On Reading Without Apps
Paper, plain text, and the surprisingly political act of not having a reading tracker.
What you lose when you track what you read, and whether the loss is acceptable.
For several years I used reading tracking software. I logged what I read, noted where I was in each book, kept statistics on pages per day, books per year. The data was accurate. I am not sure it was useful.
Reading trackers solve a specific problem: you have read many books and cannot remember which ones, or where you stopped, or whether you would recommend something you finished two years ago. These are real problems. The tracker handles them reasonably well. What it introduces in exchange is a relationship between you and the reading that involves a third party — the database — whose interests are not the same as yours.
The most visible version of this is the social dimension. Most reading trackers have a public component: you can see what others have read, rate books, write reviews. This is the platform's mechanism for generating content and keeping users engaged. It is not inherently harmful. But it introduces a subtle pressure to read in a particular way — to have opinions that are expressible in stars, to read things that are worth discussing, to finish things you would otherwise abandon because the tracker will notice if you do not.
The subtler version is the quantification pressure. Once you know you are averaging thirty pages a day, you have established a baseline you might exceed or fall below. This is probably fine for some readers. For me, it changed the experience of reading slowly — which I do, frequently, when something is difficult or requires pausing — into a performance against a benchmark. The benchmark was meaningless, but it was there, and I noticed it.
I stopped using reading trackers about eighteen months ago. I now keep a plain text file with titles and dates. No ratings, no reviews, no page counts. What I have found is not that I read more or less, but that I remember differently — less what I read in aggregate and more what individual books left me thinking about. Whether this is better depends on what reading is for. If it is for accumulation of titles, the tracker wins. If it is for the thinking that happens after, the plain text file is sufficient, and the tracker was in the way.