MySchoolReads

Breakfast Frog

About this app

Where it all began - https://myschoolreads.com
Our sister is a primary school teacher. Like most classroom teachers, she had built up a collection of books she loved lending to her pupils — because she knew that getting the right book into the right child's hands at the right moment could make all the difference to a young reader.

The problem was keeping track of it all. Which pupil had which book? Which children had read what over the course of the year? When she started looking for a classroom book lending app to help, she found plenty of options — but every single one had the same frustrating barrier to entry: before you could get started, you had to generate your own barcodes and stick them onto every individual book in your collection.

For a school library with a dedicated librarian and admin time, that's manageable. For a primary school teacher running a busy classroom, it's simply not realistic. The tools that existed were designed for libraries, not classrooms — and the difference matters.

The idea that changed everything
The solution, once we saw it, was obvious: every published book already has an ISBN barcode printed on its back cover. Publishers put it there. It identifies the book uniquely. There was no reason to replace it with a custom label — you just needed a classroom library system built to use it.

So we built MySchoolReads. Scan the barcode already on the book, and it's instantly in the system — title, author, cover image and all. No stickers, no labelling sessions, no specialist hardware. A teacher can catalogue their entire classroom library in a single sitting and start lending books to pupils the same day.
We built it first for our sister. Then we realised that if her classroom had this problem, every primary school classroom probably did. So we turned it into a product, and we're sharing it with teachers everywhere.

What’s new

Improved our book viewing and device compatibility.