One maker, a shelf of small apps.
The Book is an independent studio. It makes focused apps that each keep one kind of record, and it publishes plain guides to the subjects those apps cover.
What gets made here
Eleven apps stand on the shelf today. Some keep a personal record: a dating journal, a household's chores, a decade of listening history. Some help with a money decision: which card to use, whether a used car is fairly priced, how savings are spread across accounts. Three serve people who rent or host, and two are reference works, one on lottery statistics and one on the rights of people who receive Home and Community-Based Services. The front page describes each of them.
Every app is named for what it is. A book is something you own, keep on your own shelf and can still open in ten years, and that is the standard each one is built to.
How the apps are built
- Your record lives on your device first. Wherever an app can do its whole job without an account, it does. Sync is something you switch on when you want a second device or a second person.
- Private writing is encrypted before it leaves. In the apps that hold personal entries, the key is made on your device and is never sent, so the sync service stores text it cannot read. The guide on what encrypted really means explains the difference this makes.
- Answers come from rules and sources, not guesses. Where an app gives a figure, such as the odds of a prize or a deadline in a statute, it shows where the figure comes from so that it can be checked.
Why there are guides
Building an app that scores a used-car listing means first working out what makes a used car worth its price. Building one that drafts a deposit letter means reading the deposit rules. The guides are that groundwork, written up so that it is useful to someone who never opens the app. They are free, they need no sign-in, and they are corrected when they are found to be wrong.
Guides on money, renting, law and gambling carry a note saying what they are not: none of them is legal, financial or investment advice, and the lottery guides are plain that every draw is independent and that no method of choosing numbers improves the odds.
How it is paid for
Most of the apps are free to use on one device. Some sell an upgrade, such as sync between devices or a shared team, and two are sold as one-time purchases. The reading pages of this site, the guides and the lottery statistics, carry advertising served by Google. The apps themselves hold your records and carry none. Privacy on this site explains what the advertising uses and how to opt out of personalised ads.
Who makes it
The Book is the work of one developer, who designs, writes and supports all of it. That is why the apps share a way of working, and why a fix found in one of them is carried to the others.
Contact
Questions, corrections, bug reports and requests go to support@thebook.ltd. A person reads every message. If something in a guide is wrong, say which page and what you believe is correct, and it will be checked and fixed.