Live on iOS & Android

The ecosystem
for readers.

Read. Grow. Illuminate.

Somewhere within a few kilometres of you, the book you've been meaning to read is sitting on a stranger's shelf. Read Forward is how the two of you finally meet — and what happens long after you turn the last page.

Download on theApp Store Get it onGoogle Play

iOS & Android Real books, hand to hand Readers a few streets away

A book you loved, read once and shelved forever, is a small tragedy.

Multiply it by every shelf in your city and you have a library the size of a warehouse — locked, unlit, and quietly forgotten.

Read Forward turns the lights on.

The whole of it

The complete reading lifecycle. One ecosystem.

Most reading apps pick a single job and stop there — a catalogue, or a tracker, or a forum. Readers don't live in one of those. You find a book. You finish a book. You keep going. You tell someone. And then it begins again, with the next one. Read Forward is built the way reading actually happens.

Lend & Borrow

Your shelf becomes a lending library the moment you join one. Find the book you want a few streets away, ask for it in a tap, and meet the person who loved it first.

How lending works

Reading Habit

Four pages count. Log them, and the streak holds. What you get back is a calendar filling up with days you chose a book over a screen — and the pull to keep it unbroken.

Keep the streak

Reading & Read

Two shelves, no spreadsheet. What you're on sits at the top. What you've closed stays below — a year of your reading, in one place, growing.

Your shelves

Communities

The club that meets on Saturdays. The campus society. The eight people in your building who all read. Each gets a home — with events, arguments about chapter seven, and a shelf they share.

Bring yours
Lend & Borrow

Your bookshelf, quietly working.

Turn around and count the books you've already finished. Every one of them is doing nothing. Three streets away, someone is putting off buying that exact title. Read Forward puts the two of you in the same room — and it costs you the walk to the café where you hand it over.

  • Nearest first, always. The feed is ranked by real distance, and every card tells you how far — 700 m, not "in your area".
  • Listing takes seconds. Point your camera at the barcode. Cover, author and blurb arrive on their own.
  • Nobody loses a book. A one-time code seals the handover, so both of you always know exactly where it is.
  • Then it keeps going. Finished a borrowed book? Send it straight to the next reader instead of back to the shelf it came from.
Reading Habit

Reading doesn't fail on ambition.
It fails on Tuesdays.

Nobody abandons a book on the first night. It goes quietly, on an ordinary evening, somewhere around page forty. Read Forward's only job is to make the next four pages the easiest thing you do today — and then to show you the receipts, night after night, until stopping feels worse than continuing.

  • One swipe to log. Pages or percentage — whichever way you actually think about a book.
  • A streak you can see. Seven days at a glance, the full month behind it, your longest run marked.
  • Reminders that read the room. Pick your hour. Read before it, and the nudge never arrives.
  • A month, summarised. Days read, pages turned, books closed. Quiet, honest, and nobody's business but yours.
Reading & Read

The year you read, kept in one place.

Ask someone what they read last year and watch them struggle. Not because it didn't matter — because nothing was keeping count. What you're reading now sits at the top. What you've closed stays below, and by December it's a list you'll want to show someone.

1

Open it

Scan, search or type — the book you started tonight is on your shelf in seconds.

2

Keep going

Log the pages. The streak looks after itself, and the app stays out of your way.

3

Close it

Mark it read and it moves across to the shelf of everything you've finished.

4

Let it go

One tap puts a finished book back in circulation, waiting for whoever needs it next.

Communities

Reading is a solitary act.
It was never meant to be a lonely one.

The best part of a book is the hour afterwards, when you find someone who has also read it. Read Forward isn't built only for readers — it's built for the groups they belong to. The Saturday club. The campus society. The neighbourhood library. Each gets a home of its own, and together they become something none of them could be alone: a city of readers who can actually find each other.

  • A home, not a group chat. Members, shelves, and everything your community is reading — in one place that doesn't scroll away by morning.
  • Evenings worth turning up to. Meetups, author sessions, read-alongs and swaps, with RSVPs so you know who's coming.
  • Arguments about chapter seven. Threads that live under the book itself, so the good discussion is still there in a year.
  • Reading as a team sport. Group challenges and shared milestones — because the streak is easier when eighty people are on it with you.
  • A shelf you all own. Members lend to each other first, and the club's books stay in circulation instead of in cupboards.

You already run one of these.

A club, a college society, a library, eight colleagues who keep swapping paperbacks. We're bringing those communities onto Read Forward one at a time, and we'd rather build yours with you than hand you a settings page. Tell us who you are and we'll do the setting up.

Bring your community Get the app first
Start to finish

Four steps, and the first one takes a minute.

From the book on your shelf tonight to the reader who needed it.

1

Put a book up

Scan the barcode on something you've finished. It's visible to readers near you before you've put it back down.

2

Ask for one

Browse what's close, tap request. The person who owns it hears about it straight away.

3

Meet them

Hand it over in person and confirm with a one-time code. That's the whole ceremony.

4

Read it, then let it go

Log your pages, hold your streak, and send the book on to whoever's next.

In-app currency

Generosity, gently kept score of.

LitCoins are what a lending community runs on instead of money. Give a book to someone who needed it and you've earned the right to ask for one back. That's the entire economy — and no real money ever touches it.

  • Earned every time a book of yours ends up in the right hands.
  • Spent when it's your turn to ask.
  • Awarded for finishing a book, and for streaks that hold.
  • Shared — bring a friend in and you both start ahead.

Your next book is already nearby.

It's on a shelf a few streets away, waiting for someone to ask. Join the readers turning a city full of closed books into one open library.

Download on theApp Store Get it onGoogle Play

On iPhone and Android · Read. Grow. Illuminate.