Slowburn Get Slowburn
A window seat on a rainy night: a velvet throw, an embossed leather-bound book, a candle and the city lights beyond the glass.

The app

A reading journal that gets you.

Track your reads. Capture what they did to you. Discover your patterns. Your journal stays on your phone. No account required.

Get Slowburn

Coming to the App Store and Google Play. iPhone first.

Read

A shelf that looks like a shelf.

Every book stands spine-out on a shelf that fills as you read. Ribbons hang from the books you’re inside, tinted from wine to flame by the latest burn. At five, twelve, twenty-five, fifty and a hundred books, the shelf earns a name.

Add a book by searching, by scanning its barcode, or by typing it in. A book without a page count simply tracks in percent.

The Slowburn shelf: rows of book spines with coloured ribbons marking progress.

The journal, in your words.

Status, rating, spice, tropes, moods, the line you keep, the private note nobody else reads. Nothing is suggested to you. Progress is a page or a percent: not a timer, not a streak. No account, no sign-up: the journal is a database on your phone, and all of it works without a signal.

It speaks romance: thirty-eight tropes and an Other… for the ones it has no word for yet, a spice scale with its own vocabulary, DNF with a cause of death, and, with the launch release, content notes — what you noticed was in a book, private, in your own words where you want them.

A reading journal open on a desk: pressed flowers and clippings between handwritten pages, a fountain pen, a candle and a stack of clothbound books.
A book's journal page: tropes, moods, a line from it, a private note.

Starting

You don’t have to start over.

With the launch release, Slowburn reads your Goodreads or StoryGraph export on your phone. Ratings, dates and shelves come across; the Burn, spice, tropes and moods start from here, because inventing them would put numbers in your Stats you never gave. Your export file never leaves your phone.

Or add a few recent reads in a minute, or simply start with the book in your hands. An empty shelf offers all three.

Private.Local.Exportable.Yours.

With the launch release, everything in your journal exports as one JSON file, or your books as a spreadsheet, from Settings, through your phone’s own share sheet. Your journal is a database on this phone; the company cannot read it. You choose what you share.

The Burn

A candle burned nearly to its end beside a closed book with an oxblood ribbon.

A rating tells you how it ended.
The Burn remembers how it felt getting there.

One dial. Five flames. As often as you read.

Cooling. Warm. Burning. Feral. Ruined. Tap the flame that matches how badly the book has you, whenever you pick it up. Slowburn keeps every tap and draws the curve: the slow build, the chapter that ruined you, the cooling after.

When you finish, the curve is named — slow burn, wildfire, flicker, steady, cooled — and becomes a card. The card carries the shape. Never a word you wrote.

The Burn dial with the fifth flame lit and the word Ruined, above a curve of five nights with one book.
A finished book's Burn card, named slow burn, with its curve beside a candle.

Understand

The Stats tab: your reading identity in four shares, the spice gap, mood and trope profiles.

Your reading, read back to you.

Your mood profile, your trope profile, and the spice gap between what you say you want and what you actually finish. Free, and untouched by the paywall.

Reading Identity

Ten insights, each a plain function of your journal: what you reach for, what ruins you, how long you take, how you burn. Every insight says how many books it rests on, and what it still needs before it speaks. No AI, no personality test. One insight is free; Premium opens the rest.

Compare

Enemies-to-lovers against slow burn. Five-star reads against DNFs. Segments built from your own shelf; a verdict only when something genuinely separates the two.

A Reading Identity card: The Held Breath, with heat, pace, what you fall for and a fatal weakness.

Monthly Post-Mortem

A dossier, not a dashboard. The body count. Your type. Structural damage. The one that ruined you. The disappointment. Each numbered section appears only when your month can support it. The opening is free; Premium reads the whole file.

The Monthly Post-Mortem: a proper month, eight books, and the month's numbers over a candle and a rose.

Connect

Two leather armchairs facing each other under a brass reading lamp, an open book and two glasses of wine on the small table between them.

A few people you chose. A book read together.

Circle. People you invited one at a time. No public profiles, no followers, no feed. A handle separate from your journal, and only what you hand over: a book, a verdict, a month. Protect it with Apple or Google so it survives a new phone.

Buddy Reads. One person from your circle, one book, two positions. Notes are sealed at the page you leave them and open for the other reader only when their own progress gets there.

Sharing. A review, an identity, a month, a burn: each renders as a card and goes to your phone’s own share sheet. You choose what you share, field by field.

Starting a circle: choosing a handle that is separate from the journal.
A Buddy Read invitation and two readers' positions on the same page bar.

Make it yours

Seven card families. One is free.

Every card the app makes for you — a review, an identity, a month, a burn — is printed on one of these. One layout, one typeface; what changes is the material. Midnight comes with the journal; the other six come with Premium.

Midnight Free A candle, a crown of roses, the dark. The free family.

  • The Reading Identity card in the Midnight family: A candle, a crown of roses, the dark. The free family.
    Midnight
  • The Reading Identity card in the Oxblood family: Candlelight on dark wood and dried roses.
    Oxblood
  • The Reading Identity card in the Ember family: A fire, caught mid-spark.
    Ember
  • The Reading Identity card in the After Dark family: Black water and a single petal.
    After Dark
  • The Reading Identity card in the Moonlit family: Blue night, a shaft of moon.
    Moonlit
  • The Reading Identity card in the Marginalia family: Paper, pressed flowers, ink.
    Marginalia
  • The Reading Identity card in the Velvet family: Crushed velvet in oxblood.
    Velvet

And on your home screen.

One widget, two sizes, iPhone and Android: your current read, where you are in it, the line you saved, and how it’s burning. Tap it and you’re back on the page.

Shape Slowburn. Every reader sees what’s being considered, in the works and shipped. Premium readers vote and send their own ideas. The board is public.

The medium widget: the book's cover with a ribbon, its title and author, a saved line, page position, the burn, and when it was last read.
The small widget: a flame, the book's title and author, the page position, and the burn.

Free

Your complete reading journal.

  • Unlimited books and the whole journal
  • The shelf, search, the barcode scanner
  • Reading progress, the Burn
  • Basic Stats and one Reading Identity insight
  • The opening of every Monthly Post-Mortem
  • Reminders and the widget
  • Circle and Buddy Reads, in full
  • Review, Burn and Identity cards in the Midnight family
  • Reading the Shape Slowburn board
  • Import from Goodreads and StoryGraph (launch release)
  • Export as JSON or a spreadsheet (launch release)
  • Every privacy and safety feature

Premium

Deeper interpretation of your reading life.

  • The full Reading Identity, all ten insights
  • Compare: the verdict and the full table
  • The complete Monthly Post-Mortem, and the month as a card
  • Six premium card families
  • A vote on Shape Slowburn, and your own ideas on the board

Fourteen days free. Annual or monthly. No lifetime plan. Nothing about privacy or safety is behind the paywall. Pricing

Get Slowburn

Get Slowburn

Coming to the App Store and Google Play. iPhone first.

Questions? Or read the support page.