Discover Your Book Tracking Style: 4 Reading Apps to Consider

Tracking the books you read is not a requirement to have an enriching reading life.

However. If you’d like to keep track, take notes, or find your next book, a tracking plan can help. I started years ago by using Goodreads. It was a nice place to be for a long time. I enjoyed being able to see the cover of each book and know when I read them, in part, because I was often sharing book recommendations in my newsletter.

While it seemed harmless at the time, Goodreads does have a gamification element where every year you type in the number of books you’re aiming to read, and then the platform starts reminding you how many books you need to read each month to reach your annual goal. After feeling like this was becoming unhealthy, I needed to come up with a different plan. 

Putting this through a slow writing lens, I realized the urgency wasn’t working for me anymore. 

So, how can we track our reading life in a way that feels supportive and nourishing?

It starts by checking in with your needs.

What do you actually want out of a tracking tool?

Are you someone who really loves getting book recommendations based on your previous reads? Do you want to chat about books with other readers? Maybe you need something super minimalist and don’t want any of the community features at all. Do you want the ability to take notes about the books you read? Do you want to see the covers? Are you motivated by reading reminders?

The first step, as usual, is getting clear on what you’re really looking for. Once you’ve thought a bit about that, it’s time for the experimental phase where you might need to download some apps and play around. I’ve done a bit of this in the past couple of months so I’ll share a few of my findings but as always, encourage you to do your own research too.

Tracking Apps for Your Reading Life

The most basic way to track your reading would be using a note on your phone, or a physical notebook. This is a great option if you want a record of your reads, but don’t want to track anything else related to them. You can also create a spreadsheet if you want a bit more structure, like columns for page counts, assigning a category, or maybe writing in a favorite quote.

As for apps, my favorite one I’ve found so far is called MiniLib. The only downside (at the time of writing) is it’s only available on Apple devices, so if you have an android phone it’s not something you can get yet. But the reason I love it is because it’s so clean and simple. It’s a private, clutter-free app. It also has barcode scanning if you use that, and really no frills. There’s no social element so it’s just “elegant book management” as the brand describes itself. I like that I can still see the book covers but there’s no gamification, no community, and no reading recommendations. It’s just a lovely, simple way to visually track your books.

There’s also another Apple-based app called Margins. This is a really pretty app with an illustrated art style throughout, and how involved you want to be is optional. You can set a daily reading goal or join reading challenges, but you don’t have to. If you want it, there are also book recommendations. You can search by vibe like “books turned into movies” or “messy, hopeful ache of starting over in a new city—I like the level of specificity in some of these categories.There’s a bit more going on than MiniLib, but it’s still a clean and pretty visually pleasing app without a ton of community bells and whistles. 

If community is something you’re interested in, there are two I’d recommend checking out. The first one is Pagebound, and the second one is StoryGraph. Pagebound pitches themselves as if Goodreads and Reddit had a baby, so you can basically have tracking and discussion features all in one place. They’re also big on privacy, which I appreciate. They only have illustrated avatars (so no personal pictures), no data connections to your external social media sites, or phone numbers, anonymous usernames, and no public follower counts.

StoryGraph also has community features, but you have a bit more control to turn them off or on depending on how deep you want to go. The app has reading challenges if you like those, but you can also just track your books without it. If you really like seeing your reading state visually, you might like StoryGraph because they have lots of different graphs and charts available.

How to Start a Commonplace Journal

The last idea I wanted to share today is considering a Commonplace Journal, which is a place to record quotes from books you read. You can also add a reflection or two after the quote.

There’s a wonderful Substack post about this from a newsletter called A Reading Life, but it’s pretty simple in terms of what you need. Just pick a notebook, gather your pens, and choose a structure. You might have an opening page with a quote on it to set an intention for your journal, then the bulk of your notebook will be for collecting the quotes, and the part I think is really interesting is adding an index at the back, so you can eventually find quotes by theme or topic. 

On creating an index, here’s a quote from that post, which says: “The most fascinating part is how the collection has started speaking back to me. As my index grows, it reveals patterns in what catches my attention across authors and genres - themes of belonging, feeling seen, disappointment, solitude and isolation, lost youth. It's becoming a map of my reading mind. Far from being pointless and backwards looking, it is showing me what I actually care about before I’ve had a chance to put my finger on it myself. It honestly feels like magic.”

The good news for modern readers is there are myriad ways to keep a record of the books we read, the passages that inspire us, and the themes we find ourselves drawn to year over year.