Books and Reading
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A reading log is one of the few personal records people keep for decades, and it is also one of the most commonly lost. The services that hold them get acquired, change their terms, or close, and the export — when there is one — arrives as a file nothing else reads.
What is here is built the other way round. The library lives in your browser, it works with no network at all, and if you want it on a second device it goes through your own cloud storage rather than through an account we hold. Nothing here recommends a book to you, and nothing here is measuring what you read.
Every tool in Books
What a reading library has to get right
Two books can share a title — and any tool that pretends otherwise will eventually merge two records that are not the same book. There are several novels called Cloud Atlas. So a book here is identified by a short name rather than by its title — suggested from the title and author as you type, and yours to correct the moment two works would collide.
An edition is not a work — and the difference matters as soon as you own two copies of something. The hardback, the paperback and the audiobook are three printings of one book, with three ISBNs between them, and a library that files them as three separate books is one you will spend time correcting.
Reading progress is private — and is kept apart from the record of the book itself. Where you are in something changes every evening; what the book is does not. Keeping the two separate is what lets one be shared one day without dragging the other along with it.
Removing is not forgetting — when a library is spread across devices. If a book leaves your shelf on a phone, the laptop has to learn that it left — an absence tells it nothing, so the removal is recorded rather than simply erased.
Related categories
- Cooking and Kitchen Tools — Recipe Box keeps a collection the same way, for the shelf in the kitchen.
- Writing and Text Tools — Word and character counts, for when you are the one writing rather than reading.
- Free Online Calculators — Date arithmetic, for working out how long a reading goal actually has left.