though. Overall, I feel that this slick app holds a lot of promise, but most of the potential is untapped or undersold.

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Book Review | Perceptions About Muslims In New India

We, the reviewers, have faced this observation often enough over the years. Implicit in this statement is an assumption about what constitutes a 'Bihari'. He (mostly 'he' and rarely 'she') has to be wild, uneducated, ill-mannered, least likely to be law-abiding, in constant pursuit of shortcuts, and forever wedded to the idea of jugaad .

While the observation might come as a compliment, it distresses us nonetheless. Being born and brought up in Bihar during a time of great political and social transformation, we rarely came across any fellow Bihari who fit this assumed definition. Yet, the assumption has persisted for years, in Delhi and elsewhere in India.

Having interacted with countless Biharis, we know - to use Hilal Ahmed's distinction between discursive and substantive aspects of an identity - that a whole host of factors contribute to the making of a Bihari. An imagined discourse is an additional burden for every Bihari to deal with. The factors contributing to the making of a Bihari include caste, religion, region, educational background, place of residence, and many others.

Who Are Indian Muslims?

The same assumption versus reality rule applies when describing a group of nearly 20 crore people known as Indian Muslims. Hilal Ahmed writes, "History of the present is perhaps a provocative title, especially when it is employed in relation to Muslims of India. It is a well-known fact that Islam is the second-largest Indian religion, and Muslims constitute almost 14% of the country's population. This 'community of believers' is highly diversified-they are divided on caste, class, region, and even sub-religious lines."

Yet, as he further notes, "Their classification as a religious minority in purely statistical terms, the description of medieval Indian history as Islamic rule, and the media debates around Islamic jihad and terrorism produce a simple and undifferentiated image of a homogeneous Muslim community."

Members of the community are perceived to have identical views on all issues under the sun, are seen as voting strategically, and are associated with multiple imagined jihads . And the list goes on.

Muslim 'Politicophobia'

When such widespread diversity is glossed over and assumptions are made based on stray events -  fuelled by a heavy dose of "global anti-Islamism" and "anti-Muslim communalism in the Indian context" - you have a situation that Hilal Ahmed describes as 'Muslim politicophobia'. This leads to political engagement with the community being shunned, accusations such as population jihad (got to know this for the first time while reading the book) being levelled against them, and their representation in various fora being discouraged.

Increased religiosity in recent years, with public displays of aspects of religion that were previously confined to the private domain, has further complicated the situation on the ground.

No Different From Other Groups

Despite these challenges, members of the community, the author argues, continue to take part in political processes to secure tangible benefits as stakeholders. "They behave like consumers/clients and respond to the welfare packages offered by political parties," he writes. And in this sense, Muslims are no different from other social groups.

What are the ways then to fight this Muslim politicophobia? Is it all doom and gloom as far as Muslim issues are concerned in contemporary India? We couldn't agree more with the author's conclusion. He says, "The fight against anti-Muslimism cannot be separated from the wider struggle for social justice and economic equality.... One that allows individuals like me to critique economic injustice and social inequalities while adhering to my conception of a liberative Islam."

The book is a refreshing take on New India and all that it represents. There is no bitterness, there is no blame game. It is a foremost social scientist's take on the struggles and triumphs of Muslims in everyday life - their political participation, their survival strategies against odds, their dialogue with modernity and liberalism, and their engagement with what is called Muslim heritage.

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(Mayank Mishra is Consulting Editor and Marya Shakil is Executive Editor - National Affairs, at NDTV)

Disclaimer: These are the personal opinions of the author

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Blog – Posted on Tuesday, Sep 24

Get paid to read: 18 legitimate sites that pay reviewers.

Serious question: do you want to get paid to read? You might laugh it off at first, thinking that that sounds too good to be true, but it’s not. You can get paid for spending time on what you love: reading books. 

Of course, the key to this #hack is book reviewing, where you offer your personal opinion of a book after you’re done with it. (If you’d like to learn more, check out this post to discover how to write a book review .) Because books are constantly being published, book reviewers are generally always in demand. 

So whether you’re a voracious reader of nonfiction, genre fiction, classics, or indie books, there’s probably an outlet that’s willing to compensate you if you read (review) for them! Without further ado, here’s a definitive list of the 17 sites that will help you get paid to read. If you want to cut to the chase and find out which of them is the right fit for you, we recommend first taking this quick quiz:

Which review community should you join?

Find out which review community is best for your style. Takes 30 seconds!

Then read on for the full list of all of the ways to get paid while reading!

 1. Kirkus Media

💸 Pay: Freelance basis

👀 More information: Check here

If you’ve ever lingered on a book’s Amazon page before, you’ll have heard of Kirkus Reviews. It’s one of the most respected sources of book reviews out there, publishing many of the blurbs that you’ll see on Amazon, or on the cover of your favorite titles.

You have to wonder: where do all of these reviews come from? That’s where you come into the picture. Kirkus Media lists an open application for book reviewers. As of right now, they’re specifically searching for people who will review English and Spanish-language indie titles. Some of the qualities that they want in reviewers include: experience, a keen eye, and an ability to write about a 350-word review in two weeks’ time.

To apply, simply send your resume and writing samples! You can find out more about this opportunity here .

2. Reedsy Discovery

💸 Pay: Tip basis

A powerhouse in the world of indie books, Reedsy Discovery gives book reviewers the chance to read the latest self-published books before anyone else. You can browse through hundreds of new stories before picking one that piques your interest. And if you’ve built up a brand as a book reviewer on Reedsy Discovery, you can liaise with authors who contact you directly for a review.

Its application process is pretty simple: just complete this form to be selected as a book reviewer. Once you’re accepted, you can start looking through the shelves and reading immediately. One more thing: book reviewers can get tips for their book reviews. Readers can send $1, $3, or $5 as a token of appreciation (which, let’s be honest, all book reviewers deserve more of).

If this system intrigues you, you can “discover” more about how it works on this page .

3. Any Subject Books

Any Subject Books is a full-suite self-publishing service. More importantly for you, it hires book reviewers on a book-by-book basis to help them review new books.

They’re big on in-depth, honest, and objective reviews. No fluff here! They’re also happy to give you books in your preferred genres, so if you’re a voracious reader of war fiction, you won’t typically be asked to read the latest paranormal romance hit (or vice versa).

Sadly, Any Subject Books is not currently open to book reviewer applications, but check back again — this could change at any time.

4. BookBrowse

BookBrowse reviews both adult fiction and nonfiction, and some books for young adults. The site focuses on books that are not only enjoyable to read, with great characters and storylines, but that also leave the reader knowing something about the world they did not before. Reviewers also write a "beyond the book" article for each book they review.

5. Online Book Club

💸 Pay: $5 to $60

Online Book Club’s FAQ begins with a warning for all aspiring book reviewers: “First of all, this is not some crazy online get-rich-quick scheme. You won't get rich and you won't be able to leave your day job.”

That daunting reminder aside, Online Book Club’s setup is pretty reasonable, not to mention straightforward. You’ll get a free copy of the book and you’ll get paid for your review of that book. Moreover, it’s one of the few sites that’s transparent about their payment rates (anywhere between $5 to $60). To begin the sign-up process, simply submit your email here .

6. U.S. Review of Books

U.S. Review of Books is a nation-wide organization that reviews books of all kinds and publishes those reviews in a popular monthly newsletter. The way that it works for a book reviewer is simple: when a book title is posted, reviewers can request to read it and get assigned.

A typical review for U.S. Review of Books is anywhere between 250 and 300 words. They are looking particularly for informed opinions and professionalism in reviews, along with succinctness. To apply, submit a resume, sample work, and two professional references via email. But we’d recommend that you check out some previous examples of their book reviews here to first get a better sense of what they’re looking for.

7. Women’s Review of Books

💸 Pay: $100 per review

Women’s Review of Books is a long-running, highly-respected print publication that’s a part of Wellesley Centers for Women. This feminist magazine has been published for 36 years and is looking for more book reviewers to join their force.

If you plan on writing reviews for Women’s Review of Books , you should be aware that its reviews are published “in the service of action and consciousness.” Most of its writers are also academics, journalists, or book reviewers with some years of experience behind them. If you meet these qualifications and are accepted, you’ll be compensated $100 per review.

To pitch then a review, send them an email with a quick proposal. For more details, click here .

8. eBookFairs

eBookFairs primarily helps authors grow their author platforms, but it also has a Paid Book Reader program where readers can earn money by, you guessed it, reviewing the books listed on their site.

Note that they do have clear instructions on what qualifies as a review, so do read their guidelines carefully before applying to make sure you can meet them. For instance, the review must be at least 250 words, you must allow at least 3 days between reviews submitted, and it must provide helpful feedback for the author. There are also a limited number of paid reader positions available.

💸 Pay: Variable

If you’re a freelancer, you’re probably already familiar with Upwork! One of the biggest marketplaces for freelancers, Upwork has fingers in every industry’s pie. So it won’t be a surprise to learn that people who are looking for freelance book reviewers regularly post listings on its marketplace.

Because each job caters to an individual client, the requirements and qualifications will differ. It might be a one-time project, or the gig might turn into a long-running collaboration with the client. Generally, the listing will specify the book’s genre, so you’ll know what you’re getting before you agree to collaborate with the client on the other end.

To begin, you’ll need to sign up as a freelancer on Upwork. Find out more information on Upwork’s FAQ page!

10. Moody Press

💸 Pay: Free ARCs

Moody Press is a nonprofit publishing house of Christian titles and Bible study resources. If this is your niche, you’ll definitely be interested in Moody Press’ Blogger Review Program! As part of the program, you’ll get free copies of book published by Moody Press.

Like some of the other programs on this list, you won’t get paid for your review, but you will get a free book. Moody Press also asks you to write your honest review within 60 days of reading it. To get a feel for it, try joining the MP Newsroom Bloggers Facebook group , where you can directly interact with existing members of the program.

11. New Pages

💸 Pay: Variable 

Not interested in writing anything longer than 300 words? Are quick flash book reviews more your pace? If so, becoming a NewPages reviewer might be just your speed. NewPages.com is an Internet portal to small presses, independent publishers and bookstores, and literary magazines. More importantly, they’re looking for short book reviews (generally between 100 and 200 words) on any recent literary magazine or book that you’ve read.

If you’re already a fan of books from small presses or unknown magazines, even better: that’s exactly the kind of reviewer NewPages wants to work with. If you’d like to look through some of their past book reviews to see if your style matches, check out their book review archive here .

12. Publishers Weekly

Publishers Weekly is an online magazine focused on international book publishing and all that that entails. More pertinently, it regularly reviews both traditionally published and self-published books, which means that it does occasionally have a call for book reviewers. As of right now, it’s closed to applications — but if you check its Jobs page every once in a while, you might see an opening again.

13. Tyndale Blog Network

Tyndale Blog Network runs a program called My Reader Rewards Club, which is based on an innovative rewards system. If you join as a member, you can earn points for certain actions that you take on the site (for instance, inviting a friend to the program and sharing a direct link to MyReaderRewardsClub.com on Facebook each fetches you 10 points).

Writing a review for a Tyndale or NavPress book on Amazon or Barnes & Noble gets you 10 points, with a maximum limit of 50 points in 30 days. In turn, you can use your accumulated points to receive more books off of Tyndale’s shelves. If this sounds like something that may be up your alley, check out their FAQ here.

14. Booklist Publications

💸 Pay: $12.50 to $15 per review

Booklist is the American Library Association’s highly respected review journal for librarians. Luckily for freelance writers, Booklist assigns freelance book reviews that vary from blog posts for The Booklist Reader to published book review in Booklist magazine.

As the site itself suggests, it’s important that you’re familiar with Booklist Publication’s outlets (which include Booklist magazine, the quarterly Book Links , and The Booklist Reader blog) and its writing style. Reviews are generally very short (no longer than 175 words) and professionally written. You can discover more of its guidelines here — and an archive of previous Booklist reviews here .

To apply, contact a relevant Booklist editor and be prepared to submit a few of your past writing samples.

15. Instaread

💸 Pay: $100 per summary

Not interested in writing critical takes on the books that you read? Then Instaread might be for you. Instaread has an open call for book summaries, which recap “the key insights of new and classic nonfiction.”

Each summary should be around 1000 to 1500 words, which makes it a fair bit lengthier than your average flash book review. However, Instaread will compensate you heartily for it: as of 2019, Instaread pays $100 for each summary that you write. You can peruse Instaread’s recommended Style Guide on this page , or download Instaread from your App Store to get a better feel for the app.

16. NetGalley

If you’ve dreamt about becoming an influencer in the book reviewing community, you may want to give NetGalley a look. Put simply, NetGalley is a service that connects book reviewers to publishers and authors. Librarians, bloggers, booksellers, media professionals, and educators can all sign up to NetGalley to read books before they’re published.

How it works is pretty simple. Publishers put digital review copies out on NetGalley for perusal, where NetGalley’s members can request to read, review, and recommend them. It’s a win-win for both publisher and reviewer: the publisher is able to find enthusiastic readers to provide an honest review for their books, and the reviewer gets access to a vast catalog of books.

The cherry on top is that NetGalley membership is 100% free! Simply use this form to sign up. And if you’d like more information, you can dip into their FAQ here .

17. getAbstract

Are you an avid reader of nonfiction books? getAbstract is a site that summarizes 18,000+ nonfiction books into 10-minute bites. Their Career Opportunities page often includes listings for writers. At the time of this post’s writing, getAbstract is looking for science and technology writers who can sum up the latest magazine articles and books. They pay on a freelance basis, so apply through their website to get further details.

18. Writerful Books

💸 Pay: $10 to $50

Writerful Books is an author services company that provides everything from beta reading to (you guessed it) book reviewing. As such, they’re always on the lookout for book reviewers with fresh and compelling voices.  

One of the benefits of this gig is that you can review any book that you want for them (although they prefer contemporary award-winning American, Australian, British, Canadian, Irish, and New Zealand authors). Getting a regularly paid gig with Writerful Books isn’t a guarantee, but if you regularly publish quality reviews for them, they may contact you. 

To apply, you’ll have to be able to provide previous book review samples. Here’s the job listing if you’re curious to learn more about this role.

If you're an avid reader,  sign up to Reedsy Discovery  for access to the freshest new reads — or  apply as a reviewer  to give us  your  hot takes!

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Best Book Summary Apps 2024 – Tested and Reviewed

I love reading books.

Yet I finish most of my days with the regret I was not able to carve out enough time for reading. Between blogs, podcasts, and chatting with friends, nowadays I’m getting so many recommendations for nonfiction books that my Kindle library grows way faster than what I can read.

I have another problem. Business books usually fall into three categories:

• Great ones: full of interesting ideas and enjoyable to read (like The Unicorn Project or Lost and founder )
• Boring ones: a lot of good ideas written in an extremely boring way
• Bad ones: few ideas lost in a plethora of useless and boring pages

I love books in the first category, and they are usually the ones I review here in my blog. Unluckily, I hate the others.

It usually takes me forever to get to the end of boring nonfiction books.

I give up within the first couple of chapters when I read a bad one. And that sucks because sometimes they still have some interesting concepts I’d like to absorb.

That’s why over the weekend I came up with a new strategy: reading the entire book when it’s great. Fallback to book summaries for categories n. 2 and n. 3.

So, I’ve spent the last couple of days testing out the 4 best book summary apps to see which one is worth subscribing to. And now, I’ve decided to share my findings with you to save you some time should you be facing the same question.

The book summaries apps and websites I’ve tested are:

• getAbstract
• Mentorist (2022 update)
• Headway (2024 update)

But before I declare the best book summary app in 2024…

Is it worth reading a book summary?

Yes and no.

But before we dive deeper, a quick premise. I’m considering only nonfiction books. It would be crazy to read the summary of a novel in my opinion. This also seems to be a consolidated trend in the industry. All the book summary apps I’ve reviewed focus on nonfiction books.

Now, back to your question.

If I had enough time, I’d probably avoid reading book summaries… it feels a bit like cheating.

But I have to admit it’s an effective way to learn the key concepts of an entire book, usually in less than 30 minutes. The big question mark is… will they stick?

The value of reading a full book is that you usually get a lot of examples and repetition of the key concepts. This is useful to make it stick and to convince yourself it’s a good idea you should put into practice.

Reading the summary you get to the core concepts immediately, but you lose a lot of contexts. It feels like eating meal replacement powders: you likely get all the nutrients. But you lose all the taste .

This problem can be big or small depending on the kind of book you’re reading.

If it’s a book about “HR best practices”, it’s likely fine to read the key ideas in 30 minutes.

If you’re reading personal development books or self-improvement books … well, my personal take here is that the key ideas are almost the same on all of these books. And you probably already know them. You’re lacking the motivation to implement them.

In this scenario, reading the original book could be better. The way the author communicates the message. The motivation examples he uses to reinforce it are what really matter and they’re likely gonna be missing in the summaries.

So, if you are the kind of person that could benefit from nonfiction book summaries, let’s find out what’s the best app for you.

My criteria to pick the best book summary apps in 2024

Before I started the free trial of all these book summary apps, I’ve defined some personal criteria to pick which one I would subscribe to and which will be canceled.

I defined four main categories to rank the apps:

• Book catalog : How many book summaries do they have? Do they have the books I want to read? This is a big one and a deal-breaker for me.
• Summary quality : Another critical factor. Is the summary good? Did they capture the core ideas? Is the quality consistent across multiple books?
• Original content : Do they also have their own original content on top of book summaries? Are they any good?
• Features : do they have a mobile app? Is the website or app easy to use? Do they have any interesting unique features?

As you can see I’ve not added price as a relevant category. That’s because, no matter what’s the cost, if I’ll read summaries in a consistent way, I’ll save a lot of money compared to buying each individual book.

I actually added the last two categories after I started testing the various apps. Seems like all of them are moving beyond just book summaries and are starting to produce their own original content. Often curated summaries of multiple books on a specific topic.

On the features side, most of them nowadays also do audio summaries of most books (but machine-generated audio). I also find the usability of the app a very important factor given I’ll be using it every day.

Finally, if you’re curious to know how I tested the catalog section, here’s the list of 12 books I’ve been looking for:

• Why we sleep
• Atomic Habits
• No Rules Rule
• The subtle art of not giving a f**k
• AI Superpowers
• Lost and Founder
• The revenue marketing book
• The unicorn project
• How to lie with statistics
• Traffic secrets
• The making of a manager

Ok, time to start reading some book summaries and pick a winner!

Blinkist is probably the most known summary app in the market and the one that really started this industry. It’s reasonably priced, starting at $14.99 per month or $89.99 per year and it works like a charm.

They divide book summaries into what they call blinks. It’s usually a good mapping to the book chapters or main ideas. Each Blink usually takes no more than 5 minutes to read (or listen). At the end of the book summary, there is always a final part that recaps all the core ideas of the book.

Being the oldest book summary service the quality and catalog are usually very good.

Catalog – Vote 8

In Blinkist I was able to find 8 out of the 12 titles I used for the test. Good but not crazy good. I was actually expecting something better from their 4,500+ book summaries catalog.

Clearly, they’re focusing more and more on their original productions. If a title is a bestseller, it’s 99% sure you’ll find it in Blinkist. When you look for more niche books, there’s a 50-50 chance of not finding them.

Quality – Vote 7

The good thing about Blinkist is their consistency. You can expect all the book summaries to have quite good quality. They summarize a lot. Sometimes I would have preferred some more info on specific details.

The average summary takes 15 minutes to read. I would have preferred to go up to 30 minutes and get more details.

Still, they did a pretty good job in identifying all the core concepts of each book and expressing it in a very compelling way.

Original Content – Vote 7

Most of their original content is in form of Shortcasts. You can think of them as mini podcasts where every episode is usually 10 minutes long. There’s also a written summary for each episode.

They are of good quality and with a good selection of authors. However, I’m not a super fan of the audio format so I ended up not consuming them a lot.

Features – Vote 7

Blinkist has a very good offer. You can read on a desktop through a browser, on mobile, and on tablets.

The quality is very good with very high readability of the book summaries.

The thing I didn’t like was the inconsistency of the user experience across devices.

I LOVE the fact that you can highlight text and save it for later. Going back through my highlights of a book is something I do often. Yet I was not able to understand how to do it on my iPad. And the sync between browser and iPad is odd.

On the browser, the main dashboard is focused on the books you’re reading. On iPad on the discovery of new content. Overall, their book summary app is good but not yet great.

One very nice feature that is worth mentioning is the capability to sync your highlights with Evernote and book summaries with Kindle to read them over there and keep under the same umbrella summaries and full books.

Update May 8th 2023: Blinkist has just been acquired by EdTech startup Go1 . While this will likely have no impact in the short term, things often tend to get messy post-acquisition and we’ll need to check if they’ll keep up with their current mission or align more with Go1 needs.

Update Jan 25th 2024: Luckily, the acquisition doesn’t seem to have impacted Blinkist. So far, they have kept releasing new book summaries at the same pace, and the quality has been consistent since the acquisition.

Shortform was relatively new to the game when I first wrote this blog post, but it’s now one of the market leaders. Their catalog, once relatively small is now almost on par with Blinkist and they keep adding new books consistently with a weekly cadence.

They charge $24 per month or $197 for the annual subscription. They offer a 5 days free trial where you can explore the catalog for free.

Overall they have the best book summaries of all the apps reviewed here, and three years later since I originally wrote this post, I’m still subscribed to their service, and it’s the only book summary app I use nowadays .

The catalog is smaller than Blinkist as you can expect from a newcomer in the market. They claim 1000+ book summaries and, as you can guess, most of them are bestsellers.

I was able to find only 5 of the 12 books used for the tests. I was hoping for something more, to be honest. Most of the marketing books were missing, and even in the bestsellers, there were some gaps.

The upside is that they seem to be adding new titles at a good pace.

( 2022 Update ) The catalog keeps growing slowly but consistently. They have recently launched a Video Summary series which is free on Youtube. They are also publishing super-short summaries on Instagram .

(2023 Update) Since they keep adding books at a great pace, with around 3 to 5 new titles published every week, I’ve rechecked my list, and now 7 out of 12 books are present, absolutely in line with the other top players. I’ve increased the score in this category to a solid 8.

(2024 Update) I’m really impressed by the work Shortform is doing to improve its catalog. I’m now (Jan. 2024) reading “Feel Good Productivity” which I bought from Amazon the day it was released assuming it would take forever to get a summary. Well turns out that after just a month, Shortform has already released the summary! Great job!

Quality – Vote 8.5

The quality of their summaries is the real strength of ShortForm. I love how they structure summaries and the level of depth.

Shortform has the only summaries that can really replace reading the whole book, in my opinion .

All the other apps are only useful to understand if you might like a book before buying it or absorbing a few quotes to sound smart with your friends.

They have a generous 1-page summary to get started with. It’s really high quality, and for a quick read, you could stop there.

But if you want to go more in-depth they also offer a more detailed summary chapter by chapter. When it makes sense, they also have exercises at the end of some chapters.

Another incredible strength of ShortForm is how they make connections outside the specific book to really help you understand the topic. They often mention other books covering the same topic to add value to the summary and give you more context / different points of view.

ShortForm has the best book summaries of the apps reviewed here. Period!

Original Content – Vote 6

They don’t offer original content, but they feature summaries of top articles from the US press. The selection is still fairly limited, with around 500 articles in the catalog. Nothing to go crazy for.

There’s an audio version for all the summaries, but it’s not human-narrated, it’s actually an AI voice, which I would not listen to for 30 minutes.

Features – Vote 8

Good web and mobile versions, so avid readers will enjoy their summaries everywhere.

The experience is consistent across devices and there’s full support for highlighting text or adding notes which, unlike Blinkist, works very well also on mobile.

A nice touch is the support for dark mode in the reader to enjoy your summaries also at night.

The mobile app improved a lot over the last year and it’s now very fast and responsive. Overall it’s a very pleasing experience.

A big one for Shortform is the possibility to download a book summary as a PDF . Way more flexible than the Kindle integration found in Blinkist.

Another feature that I love is their support for ReadWise syncing. ReadWise is my app of choice to gather together all the highlights from books and articles I’ve read and check them daily to brainstorm. It’s great to have my ShortForm highlights imported there.

Update 8/8/2022: Shortform has just released another great feature that saves me money and makes my life easier. They now integrate and sync notes with Notion!

Overall, it’s a great book summary app from a software standpoint, and they keep improving it at a good pace.

The cherry on the pie is a useful summarization Chrome extension that can help you summarize in one click any webpage you’re reading, even youtube videos. It works extremely well, and I’ve been using it more and more to extract key information from posts I was reading. Since we were talking about Notion, I also use it in my daily note-taking workflow to attach some notes to the URLs I’m storing in my second brain.

GetAbstract

GetAbstract has a very unique approach. They’ve been in the book summary apps space forever with a strong focus on enterprise offerings.

Looking at their website, it’s clear that their main focus is selling to companies to give multiuser access to their employees. Still, they also have subscription plans for private users with a $29.90 monthly price tag. It goes up to $290 for yearly subscriptions.

Oddly enough, if you connect from Europe, there’s also a cheaper plan that gives you access to a more limited catalog.

Their approach is different from all the other players. While everyone is playing in a grey area from a copyright standpoint, GetAbstract acquires the rights from the publisher before writing a book summary.

Catalog – Vote 4

Even tho’ they have the largest catalog with 20,000+ book summaries, they also have the worst catalog.

Since they try to acquire rights to summarize books, you’ll find a lot of niche books but very few best sellers. I found none of the 12 books I was looking for, which was shocking.

For some of them, a review was available. For others, they said they had selected the book as interesting and were trying to secure rights. For many nothing could be found.

Clearly, the focus of this book summary service is different from the others. If you’re looking for random books to read or some very niche stuff it could be a fit. Otherwise, I’d stay away.

Quality – Vote 6

Given their unique approach, I was expecting really high-quality summaries. I was disappointed.

Don’t get me wrong, they are good. But not mind-blowing. They are also quite short, in a way comparable to Blinkist. Audio summaries are available for most books and are usually 8-12 minutes long.

Unique Content – Vote 0

They don’t seem to have any unique content added to their offer. It’s not a big issue for me, as I’m mainly looking for book summaries.

My take here is that other players recognize there’s a copyright threat to their core offer. So, they started differentiating with more and more unique content. GetAbstract secured legal rights before writing a review so they didn’t feel the need to diversify their offer.

Features – Vote 6

Everything works smoothly both on the website and the mobile app.

They support highlighting, and they have the concept of channels where you can create (or consume) curated collections of books.

I don’t like the reading experience on browsers. A lot of distracting elements in the interface and small fonts make them look more like regular blog posts than the interface of an ebook reader. The experience is way better on the iPad app.

On the bright side, you can download a PDF version of all their summaries. Overall, it’s not among my favorite book summary apps.

Another consolidated player in the book summary apps space. Instaread ‘s unique take on book summary apps is to produce a lot of high-quality, unique content on top of summaries.

Pricing is relatively cheap; they start at $8.99 per month or $89 if you go yearly. They also have a nice lifetime deal where you can get unlimited access forever at $299. It’s not bad at all if you are planning to read book summaries as a life habit.

The free trial lasts 7 days.

Catalog – Vote 5.5

Instaread has 1,000+ book summaries like Shortform but in my selection of 12 books, I was able to find only 4 of them, the big hits. None of the more niche books I was looking for were available.

This may also be due to the fact that within the 1,000-plus books, they also list a lot of fiction.

When it comes to the quality of the content… It’s okay but not my favorite one. It’s basically a collection of chapter summaries with the key takeaways of each chapter.

Everything is very condensed and schematic with a bullet-point approach. I don’t love it, but that’s a matter of personal taste. I have to admit it’s well done.

I missed the one-pager introduction that ShortForm has.

An audio version is available for every book. Like the other apps, it’s not human read, but it’s a generated voice.

Unique Content – Vote 8

Instaread clearly bets heavily on original content.

First of all (even tho’ it’s not unique), they have a large collection of article summaries from top publishers they’ve partnered with. This includes articles from The New York Times, Harvard Business Reviews, and many others.

On top of this, they have a lot of Instaread Originals. Short-form books on almost any subject. A strong area of attention seems to be biographies. They cover anyone from Kamala Harris to Jack Dorsey. They are usually well-done and insightful. Reading time for their originals averages on the 15 minutes mark.

Features – 6

They support both web and mobile with a pretty good app.

The reading experience is ok, even though moving from one chapter summary to the next could be better.

A unique feature of the mobile app is the Cards section, where you can read through cards, each containing a key takeaway from the book.

It’s not possible to save highlights from the summaries… this, for me, is a real deal-breaker.

Headway is a newcomer to this list, added in 2024. It’s becoming really popular and has an impressive growth.

Pricing starts at $14.99 per month, but, full disclosure: they were nice enough to give me a free account for this review.

I just discovered that as of January 2024, it’s being listed on AppSumo to purchase as a lifetime deal for $59. A true bargain if you end up liking the app. This is great news but also a bit scary… I’m often a bit skeptical of mature companies running lifetime deals… they are great when you get started as a marketing opportunity, but in the long run, they are not economically sustainable.

Headway has a very unique positioning within the book summary apps space. While competitors focus a lot on the core idea of book summaries, Headway wants to position itself as a personal growth tool with a lot of emphasis on self-assessment tests and reading lists based on which area you want to improve.

This approach is somehow refreshing, especially for users who are not book nerds with a long list of titles they want to read but rather have an objective they want to achieve.

Now, let’s see how it compares to the other tools in my four categories!

Catalog – 8

The catalog is large, even though it’s slightly skewed towards personal growth books. However, I found 7 out of the 12 books in my test list. It’s worth noting that 3 to 4 books in the list are very niche, and it’s not surprising that they’re not here.

Anyway, they keep adding new books quickly, and I found many relatively new books. It’s worth noting, however, that in the last few months, they appear to have reduced the pace of publishing.

Overall, I think it’s almost comparable to Blinkist and maybe larger than Shortform.

Quality – 6

This is probably the most disappointing part of Headway… it’s also very personal so you should decide by yourself: I don’t like too much their summaries.

The idea is good; for every book, they highlight some key concepts and you can read through each one of them to go more in-depth. Each point, on average, is longer than alternatives like Blinkist, but is nowhere near the depth and quality of Shortform.

Very often, it seems more like a collection of quotes and sentences taken from the book rather than a straight-to-the-point summary. 

The idea of having one or more key concepts within each chapter that you can easily save and then access later in the form of a flash card is very nice. And effective when well executed. It’s not always the case.

As an example on a page from “AI Superpowers” about the AI revolution and how it will eliminate manual laborers, the key takeaway that you can save is: 

“The internet connects the world easily and quickly, creating an environment where ideas can be exchanged and discussed.”

This is completely off-point and obvious… thank you for reminding me what the internet is!

The quality varies a lot from book to book, and it’s often inconsistent.

Original Content – 4

Headway doesn’t produce original content, but I’m feeling generous, and I’ll consider as original content their effort in content curation.

They do have many guided “challenges” to learn something new. Each challenge has a duration of days, and each day it’ll recommend reading a specific book from a curated list to learn a new skill. It’s nice and well-curated.

They also produced some “Visual stories” for bestsellers. Think of them as Instagram stories for book summaries. There are few of them, and honestly, they are pointless. Here’s an example:

Can you see the problem? it looks half-baked. The text is small for the amount of space available but most of all… the illustration is nice but completely useless to help you better understand the concept.

I think this is a big missed opportunity. Some people need visuals to learn new concepts. And an Infographic-like approach could have helped a lot differentiate Headway from competitors. These illustrations are nice but don’t add anything in terms of value.

Features – 5

The app is overall okay but doesn’t shine.

It has a nice UI in category pages, but I don’t love the reading interface… it’s too minimal and with little control over fonts.

One key feature that is missing is a web version; I get it… their approach is so unique it needs to be mobile first. On the other hand, now and then, I find it useful to access book summaries from the web browser too. Especially for copying and pasting to take notes.

Notes are the other issue I have with the App. While Headway lets you highlight and store text, everything remains within the app. As of now, there’s no integration with ReadWise or Notion.

Mentorist is a new entry I’ve discovered in January 2023.

It has a unique twist. Their focus is not only on summarizing books but more on helping you execute what you learn.

I can relate to the core value proposition of this app. Way too many people use the number of books they read in a year as their key metric rather than focusing on really understanding the book and taking action.

That’s what intrigued me the most about this app. Let’s see if it lived up to its promises.

Catalog – 5

The catalog here is very limited. Out of the 12 books in my basket, I was only able to find 3, the most popular ones, and focused on self-growth. Quite surprisingly, they didn’t even have “No rules rule” which is very popular.

A back of the napkins calculation based on their books page as of March 2022, shows only 182 books in their catalog.

Somehow this was expected, Metorist launched later compared to its competitors in the book summary space, and clearly, it still has to build its catalog.

The good note is that since I’ve signed up to the service, they’ve been adding 2 to 4 books every week and the browsing of the catalog is very pleasant with a lot of curated collections.

What can I say… it’s acceptable but not great. The summaries are very short, divided into short pages. Most books range from 10 to 20 pages, and there’s a bit of inconsistency among the length of the pages from one book to another.

What I did like about Mentorist is the audio summary. It’s usually in the 20-minute range, and finally, it’s not recorded by a robotic voice but read by a human being. Overall listening to the summaries has been quite a pleasant experience.

Personally, I think I’d use it to understand if I want to buy and read the full version of a book or to read something I’m not really interested in. For something that I care about, the summaries are too short.

Unique Content – 0

Right now Mentorist doesn’t have any unique content and they’re only focusing on summarizing popular books.

It’s a choice that somehow makes sense given they’ve chosen the app dynamics as a differentiator while other players in the space all have the same kind of app and are trying to diversify themselves more based on the catalog and their unique content catalog.

Features – 8

Feature-wise, Mentorist built a pretty good App to consume summarized books. As you can see it support dark mode and overall it’s always pretty fast and responsive.

The thing that I like the least is the reading experience. Instead of a full-page reader, it opens the summary in a relatively small window.

Highlights work very well with a dedicated page to check them and the capability to set reminders to read them again and set aside some time to brainstorm.

Finally, at the end of each book’s summary page, there’s an actionable takeaway that you can add to your list. It only takes one click and comes with some quick steps to execute it.

Once added you’ll be asked what’s the objective you want to achieve with that specific takeaway and you’ll receive reminders.

You can also log your progress and add notes.

Overall it’s a very good app with a strong idea behind it.

Good enough to forget about the small catalog and the mid-quality summaries? Not for me. I don’t think a “todo-list” tied to a book summary will make much of a difference for me. But if they improve the quality and the catalog they might be on the right path to have real differentiation in this market.

Other Book Summary Websites

There are a lot of other players in the space. I’ve tried a bunch of them, like 12min , Perlego , and ReadinGraphics for visual learners.

All of these websites offer their own take in the “app that summarizes books” space. I don’t think it’s worth mentioning them in this comparison because of their catalog size.

It’s gonna be interesting to revisit them in a year (yes, I promise I’ll keep this updated at least yearly) and see which one increased its catalog the most to become more appealing.

What’s gonna happen to the book summaries space?

My personal take is that this space is too crowded with very little differentiation between players.

Adding more books, of course, is the best way to get more customers. On the other side once all the best-sellers are covered, scaling up the number of summaries for niche books might be too expensive compared to the number of potential customers they could bring in.

This might also open opportunities for smaller players that focus on a specific niche. As an example, I’d be 100% happy to signup even at a premium price to a service specialized in marketing books.

The other question mark is legal. I’m not a lawyer, so I don’t know if book summaries are legal or not. For sure, things are changing. A few years ago, all the services were using original covers of the books. Nowadays, no one does.

For sure, there’s a level of risk involved in this business, and should the space become big enough, publishers could partner with these apps or go hard against them and keep all the pie for themselves.

Finally, another potential disruption to this industry could be AI and, specifically GPT-3. This new system has already proven to be able to write books… it’s gonna be relatively simple to use it to write book summaries at scale and with good consistency.

The Best Book Summary App in 2024

Guess it’s time to declare a winner.

Let’s go by exclusion!

getAbstract … sorry not my cup of tea. I loved the fact that you were the only ones not forcing me to insert the credit card to join the trial… but your catalog is just not a good fit for my interests.

Mentorist … The idea behind it it’s nice, helping you put into practice what you learn. But the catalog and the summary length are not where they should be right now.

Headway… It’s a missed opportunity. They have the unique concept of focusing more on a personal-growth path rather than just book reviews. It remains an idea poorly executed.

Instaread … well played with original contents and article summaries, but you didn’t excel in the catalog or the summary quality so I don’t see a reason to sign up; I’m canceling my trial, but you could be a good fit for many.

Blinkist …size does matter. And when it comes to the books that I care about, they have the largest database. However, quality matters the most for me, that’s why in the 2022 update, I’ve moved Blinkist to the second spot. Their summaries are just too short for me. They don’t have the best mobile App. Overall, the quality is consistent, and it’s reasonably priced.

ShortForm … It’s my winner for the 2024 edition of this post. The catalog is not yet where I’d love it to be, but it keeps growing, the app is great. They let me download PDF versions of the summaries, and the quality of the summaries is just great. By far the only ones that can really replace reading the full book and passing enough information to make it actionable. It’s more expensive, but it’s a price I’m more than happy to pay for the value I’m getting.

Taking everything into account, ShortForm is the winner of my roundup of the best book summary websites in 2024.

Conclusions

That’s it for this year. It was a tight Blinkist vs Short Form battle, but in the end, to call a winner, I just went with the one I keep using way more often. If you want to pick just one app go for ShortForm , you won’t regret it. If you can afford to spend a bit more, add Blinkist to the mix to get a quick overview on a broader number of books.

I hope I have helped you save some time and money by picking the best tool among all the book summary sites.

Now, it’s up to you to decide if reading book summaries is good enough for you. I still have mixed feelings about it and wish I had more time to read the full-length books. Unluckily, I don’t, and I found these summaries to be useful when there’s something I know I would not love to read, but would still be valuable for my personal growth.

Did I forget some Apps in this roundup? If there’s any service worth testing that I didn’t mention, just let me know in the comments below and I’ll be happy to add it.

Bonus Tip: Book Summary Apps coupon code

Nah, I’m just kidding. I don’t have any coupon code. BUT…

I have a couple of tips to save some money when subscribing to most of these apps.

First of all, wait for the full length of your trial. Some of them might send you a 10% discount if you upgrade to a paid plan earlier.

Second, signup through their websites, not the mobile app. This is for a couple of reasons:

• Some websites have popups that offer a 10% discount if you sign up for a trial
• Some Apps actually have different pricing if you subscribe on the browser or on mobile. Mobile is usually expensive (because of % they have to pay Apple and Google)

Finally, even if you should not do it, if you live in Europe with the current crazy EUR/USD exchange rate, you might want to use a VPN and sign up in $ masking your connection as a US resident. I use TunnelBear for this usually.

Massimo Chieruzzi

I'm Massimo and I run this blog. I'm a jack of all trades, master of none, juggling between startups, marketing, and product. You might know me as the co-founder of AdEspresso and Breadcrumbs. This blog is my playground where I build stupid tools to solve everyday marketing problems and experiment with the latest marketing tactics!

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25 comments.

July 26, 2022

Hey Massimo! First of all, congrats on the excellent post! Strict to the point, you reviewed what really matters. I want to ask you if you have ever heard/tried Accel5, from EBSCO? Their content seems niched for me, but I've found some engaging titles there and also liked the quality of the first summary I got. Have a nice week Best, Thiago

July 27, 2022

Thanks for pointing that out Thiago, I had never heard of them but the catalog looks interesting enough, I'll try to check them out in the near future!

August 13, 2022

I really love your breakdown here. For me Shortform is also the clear winner. One thing to keep in mind which is a bit unfortunate is that in recent months shortform decided to stick to publishing new summaries exclusively as 1-page summaries. In the past the 1-page summary was the brief introduction and you could read the whole deep dive afterwards. Now there is no deep dive anymore which unfortunately brings it down to the level of blinkist because I feel like I'm missing out on the detailed analysis...

September 5, 2022

Hey Timon, Yeah, that's an unfortunate choice even tho' I get the rationale behind it from an economic standpoint :( I'll reach out to them to get more insights and update the post. I'm also afraid the decision was based on monitoring users' behavior and realizing that most users were stopping at the 1 pager. Still, I find their one-pager way more in depth and well done than Blinkist. Ciao! Max

August 16, 2022

Why isn’t summary.com listed in this comparison?

Hey Ryan, Good catch, I had never heard of it, I'll check it out and update the post! Max

October 29, 2022

Nice! I'd like to publish a translation of this article in my site. I think my readers will enjoy what you have to say. Is it possible? :)

Yes as long as you give credit and link the original article on top of your translated one :)

I really really loves reading this blog post. Very insightful abd thank you for the time you took to put this together. I never wrote s feedback on a blog before but here you go, this one is just wow. Loved it. I'll sign up to one of these apps.

November 7, 2022

November 17, 2022

Would love to hear your thoughts on Headway - I'm about to end my trial and enjoyed the summary I read but obviously I want the best app possible.

December 5, 2022

I'll try to add Headway in my next review of this post for 2023 :)

January 24, 2023

Thanks for a very thorough write up. Is there anyway to find out if a specific book is covered PRIOR to signing up for Blink or Shortform.? Do they have a public index?

January 25, 2023

Hey Neil, It's a bit tricky but you can. For Shortform, here you'll find a list of books by genre. Those with the button "Read full summary" are in their library. For Blinkist just use their top navigation under Explore :)

April 15, 2023

I'm so excited to read this one. It's wonderful!!

Book summaries

May 17, 2023

May 18, 2023

No sorry, I'm planning to go multi-language at some point, also your blog seems to be in english :)

September 28, 2023

Thank you so much for this excellent source of info on summary apps. I am now 70 yo and just do not want to waste my time and funds at this point. You have helped me!

November 30, 2023

Glad to hear that Paula!!

February 4, 2024

where is the summary of this page? kidding..thanks for great review. usually such comparison reviews have a comparison table at the bottom with a full view across all apps and ratings. helps to see a bigger picture?

ahahhaha that's a great point thanks! I'll try to add it asap, over time this review has become huge :)

March 5, 2024

This post was AMAZING!!! I wish you had a review on literally everything! Thank you for taking the time to update this annually. This space is growing and being able to come to a trusted source for the best option saved me much appreciated time and money! Your thorough, helpful, and reliable all key qualities that seem difficult to find these days🤍

March 8, 2024

Wow, this was incredibly thorough and helpful. I also subscribe to shortform but was wondering if there was anything out there with comparable summary quality and a lower price. Now, I'm happy to stay with them :)

April 29, 2024

Massimo thank you so much for this review! I was doubtful about which app to choose but I will choose shortform. I think they are expensive but they are worth the value because they have so much to give on the app

This is a very thorough review! Thanks! A lot of these are so pricey though and I don't need audio format so I use Littler Books.

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