ReadingRate · What's new · 2026-08-12
Scan your bookshelf to fill your library
You can now photograph a bookshelf and have the spines read into your ReadingRate library. A vision model transcribes each title and author it can see and matches them against the catalogue; confident matches arrive pre-checked and uncertain ones wait for you to approve them. It is free at three scans a day, with thirty on Reader, and available during onboarding or any time from your library.
Available on web and iOS.
Entering a reading history by hand is the reason most reading logs die in week one. A shelf photo turns thirty minutes of typing into about fifteen seconds, and it catches the books you would have forgotten to enter — which is usually the more interesting eighty percent.
On the website books come in as finished reads rather than as things you are currently reading, on the assumption that a book on your shelf is one you have already read. In the iPhone app you mark the ones you have read and the rest go to your to-read list. Rating a handful of them is what makes recommendations useful immediately rather than eventually.
Spines the catalogue does not hold are looked up outside it and offered for you to add, and a spine printed in translation is matched to the book it translates. Where the imprint can be read, the cover you get is your own edition's. What still cannot be matched is recorded as a miss rather than silently dropped, so the catalogue learns what it is missing.
What it can't do
- Books stacked flat cannot be read — only the top cover is visible.
- Angled spines, low light, and photographs of a whole bookcase from across the room all match poorly. One shelf per photo, straight on, is the difference between a good scan and a bad one.
- It can tell that you own a book, never that you have read it.
- Matches are to the work, not to the specific edition on your shelf.
- Unreadable spines are reported as misses rather than guessed at. A wrong book in your library is worse than a missing one.
Questions people ask
- Does ReadingRate scan bookshelves from a photo?
- Yes. Photograph a shelf and the spines are read and matched against the catalogue. It's free at three scans a day, and nothing is added until you confirm the matches.
- Is bookshelf scanning free?
- Yes, with a limit of three scans a day; Reader has thirty. Only a scan that finds a book counts. New iPhone accounts need Reader to use the iPhone app at all.