ReadingRate vs ShelfMark
Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both apps, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.
ReadingRate
This app helps you understand your reading habits through detailed analytics and AI-powered insights. Track your reading speed, difficulty preferences, and genre patterns to discover books that truly match your taste. Capture thoughts and quotes to build a personal literary archive.
- Personal reading analytics
- 9-dimension book difficulty scores
- Reading journal with voice capture
- AI-powered reading insights
- Data-driven book recommendations
- Reading time predictions
- Barcode book scanner
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How hard is this book, and how long will it take you? Every book in ReadingRate carries nine measured difficulty scores, each with a written reason, and a word count turned into hours at your reading speed. Look anything up before you commit a month of evenings to it. No account needed. FREE, FOREVER, NO CARD Import your reading history from Goodreads, StoryGraph, Readwise or Notion. Log every reading day, in the app, by Siri, or by telling ChatGPT or Claude. Keep your library, your journal and your quotes. Read difficulty scores and reading-time estimates on every book. Export all of it whenever you want. Nothing here runs out after a week. NINE MEASURED DIMENSIONS Four for how hard the prose is to parse: vocabulary complexity, syntactic complexity, abstraction level, information density. Five for how hard the meaning is to reach: narrative indirection, symbolic density, ironic distance, resolution withholding, structural complexity. Each one scored 0 to 100 for that specific book, each with a written reason. YOU READ THE BOOK WHEREVER YOU READ BOOKS Paper, Kindle, library copy, audiobook. ReadingRate is not where you read. It is where the reading is kept: what you finished, how long it took, and the lines you marked. LOGGING TAKES ONE TAP Tap the book and the page you reached. Or tell Siri. Or say it to ChatGPT or Claude and it lands here. No timer, and nothing to fill in while you are trying to read. YOUR READING JOURNAL Capture thoughts and connections as you read. Save a passage and it is anchored to its page for citation later. Build a record of your relationship with a book, for reviews, essays, or just remembering why it mattered. BARCODE AND SHELF SCANNING Add a book by scanning its barcode. Members can photograph a whole bookshelf and have it read the spines. APPLE WATCH AND WIDGETS Log pages and check progress from your wrist. Currently reading and reading pace on your home and lock screens. BROWSE AND DISCOVER Curated lists, prize winners, and thousands of books with full difficulty analysis. Free to explore without an account. WHAT A MEMBERSHIP ADDS Deep analysis of any book, the Insight Lab, the full Eras atlas and literary map, book clubs, thirty shelf scans a day, the WhatsApp bot, and asking Claude or ChatGPT about your own reading history. Putting your reading in is always free. A membership is for getting more back out.
ShelfMark
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A quiet reading tracker for people who love books more than apps. ShelfMark keeps your reading life in one calm, paper-warm place. Log the page you are on, keep a streak alive, and save the lines worth keeping. No account, no feed, no noise. MADE FOR READERS - Three shelves: to be read, reading, and finished. Move a book with a tap. - Quick page updates with percent complete, pages a day, and time left at your current pace. - A daily page goal beside your grace-day reading streak. - Search your library, filter by genre, and sort by recency, title, author, or progress. - A quote wall with the book, page number, and an optional photo of the page. - A yearly reading goal and Wrapped view with pages, streaks, genres, fastest reads, and monthly activity. - A private Home and Lock Screen widget for your current book, pages today, goal, and streak. - A complete local backup, additive restore, and Delete All My Data control. FREE AND LIFETIME ShelfMark is free for up to 3 books and 5 saved quotes. Reading progress, streaks, daily and yearly goals, search, backup, restore, deletion, and the widget stay useful without paying. A single Lifetime purchase unlocks unlimited books and quotes, the 30-day Reading Pulse, finish-date pace plans, full Wrapped statistics, and the one-page Reading Year PDF. It is a one-time purchase, not a subscription. Existing records always remain readable and editable. PRIVATE BY DESIGN Your reading library stays locally on your iPhone or iPad. No account, no analytics, and no tracking. Widget content uses Apple's private on-device App Group storage and is marked privacy sensitive.
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Verdict
ReadingRate and ShelfMark are too close to call on the numbers: across 6 compared parameters — price, update cadence, ads and in-app purchases among them — neither pulls far enough ahead to decide it. What separates them is feature set and interface, not measurable difference.
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. ReadingRate sells 3 in-app purchases, starting at $9.99 per month and ShelfMark sells 1 one-off in-app purchase. Whichever you choose, the download price is not the number that matters.
ReadingRate ships an update every 8 days, ShelfMark weekly. The most recent releases landed on October 10, 2026 and October 3, 2026 respectively.
| Parameter | ReadingRate | ShelfMark |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | Free |
| Rating | 3.0 (2 ratings) — better | — |
| Number of ratings | 2 — better | — |
| Update frequency | Every 8 days | Weekly — better |
| Ads | No | No |
| In-app purchases | Yes | Yes |
| Monetization | Freemium | — |
| Devices | iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch — better | iPhone, iPad |
| Requires iOS | 18.0 | 18.0 |
| Further details — not scored | ||
| Size | 45 MB | 6 MB |
| Age rating | 4+ | 4+ |
| Developer | Simon Stawski | InnovaLabWorks |
In-app purchases
ReadingRate
- Reader Monthly7 Days trial$9.991 Month
- Reader Yearly7 Days trial$99.991 Year
- Lifetime Membership$249.99
ShelfMark
- ShelfMark Lifetime$12.99









