Bookworms is a beautiful app for Apple tvOS and Android TV that makes e-reading more social IRL. It’s always fun to snoop someone’s spines when you’re in their house; now you can do that with ebooks.
Bookworms displays your digital library and reading activity on The Big Screen (your TV). In lieu of physical spines of books on your shelf for guests to browse, they can look at your TV when it’s not in use (other displays coming soon).
Bookworms also supports comparing your reading activity and history with another user on Hardcover. Now you can easily compare each other’s top rated reads, book reviews, and argue talk about your reading tastes. Bookworms wholeheartedly endorses ruining your social life too: there’s a setting that will display the books you disagree most on – along with their reviews. Now you can have spontaneous arguments with acquaintances whether Infinite Jest is the greatest postmodern american novel or whether it’s a snoozefest outside of that Eschaton chapter.
Bookworms has views for:
- Your most recent reads
- Recent updates from all users you follow on Hardcover
- “Shelf compare” of your book library with another user – see each other’s top picks
- A “Book Club” view to compare your Hardcover reviews with another user’s; available in “what we both love” (agreement) and “you said WHAT about Infinite Jest?!” (disagreement) views
Currently, Bookworms can pull data from Hardcover.
Goodreads and StoryGraph prefer to hoard your reading data to themselves. However, you can import data from those apps to Hardcover.
Bookworms can’t be (easily) set as a screensaver, but it has an OLED-aware Ambient mode that dims the screen and cycles through selected views.
Bookworms is 100% free, libre (MIT-licensed) software.
Questions or problems? Email bookworms@ian.gay with your app and tvOS version, or open an issue on GitHub.