Build A Reader vs Bookaroo

The Build A Reader app from Tulsa City-County Library is a free tool that can help parents develop early literacy skills in children from birth to pre-K in order to grow and sustain a love of reading. The app offers short, bite-sized videos led by professional library staff demonstrating songs, finger plays, and great book recommendations in thematic categories such as Animals and Feelings to prepare young children for a lifetime of reading joy. Plus, when you can’t make it to the library for story time, you can still get a story time… in your pocket!

Bookaroo keeps your reading on your phone. No account, no server, no advertising. Everything you record — books, pages, dates, notes, quotes — lives in a file on your device. Not because we promise not to look, but because none of it is ever sent to us. WHAT IT DOES Log the page you stopped on, and Bookaroo works out the rest: how far through you are, your pace, how long the book has left, and how many days in a row you have read. Four shelves, in the order a book moves through them: Unread, Up next, Reading, Finished. A Wishlist for the ones you do not have yet, and a separate note of whose copy it is — so a borrowed book sits on the same shelf as your own without pretending to be the same thing. Lend a book out and Bookaroo remembers who has it and since when. Closed loans are kept, so you can see who had what. Keep the lines. Type a quote or photograph the page and let your phone read it. Tag it, find it again, and share it as something worth looking at. Watch the year add up: pages, books, streaks and best months, with last year beside this one once there is a last year. FOUR WAYS TO ADD A BOOK Scan the barcode. Search by title, author or ISBN. Photograph the cover and let the phone read the title off it — for the books no catalogue has. Or type it in yourself when all three come up empty. YOUR COPY, YOUR CLOUD Automatic backup to your own Dropbox, in an app folder Bookaroo cannot see past. The file is yours, in your account. We hold no tokens and run no server, so your library never passes through us. Or export it as a plain JSON file you can open and read. WHAT IT DOES NOT DO No account. No ads. No analytics or tracking SDKs. No social feed. No profile of you, because there is no way for us to know who you are.