Booklore — Privacy Policy

Effective date: 21 August 2026

Booklore is built to be private by design. We do not collect, store, transmit, or sell your personal data.

Our permanent commitment

Three promises govern everything below, and they are the ones we intend to keep for as long as Booklore exists — whatever the app costs, and whatever it looks like:

1. Your library stays on your device. The books on your shelves, your ratings, reviews, notes, quotes, reading progress, sessions, and goals are stored on your phone. We operate no server that could hold a copy of them. The one exception is the optional iCloud backup you start yourself, which goes to your Apple account — never to us.
2. We never sell your reading, and never share it with anyone. Not to a data broker, not to an advertiser, not to anybody.
3. We never build a profile of you. What you read is not used to target, score, categorise, or follow you — inside Booklore or anywhere else.

Anything we change in the future has to fit inside those three promises. If something ever could not, we would not ship it.

What we collect

Nothing. Booklore has no account system. We operate no server and receive no analytics about you or your reading. Your library — the books on your shelves, your ratings, reviews, reading progress, goals, and preferences — is stored on your device, and the only copy that can ever exist anywhere else is one you create yourself with the optional iCloud backup described below, which goes to your own Apple account rather than to us.

Advertising

This version of Booklore shows no advertising and links no advertising or analytics SDK of any kind. The book-search and cover-lookup requests described below are the only network activity the app has, and they exist to answer the one lookup you asked for — not to serve or measure ads.

Booklore is free, and we would rather tell you plainly how it might stay that way than make a promise we cannot guarantee for every future version. If Booklore ever does show advertising, all three commitments above still hold: your library would not be uploaded, read, shared, or used to choose what you see, and we would not let an advertiser build a profile of your reading. We would update this page with a new effective date before any such version reaches you, and the App Store privacy label would be updated to match. What we will not do is quietly turn your reading into ad targeting data.

Book search

When you search for a book to add, the exact text you typed — or the ISBN you scanned — is sent as a search query directly from your device to Open Library (operated by the non-profit Internet Archive), which is queried first. If Open Library returns no result, the same search text is sent as a fallback to the Google Books API, operated by Google. When Booklore shows a cover image, it downloads that one cover from whichever of those two services supplied it, then stores the image on your device so it is never requested again for that book; you can turn cover downloads off entirely, or delete the stored covers, in Settings → Cover art. Nothing else about your library ever leaves your device for this: not your shelves, ratings, reviews, notes, reading sessions, or any book other than the one you are actively searching for or fetching a cover for. Booklore attaches no account, no advertising identifier, and no Booklore-generated identifier to these requests — we do not run a server of our own for search or covers, so we never see, log, or store any of it ourselves.

Book data returned by these searches — titles, authors, cover art, and related metadata — is supplied by Open Library and, as a fallback, by Google Books; both remain the property of their respective sources and publishers.

What we can and cannot promise about the provider's side of that request. We do not control Open Library's or Google's own servers, and we have no way to verify or guarantee what either one logs internally when it receives your search. Open Library publishes API usage guidelines describing its service as intended for real-time, human-facing lookup rather than bulk data collection, but it does not publish a guarantee that individual search queries are discarded rather than logged. Google's own privacy policy states plainly that Google collects and retains information such as IP address, request details, and search terms in its server logs as part of operating its services, and that this data is handled under Google's privacy policy, not ours. We are not able to prove that either provider deletes or never logs your search text — so we are not going to claim that here. What we can say, and stand behind, is that Booklore itself sends only the single search term or cover request needed to answer your one lookup, attaches nothing that identifies you as a Booklore user, and never receives, stores, or has access to anything the provider may keep on its own systems.

Apple's App Store privacy label for Booklore currently reads "Data Not Collected," which describes data collected by Pixels512 — and Pixels512 collects none. It is not a statement about what a third-party lookup provider may independently log when it receives a request your device sends it. If that distinction needs to be reflected more explicitly in the App Store's own data-type disclosures, that is a listing-level fix outside this page, and we flag it rather than paper over it here.

Aside from this book-search and cover-lookup traffic and the optional iCloud backup described below, Booklore makes no network requests — everything else works with the device offline.

Barcode scanning

If you choose to add a book by scanning its barcode, Booklore uses Apple's built-in AVFoundation framework. The scan runs entirely on your device: the camera image is never uploaded, and Booklore never stores photographs. No third-party SDK is involved in barcode scanning — it is handled by iOS itself.

iCloud backup

Booklore can back your library up to your own iCloud account, and it only ever does so when you ask it to from Settings. The backup is written to Apple's iCloud key-value store under your Apple ID, so it can be restored on a device you sign in to. Pixels512 runs no server, holds no copy, and has no way to read that backup — it lives in your Apple account, under Apple's terms, not ours. If you never use the backup or restore buttons, nothing is written to iCloud at all. Deleting the app or clearing its iCloud data removes it.

Your data stays yours

You can export your entire library to a CSV file at any time, and you can delete any book — or your whole library — directly in the app. Apart from the optional iCloud backup described above, which goes to your own Apple account, nothing is kept on any server — because Pixels512 does not run one.

In-app purchases

This version of Booklore has no in-app purchases and no subscriptions — every feature is free, and no payment information is ever requested or handled. If that ever changes, no payment details would reach us in any case: Apple handles App Store payments, and we would never see your card.

Children

Booklore does not collect data from anyone, including children, and is suitable for all ages.

Changes

If this policy changes, the updated version will be posted on this page with a new effective date. Where a change would affect what happens to your data, we will post it before the version that makes the change is released.

Contact

Questions? Email suasion.78.hymn@icloud.com.

Get Booklore

Booklore is a free download for iPhone (iOS 15.0+).