BookHoard Support

Shelf scanning is a Hoard+ feature. It lets you add multiple books at once by photographing a bookshelf. Tap the camera icon on the Library screen and select "Scan shelf." Point your camera at the spines of your books and take a photo.

BookHoard sends the image to a recognition service that reads the titles and authors visible on the spines. You'll then see a list of recognised books to confirm before they're added to your library.

What helps it read more spines: good light, a straight-on angle rather than a steep one, spines facing out, and roughly 10–15 spines per photo. More than about forty in one shot and the text gets too small to read. Two good photos beat one crowded one. The photo is not stored — it is used only for recognition and then discarded.

BookHoard analyses patterns in your library — which genres you read most, how you rate books, and what tags you use — to suggest titles you're likely to enjoy.

To generate recommendations, we send anonymised pattern data (genre breakdown, rating distributions, and tag patterns) to our recommendation provider, Anthropic. For "Find Similar Books", the title of the book you are viewing is sent. We never send personal notes, your email address, or any other personally identifying information. See our Privacy Policy for full details.

Hoard+ is BookHoard's optional subscription for readers who want more. It unlocks:

• Shelf scanning — photograph a bookshelf and import multiple titles at once
• Unlimited reading recommendations (free users get one pick per day)
• Advanced library statistics and reading insights
• Priority support

Core features — including your full library, barcode scanning, Goodreads import, the banned books shelf, Little Free Library finder, and NYT Bestseller lists — are completely free. You can view pricing and manage your subscription from Profile → Hoard+ in the app.

BookHoard surfaces book ban data from the Banned Index, a public database of book bans and challenges across US schools, prisons, libraries and other settings (how the records are collected and verified) — over 20,000 titles documented.

If a book in your library has been banned, you'll see a 🚫 badge on its cover. Tap the badge to see how many times it's been banned, which states and school districts have banned it, and the data source.

You can also browse the full list of banned books in the Banned tab, search by title or author, filter by state, and see which banned titles you already own. This feature is free for all users.

The Nearby tab includes a filter for Little Free Libraries — the small community book-sharing boxes you'll find in parks, neighbourhoods, and outside homes.

BookHoard uses OpenStreetMap data to find Little Free Libraries near your current location. If none are found within the default radius, you can expand the search to 25, 50, or 100 miles. Your location is used only for the search and is never stored.

If a Little Free Library near you isn't showing up, it may not be mapped on OpenStreetMap yet. You can add it yourself at openstreetmap.org — it usually appears in the app within a day or two. You can also browse the official Little Free Library world map to find registered libraries near you.

Yes — Goodreads and CSV import is free for all users. To import from Goodreads:

• On Goodreads, go to My Books → Import and Export → Export Library to download your library as a CSV file.
• In BookHoard, go to Profile → Import from Goodreads and select the file.

BookHoard will import your books, ratings, reading status, and shelves. Books on your "to-read" shelf in Goodreads will appear in your Want to Read list.

Yes. BookHoard has a built-in reader for EPUB and PDF files. There are two ways to get books into it: open one of the free public-domain titles in the Trove, or import DRM-free EPUB or PDF files you already own.

To import your own: tap the + button, then Import an ebook. Pick one file or several at once; on Android you can also point it at a whole folder, and on either platform a .zip of your books works too. Your iCloud Drive, Google Drive, Dropbox and OneDrive all appear in the file picker. Re-importing a book you already have attaches the file to it and keeps your place.

The Trove is a shelf of public-domain classics you can open straight away at no cost. Find it under the + button, or on Discover under “Free to read now”.

They are free because their copyright has expired. A title only goes into the Trove when the author’s death year is known and is 1955 or earlier — which clears the life-plus-70 term used in the UK and EU, and clears the United States term comfortably. Where the death year is unknown we leave the book out rather than assume. Translations are excluded too, because a translation carries its own separate copyright.

Trove books do not count against the 100-book limit on the free tier.

Kindle files (AZW, AZW3, KFX) are locked to Amazon’s own apps by design, and that is not something we can engineer around. You can still catalogue a Kindle book in your library and track it like any other; you just cannot read it here.

Two near-misses worth knowing. An old MOBI file is usually not locked at all — it is simply a format we cannot open yet, and Calibre converts it to EPUB in a couple of clicks. And an EPUB bought with Adobe DRM is a real EPUB that only opens in software licensed to unlock it; the DRM-free copy from the same shop, often at the same price, opens here.

BookHoard reads DRM-free EPUB and PDF files — the kind you get from Standard Ebooks, Project Gutenberg, many independent publishers, and shops that hand over the actual file: Kobo’s DRM-free titles, Smashwords, Humble Bundle, Tor, and most publishers selling direct.

A book you cannot move is a book you are renting. That is the whole reason BookHoard works the way it does.

Into your library, same as any other book. Three places to find it again:

Pick up where you left off, the row at the top of your Library — anything you have downloaded or started appears there, newest first. A book you have not begun yet is marked Downloaded rather than showing a percentage.

The Trove itself. Books you already have are marked Downloaded, and tapping one opens it immediately instead of fetching it again. The Downloaded filter at the top shows only those.

Your Library, where it sits with everything else you own.

Your place in a book, and your highlights and notes, sync across your devices with Hoard+. Close a book on your phone and it opens on the same page on your iPad.

The files themselves never sync. An EPUB you imported stays on the device you imported it to — we do not upload your books. If you want the same book on a second device, import it there too; your position and notes will find it.

No. Books you import stay on your device and are never sent to our servers. What syncs is your reading position and your notes — not the file.

Trove books are downloaded from the public-domain source to your device in the same way. If space runs short, BookHoard may remove free books you have finished or never started to make room; a book you are part-way through is never touched, and anything removed can be downloaded again.

“Banned or challenged” means a specific school district or library system removed or restricted the book at some point. It does not mean the book is illegal to buy, or banned nationally. Bans are local.

Every entry names where. Tap the ban badge on any book and you’ll see the states, the individual school districts, and the source each record came from — a board vote, a district list, a court filing. You can follow it through to the full record on Banned Index.

That’s deliberate. A claim this specific is only worth making if you can check it.

Corrections go to bannedindex.org/corrections, which reaches the developer directly — the same person who maintains the database and this app.

If you can include a source — a board agenda, a news report, a district list — it can be verified and added far faster. Every record in the index carries its source, so a correction needs one too.

Getting one wrong is worth fixing publicly and quickly. The whole point of the index is that it can be checked.

Hoard+ is billed through your Apple ID, so cancelling happens in Apple’s subscription settings rather than in BookHoard:

On your device, open Settings → tap your name → Subscriptions → BookHoard → Cancel Subscription. Or open apps.apple.com/account/subscriptions directly.

You keep Hoard+ until the end of the period you’ve already paid for. Nothing in your library is deleted when it ends — you keep every book, note and rating, and you can still export the whole catalogue as CSV or JSON. Cataloguing beyond 100 books and the Hoard+ features stop; your data does not.

You can delete your account directly in the app. Go to Settings → Account → Delete Account. This will permanently delete your library data, account information, and all associated records from our systems.

If you're unable to access the app, email us at support@bookhoardapp.com and we will process your deletion request manually.

A few things to try if barcode scanning isn't working:

• Check your internet connection. BookHoard needs an internet connection to look up book details after scanning. Make sure you're on Wi-Fi or have mobile data.
• Improve the lighting. Scanning works best in good light. Avoid dark rooms or direct glare on the barcode. Try moving near a window.
• Hold steady and get close. Position the barcode squarely within the scan frame and hold the phone still for a moment.
• Check camera permissions. Go to your phone's Settings app, find BookHoard, and make sure camera access is enabled.

If the barcode still won't scan (common with older books), BookHoard offers two alternatives:

• Read ISBN — uses your camera to read the printed ISBN text from the back cover using on-device text recognition. This works well when the barcode itself won't scan but the ISBN number is printed nearby.
• Type ISBN — lets you type the ISBN number directly from the book's back cover or copyright page. Supports both 10-digit and 13-digit ISBNs.

Both options appear automatically after a few seconds if the barcode doesn't scan. You can also add the book manually by searching for its title (see below).

There are several ways to add a book to your library:

• Scan barcode — point your camera at the ISBN barcode on the back cover.
• Read ISBN — if the barcode won't scan, use the "Read ISBN" button to let your camera read the printed ISBN text from the cover.
• Type ISBN — type the 10 or 13-digit ISBN directly from the book's back cover or copyright page.
• Search by title or author — tap the + button on the Library screen and search by title or author name.
• Scan shelf — photograph an entire bookshelf to add multiple books at once (Hoard+ feature).
• Add manually — enter the title, author, and other details yourself if the book can't be found.

If BookHoard detects you already own the book or a different edition, it will let you know before adding it.

Two things are meant by “format”, so here are both.

Files you can read. BookHoard opens DRM-free EPUB and PDF files, one at a time or several at once (a whole folder on Android, or a .zip anywhere), from the Files app and any cloud drive it shows. The Trove’s free classics are EPUBs. Kindle files are locked and will not open; an unlocked MOBI is not supported yet but converts to EPUB easily. See Why won’t my Kindle books open? above.

How a book is recorded. Every book in your library carries a format, physical or digital, so you can tell your paperbacks from your ebooks and filter by either. That is a note about what you own; it does not change what the app can open.

Getting your catalogue in and out. Import from Goodreads or any CSV. Export the whole library as CSV or JSON whenever you like, and Hoard+ can export a PDF inventory for insurance.

Yes. Your library is private to you. BookHoard does not sell your data, does not use your reading data for advertising, and does not share your book titles or notes with third parties.

Features like ISBN text recognition use on-device processing — your camera images are never sent to our servers, Apple, or Google. Shelf photos are processed by our recognition provider in real time and immediately discarded.

Read our full Privacy Policy for complete details on what data is collected and how it is used.

BookHoard reads series information from the titles you import, and can look up a series to tell you how many volumes exist — so a book detail page shows something like “you own 4 of 7” along with exactly which volumes are missing.

Profile → Detect Series goes through books that don’t have series information yet and sorts them into their sets. It shows you a preview first and only applies confident matches, and there’s a one-tap undo if you don’t like the result. Books that already have a series are left alone.

Only the title and author are used to look a series up — never your notes, ratings, or which books you own.

Profile → Estimate Book Values looks up the publisher’s list price for the books in your library and totals them, so you get a real figure rather than a guess.

It is an estimate of replacement cost at list price. It is not a valuation, and it does not know that your copy is a signed first edition or that it has a water-damaged cover. For anything where that matters, set the value yourself on the book’s detail page — the estimator will never overwrite a value you set by hand.

Where no list price is available, BookHoard falls back to a rough average for the format so the total stays useful rather than incomplete.

Yes. Hoard+ members can export a PDF inventory of the collection with per-book values and a total — the kind of document a contents-insurance claim asks for.

You can also export the whole library as CSV or JSON at any time, on any plan. Your catalog is yours and you can take it with you.

Keep a copy somewhere other than your phone. An inventory that burns down with the books isn’t much use.