Novellic - The Book Club App

Love the ideas that this app is clearly trying to pull off. Getting recommendations automated based on your reading habits and being able to ask for specific recommendations from the community would be fantastic. Unfortunately this app is kind of impossible to use or understand. There’s no guidance for how the books you input on your profile will affect your recommendations, seemingly anything you’ve read is counted as a thing you want more of and the only way to indicate dislike for a book is saying you didn’t finish it, which just isn’t always the case. Also inputting books by looking each up individually is such a hassle. As for the community recommendations, as you’re typing out a request or response there’s no indication that there’s a character limit but apparently there is because I’ve seen both requests and responses that simply cut off in the middle of a word. I had this happen to one of my own and there was no indication that I couldn’t write a response that was that length. To top it all off, there’s no organization in the search function. You can’t search for an author and find all of their works. When you search some books a bunch of editions show up with no indication of what the differences are other than the covers. Oh, and there’s a lot of books and authors that apparently just don’t exist to this app and there’s no way to add them yourself or request that they be added. And I’m not talking about some small time indie author, this includes best selling authors with half a dozen books put out by a major publisher. Overall, a frustrating waste of time trying to use this app. I can only hope that they’ll improve it but given that it’s apparently existed for at least four years already I don’t have much hope. Shoutout to Megwithbooks for selling her audience this broken app as if it were perfect 😒

As a passionate reader who’s always looking for the next big read, the Novellic app has been tremendously helpful and fun to use. It is so easy to add any books I come across and want to include in my TBR list, keep track of my read and favorite books, and look up new recommendations. I have read a lot of books personalized by Novellic and I have enjoyed every single one. I love checking out all the different book clubs and see what everyone else is reading. The new addition of the yearly reading challenge is the cherry on top. I recommend this app for anyone who wants to keep their reading life organized, up to date, and handy.

This app could be improved by allowing android users to download the app, or at least use a web version of it. It limits the people we can invite to join the book club. This app has a lot of positive features that are perfect for our needs but some of our book club members are excluded because of this issue. Also, it would be nice if more options were available to look at through the different genres and not show books that I have already selected for my favorites and/or wishlist.