I read a lot of non-fiction and retain embarrassingly little of it. The highlight is made, the book is closed, and two weeks later I couldn’t paraphrase the passage if you paid me. Booksum is the fix for my own workflow: photograph the page while the book is open, keep the passage with the book it came from, and get a summary I can re-read — all of it on the phone, none of it in a cloud.
Your bookshelf
Scan a book’s ISBN barcode and it’s added with cover art, author and page count. Every book shows how many snippets you’ve saved from it. Mark books read, in progress or to-read; search across titles, authors and the text of everything you’ve captured.
Scan a page, keep the passage
The camera is tuned for book pages — volume-button shutter so you can hold a hardcover open with the other hand, crop and straighten afterwards. On-device OCR pulls the text out: Apple’s Vision framework on iPhone, ML Kit on Android. The result is searchable, copyable and editable if the OCR misread a ligature.
Summaries that never leave the phone
For a dense passage — a textbook chapter, a legal paragraph, anything that takes three reads — tap Summarise. A small language model running on the device returns the key idea in a few sentences. The first summary downloads the model; after that it works on a plane.
On Android, Booksum also annotates: draw on the page photo, circle the important sentence, leave your future self an arrow.
Review, so it sticks
The Review tab resurfaces what you’ve saved so you actually read it a second time, and a weekly notification sends you one quote from your own collection at a time you choose. The Android version goes further with spaced-repetition flashcards generated from your highlights.
Insights
Books, snippets, weekly activity, the titles you keep coming back to, and a streak — because nothing keeps a reader consistent like not wanting to break one.
Who it’s for
Non-fiction readers who highlight and never revisit. Students who need a passage for an exam. Anyone building a commonplace book of quotes and ideas. Technical readers working through a programming book with a pen in one hand.
Free and Premium
Scanning, quotes and summaries are free. Premium removes ads and limits, with monthly (7-day trial), yearly or a one-time lifetime option.
The keyword lesson
Booksum shipped under the title “Book Tracker & Scan” and ranked for almost nothing, because “book tracker” belongs to Goodreads. The retitle to “Reading Journal” and the data behind it are in the post about why Booksum exists — useful if you ship apps yourself.
