BookBuddy Pro
reviews and complaints

I am very thankful for this app that keeps track of my library of books that includes over 1,200 titles. I appreciate that the paid version of the app is only a small flat fee. The features of the app are fantastic and the scanning of ISBN barcodes is much faster than scanning the covers of books, which I tried to do when trying to keep track of my library in goodreads. I also love the wishlist that helps me keep track of book recommendations from friends, books I see but can’t purchase yet, or books I want to be on the lookout for at the next book sale. It is also nice to look up whether I already own a certain book or not. I appreciate all the information it lists about each book and the simple, but helpful organization and categories one can implement. I have recommended Book Buddy + to many friends, many of which try it and love it, too.

I just spent three days scanning and organizing 800+ hardcover, paperback and trade paperback books. It was so easy! The only reason it took three days was because my five year old twins helped (For certain values of “help”)

Highly recommend. Very easy to use. Great barcode scanning feature and easy input of ISBN if the scanning doesn’t work. Use select to grab multiple books and change fields on all of them at the same time.

Each book can have one “category” but multiple tags. Allows for multiple levels of sorting.

While there is a field for “physical location” I decided to use category for this. As I shelved my books, I used the app to move them from “Uncategorized” to the shelf I was putting them on.

If the cover picture doesn’t match in the app what you have on your volume there is an easy search feature or you can snap your own picture.

What I REALLY want from this app is a way to export the list so that it can be used in a database program in my laptop.

I was also disappointed that there was no version optimized for iPad. Even worse, when book listings are pulled in from online, the author's name is in the form first name last name. It wouldn't matter if their sorting program was sensible, but this foolish program then sorts the authors by first name (I know I can defeat that by editing each author's name to put the last name followed by a comma before the first name, but that eliminates most of the advantage gained by searching online rather than entering the books manually).

It would also help to have a compact list version, so that one could see 15 or more titles per screen, rather than three or four. Maybe this app is useful for people who are keeping track of a small number of books, but it's not much help to me.

A great app! Fairly easy to import new titles. Some suggestions to optimize usability of the bookbuddy (and moviebuddy) app:

1) batch edit function. at present you can only edit items one at a time, field per field. provide for the ability, in list view, to select multiple items; then have the ability to apply an edit, to a single or multiple fields, to all selected items.
2) search query. at present the search function will only search the titles of items. provide a module that allows for a multi-parameter or multi-field search; for example by tag(s), genre, or combination of fields.
3) desktop app, or desktop web browser-based interface. a lightweight desktop app or desktop web browser interface that syncs with your mobile device(s). this would greatly aid in database management, as managing from the mobile device interface is clumsy esp. when needing to edit each record one at a time, field by field.

I did not want to pay for an app to organize my books, so I tried about 10 different free methods and apps. Hated every single one of them. Someone on a Facebook group suggested Book Buddy, even sent me a video of them using it, I was cautious but within a day I was in love. Easy to scan in new and old books, create separate libraries for your kids, keep track of loaned books, and best of all, you can personalize the categorization of your library! Need a 1,000 word novella, no problem. Need a grade 12 standard, no problem. I am loving it. Only downside is textbooks. But to be honest only a few of us are likely to keep to many of them anyway, and you can always manually search by title, author, or isbn. And you can link up with other app users, so yeah. I kinda recommend if you have more than 100 books, after that I couldn’t memorize them well enough, but hey. You do you. But seriously, why try a free app that limits the books you can catalogue when Book Buddy is cheap enough and worth so much more. Bask in the glory of a well catalogued book collection!

This app is a great (though not remotely unique) idea. It has a clean, simple interface. Unfortunately, it is lacking many features that are necessary to make it useful for most users. For a paid app, I would expect regular addition of such features. First, there ought to be a way to import purchases from online store (like amazon) accounts all at once. The only way to add ebooks that you own is to search individually online. Further, you should be able to sort books in a wide variety of ways (author last name, title, topic, genre)- which means you should be able to add tags or keywords to entries. It would also be good to be able to somehow sync your goodreads and/or librarything and/or shelfari accounts. it should be able to allow you to note how many copies of a particular book are in your library, and what formats they are in. For example, there are a few books which I own in hard cover, multiple paperback copies, mobi, ePub, and PDF...
There are a lot more features that could be useful, but I think that these features are absolutely essential for the pro app.

This app is nearly perfect in organizing books among my children, students and myself! I love the options of organizing my books into professional, personal, and children categories; I love that I get the option to add more categories or edit the ones already provided. I also LOVE the loaned out option; you can assign a book as loaned out/returned.

I would give this app five stars if I could access my library online, but also if the loaned out option would be more streamlined, such as, you could click on "loaned out" and it would automatically assign the current date. It just requires too much clicking to assign a book as "loaned out" and then you have to toggle to the current date. I wish you could just scan or click a book and it would automatically assign it as loaned out and include that day's date, maybe provide a default option in settings?

Hopefully, those features will be added later. I plan on keeping this app and hope these changes can be made or that some other developer will include these options. Until then, it's the best library app out there!

I love this app. It's fun and simple to use but it's a little harder to upload books then it seems. The process is easy but I have found that few if any of my books scan in using the isbn scanner, even with books that have come out in the last few years. I'd guess less then 1 in 30. So instead of a few hours to scan in my ~800 book collection I'll be at least a month manually looking up each book. 1/3 of it isn't the apps fault, some stores like to put their price tags over the isbn and it's quicker to enter the books using the online look up feature (which is nice and kind of interesting) then peeling off the tag especially with the low probability of the scan working. I am greatly enjoying this app and would recommend it but would definitely let them know to expect it to take QUITE awhile to get their collection in.
It takes me between one and two minutes to get each book in, but I do nit pick at them a bit. I enter series information and check the picture to match it to my book cover and confirm that I have the same publisher. It be quicker if I just did the basics.

All in all a very usable app, but with one major failing. I’d still recommend it because the usability of the list is good once books are in but it’s going to take a looooonnng time to catalog my books.

Pros:
Super easy to add books which have an ISBN barcode.
Well-organized, easy-to-use UI.
Additional search feature that lets you use the ISBN or title (typed in) to locate unscannable books.

Cons:
One major failing - books with the EAN-13 barcode and 10-digit ISBN rather than an ISBN barcode can’t be scanned. Makes it tough to catalog a lot of books quickly. For books with a 10-digit ISBN included above the EAN code or with an easily scannable title, please add an ISBN OCR option and a title OCR option to enhance the search option? (Is there open source OCR you can integrate?)
No sortable publication year field
No sortable publication format field (hardcover, etc)
Would be great if there were a way to import a list of digital books as well, at least from Amazon (but Google Books would also be great) - integrated launch of digital books would be even better!

I wanted a way to record every book I read, both for my personal library and for homeschooling purposes. I have a day each week dedicated to reviewing children’s books and I wanted an app that would 1) easily import book details via a barcode scanner, 2) store my personal notes for future access, and 3) organize titles by a variety of sortable tools. This app delivers.

I greatly appreciate how “tweakable” the app is. My usage of the app has changed since I honed in more on my specific library management needs. For example, I no longer consider the app to be a catalog of my physical library, but a log of every book I read and review. I am very pleased with the way the settings give me the freedom to customize my app experience.

I once panicked, thinking that the app lost one of my books. It didn’t. I had changed the title’s rating and forgot that the library was being sorted by rating, thus moving the book to a different section.

The backup and syncing settings give me great peace of mind that the hours I’m devoting to recording my book reviews will not be lost.

This app is worth every penny.

This app fits by needs by far. It can catagorize books by, name, price, publisher, etc. The app gives you unlimited amount of books in you personal library. The best benefit of this app is the barcode scanner. It can always find the name and other information about your book just by scanning the barcode! If your book can't be scanned, they even give you a little internet to search for your book. If it isn't on the internet or it can't scan on the barcode scanner, you can add it manually. I only had to do this once for a local book I bought. As you might see, I did take off a star. I took of this star just because it costs money. I don't think it is necessary to cost money. Newsflash, you're not going to make a lot of money with this app! They even have a free one that I originally had, but it only let you have forty books in your library. Guess what?! They didn't even tell you about the forty books only rule. Consequently, when I had took my time to scan 40 books, it shut me off! Telling me only 40 books! Anyways, that is their problem. The rest of the app was really good, if I could I would give it a four in a half rating. But now I'm happy to give it a 4 out of 5 star rating!

Update 10/17:
Please add iPad support, and a barcode scanner for user-created barcodes (not ISBN) to loan books. Thanks.

Original review 6/25:
The app is great for personal library management. I really wish it had shared library functionality as well. For instance, User A's device should indicate if a book is being read by User B, added to the library by User B or loaned out by User B to a third party. And changes made to a title on User A's device should sync with User B's device. I hope this functionality gets added in the future.

One important feature that is lacking is library statistics. There's currently no way to know the total number of authors, or the number of books in each genre, or the absolute number of books in the library (the app only displays total unique titles, excluding duplicates) unless you physically count them.

The app performs well in what it does and is very smooth. I've never experienced any lag while using it, which is great. The only problem I noticed is that it crashes when you take a snapshot of the book while having other apps running in the background. But if you clear the cache and close other apps, the problem disappears. Hope this gets fixed soon.

My husband and I were wanting a way to catalog our home library to keep track of what we own and what we want. This app is very useful for that, especially when looking to buy a book to prevent multiple copies. Unless multiples are what you want of course. Anyway, I love the organization in the app and all of the features to customize things to my liking. My primary issue, however, is that only I can access the account since it’s on my phone. My husband can’t look at our book list while at the bookstore or library. I understand that apps are registered to apple IDs, but it seems silly to have to pay a monthly fee for my husband to be able to see his own book list too. Exporting isn’t the same as having app access like I have either. It’s a file not an editable system. I’d love to see the ability for people to share their account with their family on multiple devices. The login should be allowed to be shared. I understand the need to make money, but having my husband download the app doesn’t do anything for us because it’d be two separate accounts for the same home library of books. It’s just silly to not be able to share it with my spouse like we share streaming services and kindle unlimited, etc. I’d pay a flat fee, like the price of the app, for dual access, but a monthly or annual charge for access is ludicrous.

This is a sensational app. It is in fact mega-sensational if you take into account the absurdly low price of $4.99—comparing that just to the vast stores of bibliographic information that are at your fingertips once you start using it. Up to a few weeks ago I was drowning in my own books, and had lost all control over the piles of newly-acquired items that made navigation in my workplace at home a hazardous affair. It gave me a feeling of quiet despair, of powerlessness, and actually it started to inhibit my research. Now, several weeks later, I already have 2,070 books scanned in, with something like two thousand still to go. On my iPhone I can sort the books, and arrange them in the order that works best for me, instead of having to constantly move books from one shelf to another. It feels empowering.

Now for the batch edit function. (1) Tap “Select” in the top right corner. (2) Check the items you want to select for batch-editing. (3) Tap ••• at bottom left. (4) Tap “Replace Field.” (5) Choose the field you want to batch-edit. (6) Edit that field just like you would edit it for a single item. (7) Confirm the edit and hey presto, all the selected items have the relevant field updated. This is a really clever app, well thought-out, with no glitches that I can see. Chances are that your every need is anticipated, even if you have yet to find out how to locate the particular function you need. At $4.99 BookBuddy is a gift to humankind that will make the world a better place

I am using this to document and organize my book collection. Entering and duplicating records is straightforward and reasonably quick. I have also tested the export capability, which allows you to send a spreadsheet via email, which is very convenient. I don’t find the auto-fill (scan barcode, internet search) option to be particularly useful. I don’t know where they’re searching, but I don’t think it ever found the right edition I was looking for. One improve my I’d like to see is in how the app handles syncing. I have an iPad and an iPhone. I like to use the iPad for initial data entry (typing in a bunch of titles and authors, for example) but then I use my iPhone for taking pictures and filling in the details. There is no indicator that tells you the sync status, which can be annoying. If I add new titles on my iPad, and the tap the “Sync Now” option, the app will show a progress bar that counts to 100%, and the sync time stamp will update. If I then take out my iPad and sync, it will do the same thing, but the data on the iPad doesn’t change. The new records appear on the iPad eventually, but there does t seem to be any rhyme or reason. Sometimes it happens 5 minutes later. Once, after hours of waiting, I had to disable syncing on the iPad, and then set it up again, and the data finally synced. It would just be nice if there was some indicator that says something like “We found the synced file from your iPhone. It’ll take 10 minutes for the database to update completely, but it is safe to proceed.”

Update 9/2022: Since my original review, I now have nearly 1,500 titles in my collection and BookBuddy is still my favorite iOS and iPadOS app. I was just complaining this morning to my spouse about how some paid app developers (NOT these!) never seem to update their products, even after a major operating system update, like iOS 16. Contrary to that trend, the BookBuddy developers are constantly updating this app with new and requested functionality and features. Every time there is an update, I feel warm inside.

Original review: This is by far my favorite iOS/iPadOS app, using it almost daily to catalog my entire collection. While not as extensive as some, I’ve added about 850 titles so far with lots more to go. I’ve added each one manually, since online search frequently pulls in incorrect information uploaded from other sources (not BookBuddy’s fault!). Some features I particularly appreciate are the attention to detail and the amount of information that’s able to be recorded for each book. I am actually considering using the Library of Congress Classification system for my library and this app supports it! If I have any suggestions for the app’s improvement, they would be the following: - Multiple authors per title. This could be extended to translators, editors, etc. Having only one author results in some co-authors being difficult to locate in the database. - BC dates! This is a must have, since all my titles published “pre-Jesus” are listed as year 1, with a note at the bottom documenting the correct year. Those with a lot of Plato, Homer, etc. will go crazy. - It would be nice if the Date Added and Purchase Date fields could be stored as year only, consistent with all other date fields. This is my OCD nature coming through, but I’d like to be able to document books I purchased decades ago, but obviously don’t remember the exact dates.

I imported a large collection of drawing books (91). Only 51 of them had bar codes- so I got a lot of experience doing bulk importing. I also did this exact same thing with my Android phone using the app Handy Library. So I’ll be comparing my experience to that.

Obviously the first task at hand was to do a bulk import of all of the books that had bar codes. This worked 95% of the time, but gave me a rejection buzz on three of them. Found out later that on an individual import it was able to import them just fine.

After the bulk import I thought I’d be able to edit them in a bulk way - select a common tag, genre, etc - but that option was not available (minus one star).

Many of the imports had the photo wrong (it was like it had zoomed into one section of the book cover). Which meant I had to go to each import on an individual basis to both correct the image as well as edit the tags I couldn’t do on a bulk basis. The photo import for Handy Library was far superior to this experience.

Out of that stack of 50 books I had imported I then had to remember which book I had just updated so I would know which needed to be edited next. Would have been nice if the previous one edited remained highlighted upon your return to the stack.

When I had finally completed my bulk editing it rejected my entire import because one of the scan imports was missing the author. Turned out it was mass market Barnes & Nobles book that really didn’t have an author - but that didn’t stop the app from insisting that one be provided.

After completing that it then complained there was a duplicate book being imported - but gave no indication as to which book it was. So simply had to import the entire collection, then hunt for that duplicate.

Turned out I had imported the entire collection “uncategorized”. So selected the entire uncategorized selection expecting to able to bulk change them - but again bulk editing was not available.

Next came individual imports. I found the online search results to be far inferior to the ones from Handy Library. Requiring me to correct book covers 95% of the time (minus another star).

Plus many of the online search came up empty - requiring manual import. Again, not the experience I got from Handy Library.

This review doesn’t mean this app isn’t useful - it’s more of a notification to the developers that bulk editing needs to be considered.

Scan barcode? Great idea, but so far, out of @ 100 books, only 50% have been "found" by the app - which makes the multiple scan useless or worse. Fix this guys...

The first 6 books I scanned the app couldn’t connect. The authors are searchable but I was hoping to be able to scan the ISBN while I put my books away. Disappointing.

Scanned 57 books and only seven of them registered. I did not have this problem with the lite version. Kinda makes me wonder why I spent the five dollars for the full version.

After purchasing this app, it should be able to allow us to change the country. As it affects the titles of the books according to country even though one does NOT speak the language.

If it can’t find them It can’t organize them. I’d have to type each one in and still I’d have to navigate to them.

Total waste of $4.99. Should have just flushed 5 bucks down the toilet.

I hate apps that rely on other programs to function. Especially when they do not tell you this up front!

A $5.00 app that won't function unless you use another program is baloney.

I would find another app for keeping track of your books.

This is a very disappointing app. 75% of the books I scan are not able to be found and I have to manually input them. I have compared it with the scanning function on Goodreads and Goodreads is by far much better, and it's free. I would not buy this app again. I wouldn't even use it if it was free.

Out of the first dozen books I tried to scan, only ONE was recognized by the system. With 1000s of titles this isn't going to save me any time at all. My first q: How do you get a refund? Also, does anyone know of another app whose developers included all ISBN-linked titles? Thanks. Douglas in Atlanta

I have an iPhone X and I wanted my files from my phone to be on my iPad. I tried reading the FAQs, but it didn’t make sense to me as I ended up purchasing the Pro version twice on my phone and iPad and still can’t transfer files over. I love the layout of the app on the iPad, so I wanted to transfer it over, but it’s so difficult.

My sister and I share a library, and we have 2 different Apple IDs. I would like a way to share our very large library with her, since the library is already on my app. But she cant access it since she has a different Apple ID. Is there a way around this? Or a computer/desktop way to access my library, so my sister has it as well?

90% of books scanned cannot be found. Who has time to add manually, that is why you have an app. I mean really Stephen King and Dean Koontz, scanned barcodes 5% found. Two of the top writers in the business. What if it is older than 3 years it is not worth reading.

Beef up your library, and I will give you 4 stars. I wasted 2 hours scanning for nothing.

Be real

I bought this app in order to enter in books from my home library that I want to remember but get rid of. I have stacks of books to enter (at least 100 or so). I bought this app specifically because it can scan bar codes. So far I've tried 7 or 8 books and NONE of them are found. I have had to enter each one by online search. This is ridiculous and a rip off. Not what I expected at all.

I have over 200 cookbooks and have scanned them successfully and sync'd then to Dropbox, and confirmed the following day that they are still there (they are). But a few weeks later, they're gone. All 200 books. I repeat the process again. Same. Repeat. Same. Sync'd to iCloud the fourth time, no issues.

AVOID DROPBOX.

Also, why only iCloud or Dropbox offered as a cloud solution? Why not OneDrive (Microsoft)?

I was using the free version but got to the 50 book limit so wanted to “upgrade”. The App Store led me to this so I purchased it to find out it’s separate and I would have to start over and input the 50 books I already entered in the free version. I tried to ask for a refund for this so I could go back and pay for the upgrade in the free app but it won’t let me submit a refund request so I am out $5 and will use Libib instead.

I want my money back. I like the freebie and hit the 50 book limit. So instead of buying each app separately I decided to go ahead and purchase the bundle. Well, I now have two separate versions of the same app, and they won't sync after backing up to iCloud. Waste of time and money if your "free" version doesn't sync to the paid. I waste money purchasing the paid version on the free app! No "hey, we se you already purchased this, no cost, here is your update." Nothing. Not worth it if I have to enter in another 50 books again AND you over charge me!

I have been a very satisfied user of all of the developers apps for quite some time, but recently the iCloud synce is broken, and my iPad an phone no longer sync. Have contacted developer and followed instructions to no avail. Developer suggests I have disabled or otherwise altered my sync settings…I have not, and then that apple iCloud itself is to blame. I find this unlikely as no problems ever before and I use iCloud for everything. Further suggested that I use Dropbox instead, which I do not want to do as just another complication and cost. Other developer apps working fine, so I do not see why apple is at fault. Please fix the sync functionality so app is 5 star again.