Book Beats: Reading to the Rhythm

Tracking the books you read is well-trodden App Store ground. So is making music playlists. But what if you combined the two? The result is Book Beats, a new iPhone and iPad app from Olea Studios’ Casey and Lisa Doyle, that does just that, managing to elevate books and music in a new and unique way by bringing reading and listening together. It’s a terrific example of an app made by people who deeply understand its subject matter and bring AI to bear in a focused, tasteful way that elevates the app’s experience without being gimmicky.

Books, Collections, and Beats.

At its core, Book Beats is a book tracker. You add the books you read or want to read, organize them into collections, and track your progress in each. The app lets you search for books and includes links to purchase them on Amazon or Bookshop.org, which supports local bookstores. You can also import books from Goodreads or The StoryGraph, scan a book’s barcode, or add books manually. Once they’re in your collection, you can mark books as owned or borrowed, or you can wishlist them. Plus, you can add notes, edit a book’s metadata, update the number of pages you’ve read, and mark books as “Reading,” “Finished,” or “Abandoned.” As for organization, you can view your books as a list or a grid and filter and sort by numerous criteria. There’s an impressive amount of depth here for an app that was just recently released.

If you want, you could solely use Book Beats as a book tracker, and it would do a great job, but the music side of the app, which integrates with Apple Music, is what really sets it apart. The app’s Home view is a showcase of its mashup approach to reading. You’ll find sections dedicated to the book you’re reading, books recently added, and playlists you listened to recently.

Book Beats’ Home tab.

You’ll also find curated collections of “Books with a Beat” in the Home tab. These are books that fit a genre especially well. For example, “Static & Emotion” is paired with Alternative Rock and features books like Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Girl, Interrupted, and Fight Club. Other sections of the Home view include a featured album, best-selling books, a daily quote, featured musical artists, and curated book collections. It’s one of the most thoughtfully curated landing pages I’ve come across in any media tracking app, which makes it a valuable place to browse for a new book and musical inspiration.

The Books tab is where you add new books, search and browse your existing collection, and make metadata edits. Tapping on an individual book opens a detail view with more information about your book, including a synopsis, and a list of any collections it belongs to. From here, you can also buy any book you don’t already own and create a playlist once the book is part of your library.

Creating a playlist.

Playlists are generated with the help of AI with a detailed prompt that avoids clichés and repeated songs by one artist. Instead, the prompt is designed to evoke the feeling of the book, invoking its themes, emotional arc, setting, pacing, and character dynamics. I’ve created playlists for a few books I know well, and I was very impressed with what was selected. Not only did the songs fit the material I was reading, but it was also music I just plain liked, drawing from many of my favorite artists. When creating a playlist, you can specify a genre if you’d like and manually add your own tracks, but I’ve found the results were great without doing either of those things.

The Beats tab collects the playlists you’ve created for your books. From here, you can drop right into a listening session, edit a playlist manually, and pick favorites. You can also use this tab to create playlists for any books that don’t have them yet. When a playlist is playing, the app displays basic play controls at the bottom of the screen, similar to what you find in the Music app. Tap on the player, and it fills the screen with an animated spinning record featuring your book’s artwork and song details.

Book Beats’ full-screen player on the iPad.

One thing I’d like to be able to do is create multiple playlists for books, which I don’t think is possible, although you can delete the existing playlist and replace it with a new one. As much as I like the playlists that Book Beats has created, I’d love to be able to create more and longer playlists for books that are going to take a long time to read. I’d also like the ability to open playlist tracks in Apple Music, add them to my Apple Music library, and favorite them, which would help the music side of the app better match its book collecting and tracking depth. The app should also use a number keyboard for tracking pages read instead of a one-page-at-a-time numerical stepper control, even though you can hold the stepper down to increment the page count faster.

Finally, Book Beats offers stats on how many books you’ve read during the year. Sadly, because I’ve only just begun using the app, my stats page is empty.

I read so much on the web for work that I rarely sit down to read a book for fun, but Book Beats might just change that this summer. I don’t have any illusions about freeing up my already busy days, but among the things I’ve been doing over the past few months is setting aside more analog time for myself away from screens. Walks and runs outside have been great, but sitting in the sun with a paperback and some music playing feels like the perfect next step. If books and music are your peanut butter and jelly, check out Book Beats. It’s a wonderful app that captures the best of reading and music in one tight, beautifully designed package.

Book Beats is available on the App Store as a free download. Creating more than three generated playlists and curated collections requires an Encore subscription, which costs $0.99/week, $2.99/month, or $24.99/year.