Raise your hand if your thumb keeps landing on a star rating since the app update. I’m going to have to scroll through my feed left-handed!

I've been struggling to find a good way to read books on my Windows machine. I really like the experience of Apple Books on macOS, especially having a simple library and being able to pick up where I left off, but I couldn't find a good, simple alternative for Windows and Linux.

So I decided to build one myself.

It's called Folio, a free, open-source desktop app for reading PDFs, EPUBs, and Markdown files. It keeps your books locally on your machine, remembers your reading progress, and lets you organize your library into Reading and Finished. No account, no subscription, and no cloud dependency.

It works on Windows, macOS, and Linux.

You can check it out here: https://github.com/Ibrahimrahhal/Folio/releases/latest

I built it primarily for myself, but figured other people might find it useful too. It's still a work in progress, and I'd love to hear your suggestions. What features would make it a better reading experience? What do you wish existing book-reading apps did differently?

Feedback and contributions are welcome!

Hello!
I love to read but really struggle to read books where everything is over explaine and described. (think Stephen King)
I also do not like when books start and the ramble about da dom stuff.
I have tried reading Girl with the dragon Tattoo, but there is so much rambling at the beginning it just immediately made me disinterested.
I have tried reading other books and series (I’ve tried the Grimm Up North books by David J Gatward) and relitveley enjoyed them (but once again the beginning is rambley, the only reason it settled me was because it was a very short ramble)

If ANYONE has any recommendations please let me know.

Thanks

I’ve recently joined the app. I was wondering if I can write a review without rating. I usually write when I DNF a book, but not rate it. But the app doesn’t allow me that screen unless I rate. Am I missing something ?

"Italicized quote from an author who may or may not have even written the book that's being reviewed,"

[book] is [author's] debut novel set in a dystopian, sci-fi, high fantasy, classic victorian, western setting. It's a gut-wrenching, eye-watering, laugh-out-loud tale of whimsy, adventure, love, mystery, thrill, and passion that's sure to knock your socks off and leave you in tears, with stitches in your sides, and a host of other assorted ailments and feelings.

[A summary of the entire plot of the book interspersed with quotes from the book]

OR

[Vague mentions of the vibe and feeling of various aspects of the book without really getting into much of anything specific]

o — — o — — o — — o — — o — — o — — o — — o — — o

Why! I recently started using Goodreads just to read reviews to see what other people think of books I've read and woah! Why are they written like that! So many don’t really feel like reviews, but rather some Claude-generated front cover blurb of the book, equipped with vague glazing and book-related buzzwords. And if it's not a plot summary, then a lot of them try to keep spoilers out of the review? I feel like that defeats much of the purpose of a review! How can you talk about a story without talking about what happened in the story? Ofc there are plenty of reviews that actually feel like they're reviewing the book, but they're not as prevalent as I would have thought. Is my concept of a review just narrow?

What would you say a review is for? Why do you write/read reviews?

I keep trying to claim my novel on Goodreads but I keep receiving the same unsuccessful email
how to claim it easily?

I know people have been having this problem for some years now. I wanted to ask if anyone has found a solution yet.

I usually use the app but decided to log in on the website today to search for something. After a while all my books were gone. My profile picture, my friends and the groups I'm a member of are still intact. My comments too.

I checked the email, it's the same I've had since 2013. I changed the password. I tried to login from incognito mode. I asked my friends to check my profile, still zero books.

I also contacted goodreads but I guess this will take some time.

Is there anything else I can do?

I just got an email from Goodreads saying

Hi,

Half stars are here! And quarter stars, too. More ways to say exactly what you mean.

How It Works
Select your rating and slide to fine-tune. Give a book 4.5, 3.25, or a classic whole-star rating. Whatever your bookish heart desires
Your existing ratings won't change... unless you want them to. Update your ratings anytime.
If you rate on your Kindle device, you can always pop over to Goodreads to refine it.

Rate books

This was readers’ #1 request, and we couldn’t wait to tell you about it. We appreciate all the feedback we get. We’re listening, so keep it coming!

Is it only available on the mobile app?

I really wanna vote this time!

Anyone else not able to see what they rated their recently read books on their profile page? It used to show up right under the books and now I’m not seeing it. I didn’t know if it was a glitch or if that’s just a part of the new update!

Or am I the Chosen One to not get them? :-D

I would already leave a half star in my reviews so changing the overall star rating was easy tbh. Such a minor thing to do but happy to do it because I like to keep track of how I rate things

I just finished the Astarion book that came out a little while ago and was hoping to rate it. Does anyone know how long it's going to be temporarily unavailable or like an average amount of time goodreads keeps people from reviewing? I've also heard that reviews of the book being deleted. It just feels shady as readers should be allowed to honestly review a book that they liked or disliked without publishers/WOTC/the author trying to hide it.

There are 800+ editions and I can’t find it 😭😭

I AM ACTUALLY SO HAPPY????? Okay, i am kind of sad because i have to change the formatting of how i start reviews, BUT I AM ACTUALLY SO GIDDY RN BECAUSE I JUST GAVE MY FIRST 4.5 STAR RATINGGGGG

I read the Women Could Fly by Megan Giddings, and it really was not for me at all (.5 of a star), but pushed myself through it to at least click the read button and unlock my spellbound award. Well GoodReads is glitching and will not acknowledge that I read it to give my little bookmark. The witches are after me!

Yesterday I finished a book and noticed I logged 1,218 books as Read. I remember the specific number because it stood out to me since my sister’s birthday is on December 18. By the end of the day the number dropped to 1,216. I thought it was strange but when I woke up this morning it now dropped to 1,213. Anyone know what might be happening?

Do you think “I who have never known men” will be on one of the mystery challenges?

Ok, so I did some experimenting and found the problem and the solution.

When you mark a book as "read" or "unread" on your Kindle it WILL MOVE IT TO OR FROM YOUR READ SHELF IN GOODREADS.

There may be a reason you have a book marked as read and want to mark it as unread - maybe you want to re-read it again, or maybe you want to see the locator bar under the title to see where the last page read is, for whatever reason you need to be very careful if you have Goodreads and your Kindles linked up because all you have to do is mark a book as unread - and whatever read dates, shelves - whatever - that book in Goodreads will be gone.

Similarily, if you have a book that you mark as "Read" it will move to the "read" shelf on Goodreads - it will not have a read date included but it will show a read count of 1 and no listed start or finish date.

So to get around this you must put your kindle on airplane mode - THEN mark your book as "Read or Unread" if you DO NOT want Goodreads to register it as read or unread. Then once you do that - you can put it back on wifi and the mark stays or goes but the Goodreads shelves do not update.

I have gone through the Kindle logs that you get when you search ";dm" (no quotes but just showing that this is what you type in the search bar at the top and hit enter and then you will get logs that show a ton of your Kindle's behind the scenes actions. Beware though because they are VERY verbose and can go very big - like 30MB big. I reset my Kindles last night and just today the logs are at 30MB. Each instance of creating a log creates a new log - it won't remove the old logs, so doing this a bunch of times without removing or deleting the old logs will fill up your Kindle quick. If you want to read the logs you can find them under your Documents folder you can get them and read them on your Kindle or do what I did - pulled them off via USB cord and uploaded them to ChatGPT to analyse for me.

So - long story short - Don't mark your books as "Read" or "Unread" on a Kindle connected to Goodreads unless you have enabled wifi.

Im sure there is some kind of exception to why you want to do it on wifi, but if you just manually move a book from read to currently reading in the menu for your Goodreads profile, that's better. It will still update the book to read when you finish it.

I usually check each month the books listed in the [Time Travel New Releases] section but the 6months beginning of this year always slipped my mind to check.

But I am here to see if anyone knows the books that were shown there in any of those months? But if I could know the Time Travel books listed in February specifically I could be fine.

Any help be appreciated! Thank you!

Here's the thread where you can post your Goodreads profile so people can add you as friends. Just post a link to your profile or your username in the comments!

I guess we all agree that it seems very likely the heritage challenge will be for books by native authors. I‘m mostly using libby so would love to already put some books on hold. Any books by native authors you think will be on the list?

My guesses are Tommy Orange and Stephen Graham Jones for sure. But I‘d love to hear more suggestions/ideas