BookPine vs Ex
Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both apps, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.
BookPine
Track your reading journey with detailed stats, custom lists, and reading goals. Easily import your library from other platforms and discover ambient sounds for focused reading. Share your progress and connect with a community of book lovers.
- Detailed reading stats and insights
- Custom lists and shelves for organization
- Personalized reading goals and challenges
- Import from Goodreads, StoryGraph, LibraryThing
- Ambient sounds for focused reading
- Social features to follow friends and share reviews
- Transaction log for borrowed, lent, or purchased books
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BookPine is a free book tracker for readers who like to keep a record of what they read. Log your books, set goals that fit your life, and see real stats about your reading habits. If you're coming from Goodreads, you can bring your whole library with you and pick up right where you left off. There's no subscription and nothing is locked behind a paywall. READING CIRCLES Read a book together with friends or other readers. Start a circle from any book, make it public or private, and choose how long it runs. Members write posts, comment, vote in polls and log their progress as they go. You can hide a post until readers reach a certain point in the book, or until they finish it, so nobody gets spoiled. SERIES TRACKING BookPine builds your series list from the books on your shelves. Each series shows its books in order, how many you've read, and which one comes next. Reading a series in another language? Set the language for that series and your progress only counts the books published in it. You can also mark a series as paused or abandoned. CUSTOM COVERS Don't like the cover on your edition? Change it. Pick one from another edition, upload your own image, or grab one from any web page. Only you see your custom cover, and it shows up everywhere you see that book in the app. HOME SCREEN WIDGETS Keep your books on your home screen. Pick a grid of covers, a shelf of spines lined up like a real bookshelf, or the book you are reading now with your progress on it. Choose which shelf each widget shows, how it is sorted and which colors it uses. From the Currently Reading widget you can start the reading timer or update your progress. CUSTOM GENRES AND TAGS Sort your library with your own genres and tags: comfort read, slow burn, signed copy, book club, five-star prediction, whatever fits how you read. They are private to you, and you can filter your whole library by them, so any book is easy to find again. READING STATS AND INSIGHTS Track pages, finished books and reading time, with charts for your streak, monthly progress and yearly trends. It's an easy way to see how much you read and what you actually finish. BOOK TRACKER, LISTS AND SHELVES Shelve books as Currently Reading, Want to Read, Read or Did Not Finish. Rate with half stars, write reviews, and make your own shelves and lists. Add a book in seconds by scanning its barcode or searching by title, author or ISBN. READING GOALS AND CHALLENGES Set yearly, monthly or custom goals by books, pages, minutes or authors. Streaks and milestones help you keep the habit going. IMPORT FROM GOODREADS, STORYGRAPH AND LIBRARYTHING Import your books, ratings, reviews and shelves in one go, so your reading history comes with you. TRY IT AS A GUEST Open the app and start tracking without an email address. Create an account later if you want to keep going. AMBIENT SOUNDS Play rain, a crackling fireplace, cafe noise and more while you read. SOCIAL Follow friends, share reviews and see what other people are reading, along with their goals, shelves and wishlists. SHAREABLE BOOK CARDS Turn your current read, a favorite quote, a review or a reading milestone into an image you can post or send to friends. TRANSACTION LOG Keep track of the books you borrow, lend, buy or give away. PRIVATE BOOKS Some reads are just for you. Private books never appear on your public profile. ALSO INCLUDED • Dark mode, plus dark gray, high contrast, true black and sepia themes • Available in 16 languages • Half-star ratings and tags for more detailed reviews Terms of Use: https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/itunes/dev/stdeula/
Ex
Catalog your personal book collection, track where each book is, and manage loans to friends. Organize your library with custom shelves and discover what your community is reading.
- Scan and catalog books
- Organize books on custom shelves
- AI-powered shelf arrangement suggestions
- Search personal and community libraries
- Manage book lending and borrowing
- Create custom book lists
- Connect with friends and share collections
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Your books, and the ones going around. Ex-libris is the app for your own library: what you own, where it sits, and whose hands it is in. Not a reading list — an inventory of the books actually on your shelves. BUILD YOUR LIBRARY, ONE SHELF AT A TIME Open the scanner and walk along your shelves: the camera stays up, each barcode brings the book onto the screen, one tap files it, and the next one is already waiting. A book you have scanned before says so, so a second pass never creates duplicates. You can also search for a title and add it by hand. SHELVE THEM THE WAY THEY SIT AT HOME Create shelves and drag your books onto them, on a screen built for it: your shelves on one side, the books still to file on the other, and nothing written until you confirm. If you do not know where to start, "Suggest an arrangement" uses the AI built into your iPhone to propose shelves sized to your collection. You keep the last word: the proposal touches nothing before you accept it, and never disturbs what you arranged by hand. ONE SEARCH One field, three answers: your books, your friends' books, and the inventaire.io catalogue. Your own results first, your recent searches at hand, and the option to search by title or by author. LISTS FOR EVERYTHING ELSE To read, to give away, summer crime novels, the pile by the bed: create as many lists as you like, from a book or from the Lists tab. LEND, GIVE, SELL Mark a book as available to lend, to give away or to sell, and follow each transaction with the person concerned, messages included. You finally know who has your copy — and since when. THE COMMUNITY Find your friends, browse their shelves, see what they are willing to lend, and ask them for a book instead of buying it. BUILT ON INVENTAIRE.IO Ex-libris runs on inventaire.io, the open, non-profit book database: your account and your books are hosted there, author, work and edition pages come from its open data, and what you add benefits everyone. No ads, no data resale. Happy reading — and happy lending.
Screenshots
Verdict
The clearest difference is review sentiment: Ex at 100% against BookPine's 25%. Ex also leads on rating (5.0 vs 4.8) and monetization model (free vs ad-supported). BookPine's advantage is ratings volume (60 vs 1) and iOS requirement (16.4 vs 26.0). On price, update cadence, ads and in-app purchases there is nothing between them.
Scored on Price · Rating · Positive reviews · Number of ratings · Update frequency · Ads · In-app purchases · Monetization · Best chart rank · Devices · Requires iOS
Both are free to download. Neither carries in-app purchases, so what you see is what you pay.
Ex holds the better App Store score, 5.0 against 4.8. That said, the two scores are not equally well evidenced: BookPine has 60 ratings behind it against 1, so its average is the more settled of the two. Written reviews point the same way: 25% of BookPine's written reviews are positive against 100% of Ex's.
BookPine ships an update weekly, Ex every 4 days. The most recent releases landed on October 12, 2026 and October 11, 2026 respectively.
| Parameter | BookPine | Ex |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | Free |
| Rating | 4.8 (60 ratings) | 5.0 (1 ratings) — better |
| Positive reviews | 25.0% of reviews | 100.0% of reviews — better |
| Number of ratings | 60 — better | 1 |
| Update frequency | Weekly | Every 4 days — better |
| Ads | No | No |
| In-app purchases | No | No |
| Monetization | Ad-supported | Free — better |
| Devices | iPhone, iPad — better | iPhone |
| Requires iOS | 16.4 — better | 26.0 |
| Further details — not scored | ||
| Size | 100 MB | 17 MB |
| Age rating | 12+ | 4+ |
| Developer | Devpri SRL | Lunabee Studio |
Customer experience
BookPine
Ex
In-app purchases
BookPine
No in-app purchases
Ex
No in-app purchases









