NetGalley Shelf

NetGalley LLC

About this app

NetGalley Shelf is a reading and listening app for NetGalley members. NetGalley helps publishers and authors promote digital review copies and audiobooks to book advocates and industry professionals. Publishers make digital review copies and audiobooks available for the NetGalley community to discover, request, read, and review.

NetGalley does not sell any content, including books or audiobooks. Each book on NetGalley is provided to specific members by the publisher directly, at no cost to the NetGalley member. Books on the NetGalley site are used for review and promotional purposes only.

Users of the NetGalley Shelf app will need to register as NetGalley members on NetGalley.com or NetGalley.co.uk, then all your approved NetGalley books and audiobooks will automatically appear in this app. No need to press Download on the NetGalley website!

Reading is easy and convenient using the NetGalley Shelf app. Download approved books for access on the go, or start listening right away with streaming for audiobooks.

Ratings and reviews

From a reader standpoint its extremely flawed. For starters, you can't get the app on a Kindle Fire. And for some reason, you can't send books to Kindle anymore. You can only download them to read within their app; which has no visual (disability) accommodations. The dashboard and layout are not well conceived. It doesn't tell me when reviews are due, nor does it allow me to submit the reviews, so I still have to use their website for the pertinent functions.

As someone who primarily consumes audiobooks, I'm immediately taken aback that I can't customize the audio speed beyond the 0.25 presets (eg. 0.75x, 1.0x, 1.25x, etc). I'm someone who vacillates between 1.0-1.25, usually 1.10 and 1.15, so 1.25 is a little too fast on average. Since audiobooks are becoming increasingly more popular, there is a distinct advantage to catering to a more nuanced experience for reviewers. I'd love to see this updated for more audio speed control, please!

The only issue I have with this app is that the audiobooks generally go past 100% and are actually longer than the app lists them as. All audiobooks I listen to get to 100%, then continue for another 30-60 minutes, ending at 112%, 106%, etc. It makes it hard to gauge how long I actually have left in the book. Other than that, I have not run into the issues that have been mentioned by other reviews. The app works as intended, minus my one annoyance.

What’s new

Small improvements and bug fixes