Match BookFor iPhone · Free
Your favourite books have a pattern
Match Book finds it — then finds more like it. Not “readers also liked”: it reads the books you gave five stars, works out what they have in common across fifteen dimensions, and goes looking for that.
No account · No subscription · No Match Book server
How it works
Three steps, then you’re reading
Import your library
One CSV export from Goodreads. The app walks you through getting it, which is fiddlier on a phone than it ought to be — so it tells you exactly where to tap.
Get your reading DNA
Match Book reads your five-star shelf and draws what your taste actually looks like. Most people find at least one thing about themselves they hadn’t noticed.
Find books that fit
Every suggestion is checked against a public catalogue before you see it, so you never get sent after a book that doesn’t exist.
Your theme
Fifteen dimensions of you
Genre, mood, pace, tone, length, when and where it’s set, how it’s narrated, what era it’s from, how well known it is, series or standalone, its themes, how it ends, and who wrote it.
Your taste is drawn as a fifteen-spoke web — the further out a spoke reaches, the more consistent you are on it. Tap any spoke to see what it measures and where you sit. Two readers’ webs are drawn the same way, so they’re worth comparing.
Dials & spin
Turn one dial. Same you, new territory
Matching your taste exactly gets you more of what you already love. Sometimes that’s the point. Sometimes it isn’t.
Nudge a single dial — longer, darker, further from home — and everything else stays yours. Or spin the wheel and let it flip your strongest preferences on purpose, which is how people find the book they’d never have picked up.
Alerts
A new book fits? You’ll know
Match Book can watch for new releases from the authors and corners you love, and tell you when one lands that genuinely fits your theme.
The check runs on your phone. There is no push server, so no notification you receive has been seen by anyone else — and alerts only fire for a strong match, not for everything published that week.
Pricing
No subscription. Ever
Match Book is free, with no in-app purchases. Working out what a book is actually like takes a language model, and that costs real money per book — so rather than charge you monthly to cover it, you bring your own key and pay your provider directly.
Reading a whole library costs roughly 30 cents, once. Each round of matches after that is a few cents. Most people spend under a dollar a month.
You’ll need a key from OpenAI — it takes a few minutes, and the support page walks through it. You can explore the app with the built-in sample library first.
Privacy
No account. No server.
There is no login and no Match Book server. Your library, your ratings and your theme are stored on your device, and we could not look at your reading if we wanted to — none of it ever comes to us.
To read your books, the app sends book details to OpenAI under your own key — but only after showing you exactly what gets sent and asking first. You can change your mind in Settings at any time.
No analytics, no advertising SDKs, no crash reporting, no tracking of any kind. Your API key is held in the iOS Keychain and sent only to the provider you chose.
Changing phones? Export one backup file — library, theme and all the book analysis — and restore it on the new device, so you never pay to work the same books out twice. The full detail is in the privacy policy.
Before you start
What you’ll need
A Goodreads library
With books you've rated — it's the ratings that make the whole thing work.
Your own AI key
From OpenAI. A few minutes to set up, cents to run.
An iPhone
iOS 16 or later. There's no iPad or Android version yet.
Stop reading the algorithm’s books
Free, private, and built for people whose taste doesn’t fit neatly into a genre.