The Goodreads App: A Complete Guide to Features & How It Works
The Goodreads app is where most people start their book tracking journey. With over 150 million registered users, a database covering tens of millions of titles, and a presence on web, iOS, and Android, it is the most widely used reading platform in the world. Whether you are brand new to book tracking or are trying to understand exactly what Goodreads offers before deciding whether to stick with it or move on, this guide covers everything you need to know.
Where Goodreads Came From
Goodreads was founded in 2007 as a social network built around books. Its premise was simple: let readers track what they have read, share recommendations, and see what their friends are reading. It grew quickly, and in 2013 Amazon acquired it. Today it sits within Amazon's ecosystem alongside Kindle, Audible, and Amazon Books, which shapes a lot of how it works and where its priorities lie.
The Core Features
Shelves
Goodreads organises your books into three default shelves: Read, Currently Reading, and Want to Read. Moving a book between shelves is straightforward on both desktop and mobile. You can also create custom shelves — "favourites", "book club reads", "abandoned", or any other category that makes sense for how you organise your library. Custom shelves layer on top of the default three rather than replacing them, so a book can sit on your Read shelf and your Favourites shelf simultaneously.
Star Ratings and Reviews
When you mark a book as read, you can give it a rating from one to five whole stars. There are no half-star or quarter-star increments — a book is a 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5. You can also write a full review, which gets posted publicly to the Goodreads community unless you mark it as private. Reviews can be formatted with basic text options, and you can add spoiler tags to hide content that might give away plot details.
The Reading Challenge
Each January, Goodreads prompts users to set an annual reading goal. You nominate a number of books you want to read by December 31st, and Goodreads tracks your progress throughout the year, showing you whether you are ahead of or behind pace. It is simple, effective, and one of the most used features on the platform. The challenge has become something of a shared ritual for reading communities, with users comparing goals and progress on social media throughout the year.
Friends and Social Features
Goodreads has a social layer built around following other readers. You can follow friends, authors, and public figures, and your home feed shows their recent activity: books they have added, reviews they have written, and updates to their reading progress. You can comment on activity and like updates, though the social experience is fairly minimal compared to dedicated social platforms.
Community Reviews and Ratings
One of Goodreads' most genuinely useful features is its aggregated community data. Every book in the database has a community rating and a collection of user reviews. For popular titles, there are often thousands of reviews to browse. This makes Goodreads a useful reference tool even for readers who do not use it as their primary tracker, simply as a place to gauge community sentiment before picking up a book.
Groups and Book Clubs
Goodreads has a Groups feature where readers can create or join communities around shared interests, genres, or book clubs. Groups have discussion boards and can organise group reads. The feature exists and functions, but it is one of the less polished parts of the Goodreads experience. The discussion format is basic and the interface for managing a group read has not changed meaningfully in years.
Recommendations
Goodreads generates book recommendations based on your reading history and ratings. In practice, these recommendations are widely considered poor. They tend to surface obvious choices rather than genuinely personalised suggestions, and the commercial motivation behind them as an Amazon product means they do not always have your taste as their primary consideration.
The Desktop Experience
On desktop, Goodreads gives you access to its full feature set. The interface is organised around a navigation bar with access to your home feed, your books, your friends activity, and community features including lists, discussions, and news. Book pages on desktop show the full depth of community data: ratings breakdowns, review sorting options, series information, author profiles, and editorial listings.
Desktop is where you will find the most complete version of Goodreads' features. The import and export tools, which let you pull your reading history into a CSV file or bring data in from another source, are accessible on desktop and are an important feature for readers who want to migrate their data elsewhere. Listopia, Goodreads' community-curated book list feature, is also most fully usable on desktop. If you are doing any kind of serious library management, shelf organisation, or data work with your Goodreads account, desktop is where you want to be.
The Mobile App Experience
Goodreads is available on iOS and Android, and the mobile app deserves more credit than it sometimes gets. While the design reflects the same dated aesthetic as the desktop version, the core experience of using it day-to-day is straightforward and intuitive. The features that most readers use most often — logging a book, updating your progress, checking what is on your shelves, browsing a friend's recent reads — are all easy to find and simple to use. The app does not get in its own way, and for the basic business of tracking your reading on the go, it works reliably.
The mobile app also has a barcode scanner that lets you add physical books to your shelves by scanning the ISBN from the back cover. For readers who buy physical books regularly, this is a genuinely useful shortcut that is not available on desktop.
Push notifications on mobile keep you connected to activity from friends and book clubs, and the reading progress update flow is quick and low-friction, making it easy to log where you are in a book without breaking your reading session.
Where the mobile app falls short relative to desktop is in the depth of certain features. The full import and export tools are not available on mobile. Some shelving and list management tasks are more cumbersome on a small screen. The Groups and community discussion features are functional on mobile but feel limited compared to what is available through a browser. If you want to do anything beyond the core tracking and social features, you will likely find yourself reaching for desktop.
What the Goodreads App Does Not Have
Understanding what Goodreads offers is only half the picture. The other half is knowing what it does not have, because for many readers those gaps will matter more than the features that exist.
There are no meaningful reading statistics. Beyond your reading challenge progress and a basic count of books by shelf, Goodreads does not help you understand your reading habits over time. No genre breakdowns, no reading pace analysis, no monthly or annual recaps.
There is no mood or pacing discovery. Books are organised by genre and community lists. If you want to find a book that matches how you feel right now, Goodreads cannot help.
There are no AI features of any kind: no AI companion, no AI-powered recommendations, no intelligent layer that adapts to your taste over time.
Ratings are whole stars only. The precision that half-star or quarter-star systems offer does not exist here.
Is the Goodreads App Worth Using in 2026?
For readers who are just starting out with book tracking, Goodreads is a reasonable entry point. It is free, it is stable, the mobile app is easy to pick up, and the community database is genuinely useful. If you primarily want to keep a list of books you have read and see what your friends are reading, it does that job without friction.
For readers who want more, the gaps become harder to ignore over time. Our full Goodreads review gives a detailed verdict on where it falls short and who it is genuinely right for.
Where to Go When You Are Ready for More
Bookwise is designed for readers who have outgrown Goodreads and want an app that meets them across all their devices with a fuller experience. The web app and mobile experience share the same data seamlessly, so your reading life follows you whether you are on your phone, tablet, or desktop. Quarter-star ratings give you precision on a 0 to 5 scale. An AI reading companion adapts to your progress and discusses books intelligently without spoilers. Reading stats give you a meaningful picture of your habits over time. And book club features are built as a real product rather than an afterthought.
If you are considering moving your Goodreads history to a new platform, our guide on how to import Goodreads to StoryGraph covers the export process in detail — and the same CSV export works for importing into Bookwise, with no paywall required. When you are ready to explore beyond Goodreads, our guide to the best Goodreads alternatives covers every app worth considering.
