Coming from Goodreads
Ruxpin will not replace Goodreads. It holds the part that was never in there.
Goodreads is a record of what you read. Ruxpin is a record of what you thought while you were reading it: spoken in the moment, transcribed, and filed under the book so you can go back to the page.
The honest version, first
Three things that will put some readers off, said before you sign up rather than after.
There is no import
You cannot bring a shelf, a rating, a review, or a to-read list across. Not from a CSV, not from anywhere. Nothing is planned for this year, and if that is a dealbreaker it is better to find out here than three screens into signing up.
It is not a tracker
No shelves, no star ratings, no reading challenge, no yearly total. If what you liked about Goodreads was the counting, Ruxpin will not scratch that, and a tracker you keep alongside it will.
iPhone only, and it is paid
iOS 16.4 and later. $5.99 a month after a free 30 days, with no card up front and no permanent free tier.
There is less to bring across than it sounds
The thing Ruxpin holds is what a book made you think, in your own words, said at the moment it happened. There is no export of that anywhere, from any service, because you never wrote it down. That is the whole problem it exists for.
So a shelf of 400 finished books would arrive here as 400 empty rows. It would look like a library and hold nothing, which is the opposite of what this app is. The record starts the next time a book makes you stop, and it is worth something by about the fourth thought rather than after an afternoon of setup.
The one slice worth carrying over is what you are reading right now, which for most readers is one to three books. That takes about a minute, out loud, and you do it by using the app rather than by importing anything.
What the first week looks like
- One
- Install it and say one thought about the book that is open right now. Not a summary, not a review. The thing you would have said out loud to somebody in the room.
- Two
- Do it again three or four times over the week, whenever something lands. There is no form to fill in mid-chapter. Say “page 84” and the entry files itself there.
- Three
- By the weekend that book has a page of its own: what you said, where in the book you said it, and a heatmap of where your attention actually went.
Your voice is deleted the moment the words are out, and one tap erases the whole record for good. The privacy policy says how, in full.
Keep counting somewhere else
If part of what you are looking for is the shelves and the yearly total, get a tracker for that and use Ruxpin beside it. They answer different questions and neither one gets in the other’s way. How the two sit together is written out on its own page.