Bouky
Keep the words worth keeping from the books you read on paper.
Photograph a page. Bouky reads it on the phone, then you drag from the first word of a passage to the last, or tap the single words worth keeping. What you keep lands in a library that spans every book on your shelf.
Your books, your photographs of their pages and everything you keep off them stay on the phone. There is no account, no sign-in and no server of ours holding any of it.
Free for three books, with no advertising anywhere.
Your books stand as covers on boards you name, a line of them to a shelf, each board wearing its own painted plate. Photograph a jacket and the title and author are read off it. A book with no photograph is bound in cloth and blocked instead, with a band at the head, or gilt rules at head and tail, or a label of darker leather let into the board. Hold a book to move it along its shelf or onto another.
What you keep
A passage runs from any word to any word, across the ends of lines, and two handles trim the ends word by word. It is kept with the book it came from, the page it stood on, your own note and your own tags, and the crop of the photograph it was taken off.
He had been, he said, a great reader in his youth, and the habit had outlived the leisure that made it possible.
Single words are kept the same way and set as an index, running on across the measure and wrapping, the way the index at the back of a book does. A word is short, and a row to itself wastes a screen.
What it does
One photograph, as many extracts as you like
The page is read once and in full, so a page you marked in three places does not have to be photographed three times. Two fingers zoom, one finger selects.
What a word means, worked out on the phone
Meanings and translations come from Apple's on-device model, in the sense the word carried on the page you took it from. Nothing is looked up online and no dictionary has to be downloaded.
Meeting a word again
A word you kept before is ruled under in clay when it turns up on a page you are photographing now. A word kept out of another book six months ago, standing in the one in your hands, is the whole reason to have kept it.
Page numbers read rather than counted
The folio is looked for in the head and foot margins, in arabic or in lower-case roman. A page whose margins say nothing stays unnumbered rather than wearing an invented number.
A morning worth opening
Today holds four leaves behind one switch: the page Bouky writes out of words you kept, in the language of the book they came from, and three things you kept yourself, drawn for the day and handed back whole. Nothing is ever asked of you there.
On the home screen
Two widgets. One kept word with what it means, turning at morning, midday and evening, and one kept passage. Neither counts anything and neither shows a number.
From wherever the photograph already is
A photograph of a page sitting in Photos or in a message can be sent to Bouky from the share sheet. It asks which book it belongs to, and Bouky reads it the next time you open the app.
Fifteen languages
English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Arabic, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Russian, Turkish, Polish and Swedish, chosen inside Bouky rather than two apps away in iOS Settings, and the meanings follow whichever one you have it in.
What is free and what it costs
Free, for good
- Photographing pages and reading them
- Keeping words and passages
- What they mean
- Search, tags and favourites
- The three kept leaves of the morning, and the reminder that brings you to them
- The whole collection exported as a PDF you keep
- Three books on the shelf
What Bouky costs
- The shelf beyond three books
- Your library travelling to your other devices through your own iCloud
- The morning page Bouky writes out of the words you kept
- Seven days free on the yearly plan, or one payment for good
Nothing you have already kept is ever taken away. If a purchase lapses, the travelling stops and no fourth book may be added; every word and passage stays where it is, and the export is still there to take them out with.
What it will never do
No streaks, no reading goals, no daily targets, no scores, and nothing that counts the days you did not read. Bouky asks nothing of you. A word comes round on the morning page and when you meet it again on a page you are photographing, and that is the whole of it.
Privacy, in one paragraph
Text recognition and every meaning are worked out entirely on your phone, and nothing you photograph, write or keep is ever sent anywhere. There is no account and no advertising. Bouky does count how it is used, which is a verb and a few small words beside it and never anything of yours, and one switch in Settings stops even that. Your library travels through your own private iCloud database, where only you can read it, or stays on the one device. The long version is on the privacy page.