Interesting that you also track reading speed. My speed differential between different types of of books always surprises me a bit. Usually it's something like, "Wait, I'm only 20% through this book and I've been reading it for two months?"

That reading speed (in words / day) is mostly a byproduct of wanting to track start/end dates and a word count, so I get speed "for free". I don't actually look at it much, but it's an interesting proxy for "rough interest level".

It is funny how much variation there is between books/genres though! The sentence complexity and variety definitely comes into play here.

Hey David! It's Taylor from https://taylor.town

For those who don't know, @schmudde runs a blog called Beyond the Frame: https://schmud.de

He also has an excellent Strange Loop talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SU6NvkkF4Xk

Neat! Thanks for that context.

also curious how you track your reading speed? any tools or process that works for you?

Great site. Would be cool to pull your Airtable data into Gatsby and render it on your site!

Thank you!

I've thought about it. Honestly the most likely thing is that I'll make a standalone site for media reviews and consolidate everything. That's what I did for this (https://github.com/xavdid/kerfuffle; currently offline) and I was very pleased with the result. ".review" is a TLD, so I spin it up under something there. :)

Hey I love your reading tracking, care to share your tracking / reading process? Any reason you use airtable over, say, Goodreads?

Thank you for the kind words!

I find the Goodreads UI _incredibly_ busy. Here's what I saw when I logged in just now: https://cdn.zappy.app/76d7cba6b409f0aa9310214401d11db9.png

It's nice to see what my friends are reading, but it's always trying to recommend me books, sell me things, etc. It makes sense (it's why Amazon bought them) but it I found it mostly got in the way of what I wanted out of it- a spreadsheet with pre-filled information. Also it's dumb, but I wanted to rate books on a 4-point scale, and theirs is out of 5.

I used to use a gSheet for this (with columns for title, author, day start/end, and review), but I wanted a way to source rich info. So I combined Zapier, the google books API, and an npm package I wrote to count the words in an epub (https://github.com/xavdid/epub-wordcount/) and fed all that info into Airtable. It sounds like a lot of work, but I set it up years ago and it's been happily humming along.

Now I have exactly the tracking system I want, and it's not at the whim of decisions on any product roadmaps.