BookSafe — Press

In brief

As of August 2026 · everything below is cleared for publication

BookSafe is a book manager for iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch: scan books by ISBN, track your reading, keep a wishlist, stay on top of series. What sets it apart from Goodreads and StoryGraph: no account, no tracking, no third-party servers. Data lives on the device and syncs only through the user's own private iCloud.

Built by a family in southern Germany — the father writes the code, the mother proofreads every line, their daughter makes sure the series are right. Particular care goes into German book metadata (Deutsche Nationalbibliothek). Free for up to 50 books, then a one-time €3.99 — no subscription.

Key facts

Name	BookSafe
Tagline	“Your library belongs to you.”
Category	Books (secondary: Productivity)
Platform	iPhone and iPad from iOS 18.0, Apple Watch from watchOS 11.0
Languages	German and English (follows the device language)
Price	Free for up to 50 books — with every feature. “BookSafe Pro” lifts the limit: €3.99, one-time purchase, no subscription
Age rating	4+
Version	1.1
App Store	apps.apple.com/app/booksafe
Developer	Sisofa — a family in southern Germany; not a company, no investors
Press contact	kontakt@sisofa.de

Six core features

Your library belongs to you. No account, no tracking, no third-party servers. Everything lives on the device and syncs only to the user's own private iCloud — the app works offline, too. The App Store privacy label reads, verbatim: Data Not Collected.
Series that finally add up. BookSafe identifies book series and volume numbers from several library catalogues — including the German National Library — and groups them automatically, special volumes such as “book 8.5” included. Missing volumes are visible at a glance and can be added in the edition you prefer.
Add books in seconds. Scan an ISBN with the camera — title, author, cover, publisher, genre and release date arrive automatically. Duplicates are caught before they reach the library, and CSV import handles Goodreads exports.
From reading day to reading year. A “Today” daily page with a quote of the day and yearly goal, reading sessions with a live timer and streak, statistics on genres, pages and years, milestone stamps and a yearly challenge — and at year's end, a year in review as an animated film to share.
Wishlist, countdown and library loans. Save upcoming titles — a widget counts down the days, and on release day the app celebrates with fireworks. Borrowed books can be marked as loans, with a countdown that reminds you before they're due back.
Start from your wrist. The currently-reading list runs on Apple Watch too: tap, and the reading session starts — even with no iPhone in range; the watch remembers everything and syncs up later on its own. At the end, set the closing page with the crown, and progress and reading time land in the statistics.

New in 1.1: Apple Watch — reading sessions can be started and stopped straight from the wrist, even with no iPhone in range.

Privacy — the facts

App Store privacy label: “Data Not Collected.”
No user account, no sign-up, no email address required.
No analytics SDK, no ad network, no third-party frameworks in the app.
No in-app review prompt — a deliberate decision.
Sync runs through Apple's CloudKit in the user's private iCloud database. The developer has no access to it.
Outgoing connections happen only when looking up book metadata and cover art — they carry the ISBN, never a user identifier.
Export any time as CSV or PDF.

A note for quoting: BookSafe is not “end-to-end encrypted”, and as of 1.0 it is no longer “fully offline” either. The accurate phrasing is: no third-party servers, only your own private iCloud, works offline.

About us

BookSafe was built at a kitchen table, not at a company. The father has been working on the app in his spare time since May 2026 — though on his own it would not have become what it is.

The mother proofreads every line: store copy, app text, the hundred-plus quotes of the day. She finds the mistakes nobody else does. The daughter collects book series and reports every single volume filed in the wrong place — the fact that series detection gets even special volumes like “book 8.5” right is down to her standards. The wishlist with its release-day fireworks was her idea, too. And in this family, the question of which ideas are worth showing is not answered by the developer.

“There is no account and no tracking, and that was never a product decision — it was a family decision. Our daughter's reading list is nobody's business but hers, including ours if she'd rather keep it that way. So it stays on her device and in our own iCloud, nowhere else.”
— Sisofa

BookSafe is not a company: no team, no investors, no ad revenue. The app is written entirely in Swift and SwiftUI with zero third-party dependencies; most of the care goes into the book-metadata detection.

A note for press: The family appears publicly as Sisofa; we do not publish the names of the mother and daughter and do not arrange interviews with them. We are happy to answer questions about their contributions ourselves at kontakt@sisofa.de.

Assets

All materials may be used freely in editorial coverage of BookSafe.

Press information on a single page

BookSafe-Press-Onepager.pdf — A4, one page, selectable text. Key facts, core features and privacy facts at a glance.
BookSafe-Press-Onepager.png — the same sheet as an image (2382 × 3369 px). German edition: PDF · PNG