BookFly
Support
Help with BookFly
Most questions are one of the six below. If yours is not, write to support@itworkedsystems.com and a person will answer.
Getting a good scan
Two things fix almost every disappointing result.
- Stand square to the shelf rather than off to one side. Spines photographed at an angle overlap each other and hide their own lettering.
- Get close enough that one shelf fills the frame. A whole bookcase in one photograph gives each spine too few pixels to read.
Beyond that: avoid direct glare across the spines, and photograph one shelf at a time rather than trying to capture everything at once. You can add several photographs to a single scan.
It found fewer books than are on the shelf
The count is a floor, not an estimate. Whatever number you were shown before paying, the list you receive has at least that many rows. If a spine could not be read at all it arrives as a row you can fill in yourself, rather than quietly going missing.
Books lying flat, pushed behind others, or with blank spines are the usual cause. Photograph the shelf again from straight on and add it to the scan.
Non-English spines
English titles come back most reliably. Turkish and other Latin-script languages are read reasonably well but can come back transliterated inconsistently. Cyrillic is read poorly and Russian titles are often missed. This is a known limitation and it is being worked on. Any book that is missed or wrong can be corrected by hand, and the correction sticks.
Fixing a book that came back wrong
Tap the book, then edit the title or author. Corrections are permanent and a later rescan will not undo them.
A row BookFly could not identify, if you leave it unnamed when the scan is filed, waits on the library's Needs a look page under Not added yet, with a crop of its spine, so that a book you own is never silently dropped. Tap one and type what it is.
A book has the wrong cover
Covers come from Open Library, matched on the title and the author. A cover shows whichever edition Open Library has, which may not be your copy, and now and then it is another book altogether. Tap the book and choose Remove cover, or fix its title or author, which looks for its cover again. A book Open Library has no cover for keeps the plain cover BookFly draws for it. To have no covers at all, turn off Book covers in Settings.
Subscriptions and billing
| Question | Answer |
|---|---|
| What is free? | Counting the books in a shelf photograph, adding books by hand, and keeping your library: browsing, editing, lending, covers from Open Library, a wishlist, goals and their reminders, backing up and exporting |
| What is paid? | With either plan: naming the books in a photograph, of a shelf or of one book, and weekly picks. BookFly + Chat, the higher plan, adds Chat, for questions about the books you own |
| Do I keep my library if I cancel? | Yes. The books, the shelves and the list stay on your phone and stay yours |
| How do I cancel? | iPhone Settings, tap your name, then Subscriptions. At least a day before it renews |
| Refunds | Apple handles all payments and refunds: reportaproblem.apple.com |
I paid and it says I have not
Tap Restore a purchase on the paywall. That asks Apple directly what you own, which is authoritative. If it still does not appear, make sure you are signed into the same Apple Account that made the purchase, then write to us with the date and we will sort it out.
Moving to a new phone
BookFly does not sync, deliberately, because there is no account and nothing of yours sits on a server. Moving phones goes through a file.
- On the old phone: open the Settings tab and tap Back up library. It writes a single file containing your library: books, states, dates, loans, notes and any edition details, along with your wishlist and the weekly picks you marked Not for me.
- Put it wherever you like: Files, AirDrop, email it to yourself.
- On the new phone: open the file, and BookFly imports it.
Books waiting under Not added yet on the Needs a look page are not in the backup, so add the ones you want to your library before you move. Covers are not in it either: the new phone fetches them again from Open Library.
Edition details are never sent to BookFly's server or to an AI company. They are kept on the phone, and the backup and the spreadsheet carry them.
Export is the only copy of your library that exists off the phone. If you would mind losing it, export it now rather than the day you drop the phone. Nobody can recover it for you, because nobody else ever had it.
Privacy
There is no account and almost nothing leaves your phone. The details, including exactly what is sent and when, are on the privacy page.
Still stuck
Write to support@itworkedsystems.com. Telling us your iOS version and what you expected to happen makes it much faster. If a scan went wrong, the photograph helps most of all, and it will only be used to work out what happened.