Parents' Guide to Bookmate. Books and audiobooks

If you're looking for an app to help you manage your reading and listening list, keep looking. Even with a paid subscription, the selection in Bookmate. Books and audiobooks is pretty limited, and searches for common books (like recent bestsellers or major titles like Harry Potter) come up short. Instead, these searches more often result in a list of tangentially related items, like podcasts, fanfic, and unauthorized biographies. It's not clear where this content is coming from. There's a decent selection of public-domain classics, but it's not clear how or why this selection of books and audiobooks and podcasts turns up here. If a book doesn't show up in a search, the app mystifyingly invites users to upload the book on their own, which seems like an odd thing to expect from users who are looking for new books in the first place. Perhaps most importantly, as an e-reader, it's is actually pretty hard to use: It's surprisingly tricky to get the navigation menus to appear on screen while you're reading a book.

Finally, this app feels uncomfortable from a privacy perspective. Unless you choose to read privately, your book shelves and reading history are shared by default, both with other users and with publishers whose content appears on the platform. Overall, look elsewhere for an app to effectively find and enjoy digital media.