Okay, I'm going to do something super tacky today and use material from a blog post I created for my library's reading program. I've been meaning to blog here about this website for a few weeks and just haven't gotten around to it. However, I would like to point out that this post is a bit different in that I am including personal details that I would never share with my patrons. See. You all are special. :-)
It goes without saying that I read a lot. And as a good little obsessive reader I track what I read. I first started doing this in 1985. At the time my library did not have a summer reading club, so my grandmother decided to run her own. She gave me a small, spiral bound notebook to list the number of books I read over the summer in. At the end of summer I was promised a prize based on the number of books I finished. I read every single book I could get my hands that summer, anticipating a kick ass. While the summer reading prize I received was great (my first boombox and the soundtrack to Purple Rain -- I had the best grandma ever), something strange happened along the way. I became obsessed with tracking what I was reading as well as how much I was reading.
I soon graduated from spiral bound notebooks to loose leaf paper kept in a Trapper Keeper. The Trapper Keeper was my organizational method of choice for quite awhile, until I learned how to track what I was reading with Excel spreadsheets. While all these different methods got the job done, none of them were perfect. So I kept searching for the perfect system. And now, I think I might have found it.
With many apologies to LibraryThing, I think my new favorite website for all things book is aNobii. Although it is smaller than LibraryThing in membership and books listed (for now), its functionality for readers wanting to keep track of the books they have read makes it a much better choice. What makes aNobii so gosh darn great? In addition to allowing you catalog, rate, tag, and comment on the items you add to your shelf, aNobii allows you to track your reading progress. Each time you enter a book into aNobii you can put it into one of five categories:
- Not Started
- Finished
- Reading
- Unfinished
- Reference
In addition to these categories, aNobii also allows you to note the date you finished reading a book. And for those of you who are true book nerds like me, aNobii has a "shelf stats" area that lets you see not only how many books you read in a particular year, but the number of pages you read as well. The nerd in me is going wild at the thought of being able to say, "I bet my page count is bigger than yours."
Another cool option if you are someone who lends a lot of books out, aNobii allows you to not only keep track of who has what book, but it also allows you to automatically send them gentle reminders when they are late in returning books to you.
Setting up an account with aNobii is quick, easy, and best of all free. If you haven't found your ideal method for keeping track of what you are reading, you should definitely give it a try. And if you do try it out, be sure you let me know what you think! :-)
posted by Kelly @ 8:45 AM
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