Bookworms is a beautiful app for iOS and tvOS that makes e-reading more fun, social, and spontaneous.
Bookworms for tvOS
It’s always fun to snoop someone’s spines when you’re in their house; now you can do that with ebooks with your Apple TV.
Bookworms for tvOS displays your digital library and reading activity on the Big Screen. 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.
It’s fun to talk about what you’ve read, but you may have little to talk about for books only one person has read. Thankfully, Bookworms 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.
Also, Bookworms wholeheartedly endorses ruining your relationships with others: you can sort books by those you disagree most on – along with their reviews. Now you can have spontaneous arguments with casual acquaintances whether Infinite Jest is the greatest postmodern american novel or whether it’s a snoozefest outside of that Eschaton chapter. This is the kind of stuff we invented transistors for.
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. Hardcover data is synced daily. Supported eReader software, like KOReader, can automatically sync your reading progress to Hardcover.
Bookworms can’t be set as a screensaver due to tvOS limitations, 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.
Bookworms for iOS
Bookworms for iOS is mostly a companion to the tvOS app, with a handful of fun additions – becuase why not?
Design & Delight
Bookworms includes 3D models of your library with generated spines, and this syncs to tvOS. On newer iOS versions, you can use Apple Foundation Models to design beautiful spines for unique views of your library. Knock your books over like a domino before you post to socials, spin them around, stack them up, knock them over – it’s fun! You can customize the spine colors, fonts, and design, and choose alternative 2D covers if you don’t like the default.
If you hate fun though, don’t worry – all the screens you would care about support both flat and 3D modes.
Share
There’s a Share tab which allows you to share your carefully designed reading history in fun formats designed for social media.
That’s all folks
Questions or problems? Email bookworms@ian.gay with your app and OS version, or open an issue on GitHub.