BookBuddy Review

Wednesday, October 19, 2011

BookBuddy Review

at 6:05 AM

BookBuddy Review

By Jennifer Allen on October 19th, 2011
Our Rating:

:: USEFUL
iPhone App - Designed for the iPhone, compatible with the iPad

BookBuddy offers a great way to manage a book collection, but does miss a couple of useful features.

Developer: Kimico
Price: $4.99 (LITE version available)
Version Reviewed: 3.0
Device Reviewed On: iPhone 4

iPhone Integration Rating: 3.75 out of 5 stars
User Interface Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars
Re-use Value Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

Overall Rating: 3.58 out of 5 stars

I’ve got a house full of books, to the point that one room has so many boxes of books, I can hardly walk around it. Before my love of technology, I had a great love for reading. I still do, with my trusty iPad providing much of the focus thanks to iBooks. BookBuddy is an app that aims to help its users keep track of the many, many books they may own. It does a pretty good job of it too.

When owning numerous items within a collection, it’s all too easy to lose track of what’s there and what isn’t. BookBuddy is set up to offer most commonly used categories such as books currently being read, books that have been read and books lent out to friends and family. Other categories can then be added so that users can arrange their collections however they want, such as according to genre or type of mood that works well with the book. The pre-defined categories should cover most interests, however.

Entering information for each book is pretty simple. Users can either add all the information manually or by searching Google Books for ISBN numbers, book titles or the author’s name. Without barcode scanning functionality, it does take slightly longer but it’s quite easy to enter the first few letters of a title. Users can then add a rating out of 5 for the title and set a status for it, such as if it’s been lent out to someone. Unfortunately, there’s also no way of setting where the book is located such as which room it’s in or whether it’s an eBook.

Backup functionality via Dropbox is there, keeping the plethora of useful information safe. Users also get the option to share information via Facebook, Twitter or email. This is particularly useful when wanting to share present ideas although it does only seem to be possible to implement with individual entries rather than a list en masse.

BookBuddy is a pretty useful idea but missing out a few minor but useful features like wishlist sharing and being able to scan barcodes means it’s not quite as essential as it potentially could have been. However, for the book fan this is a worthy starting place, especially for those who swap titles with friends frequently.