A reading diary that fits in one tap
Most reading diaries die at the third book, and the reason is rarely a lack of will: it is that logging costs too much. Here the cost is a search and a tap. The book goes into your want-to-read queue, and when you finish, the same screen asks for the date, the rating and the two lines of what you thought.
While you are reading, the book sits in progress, neither queued nor archived. It sounds like a detail and it is not: a "want to read" list that includes the book currently open on your nightstand stops describing reality within a week, and a list that does not describe reality stops being consulted.
Collections are yours and follow no rule: by genre, by author, by "bought at the book fair", by year. They exist because a two-hundred-book shelf sorted only by date answers none of the questions anyone actually asks about their own shelf.
Where the books come from, and what that changes for you
The catalog is Open Library, the Internet Archive's open collection. It is public, has no quota and covers editions in many languages, including Brazilian ones, which commercial catalogs tend to ignore or list only in their English translation.
That has a practical consequence worth knowing: Open Library is collaborative, so quality varies. A classic arrives with cover, synopsis, publisher and page count; a small release may arrive with nothing but title and author. When a cover is missing, the app draws a block with the type's icon instead of showing a broken image.
The app looks for the edition in YOUR language before falling back to the canonical one. Without that, searching for a book in Portuguese returns the American cover and the English title, which is the same work and does not look like the book in your hands.
Where one exists, the link goes to the edition's page, where the buying and library paths live. NextWish does not sell books and is not affiliated with any bookstore.
Reading does not live apart from everything else
Most reading apps only know about books, and that is where they push you into a second app for movies and a third for games. NextWish starts from the opposite idea: one profile holds books, movies, series, music, games and products, with the same ratings and the same collections.
That changes what the profile says about you. A shelf of a hundred books tells one part; the same shelf next to what that person watched and played in the same year tells another, and it is the one friends actually comment on.
Achievements follow the same logic: they exist per type, so reading has its own ladder, and there are ones only people who move between universes reach. The ranking among the people you follow adds it all up.
Reading is slow, and the app has to live with that
A film lasts two hours and a book lasts weeks. That sounds like a detail and it is what separates a reading app that survives from one that gets abandoned: if the only possible transition is from "want to read" to "read", your list is wrong for the entire time you are reading, which is most of the time.
That is why the in-progress state exists and is first-class: the book leaves the queue the day you open it, without pretending it is done. What is in progress appears in its own section on the type screen, and it is the first thing you see when you walk in.
The date that gets saved is the one you FINISHED on, and you can change it. That matters for anyone logging a book weeks after closing it: the right date is the day you finished, not the day you remembered to write it down, and a diary with wrong dates stops serving the one thing it does well, which is remembering.
At the end of the year all of it becomes a recap: how much you read, what you liked most, how the year compares with the one before. It exists because the reason to keep a diary is being able to look back, and looking back must not be work.