1 January 2026 · Book Assembly Team · 6 min read
Every January, the posts start appearing. "My goal is 52 books this year - one a week!" "I managed 100 books in 2025, aiming for 120!" Screenshots of Goodreads stats 📊, carefully cropped. The humble brag disguised as a reading goal.
Good for them, I suppose. But I find myself scrolling past, slightly irritated, unable to articulate exactly why.
It's not jealousy. I don't actually want to read 100 books a year. I want to read good books, at whatever pace makes sense for each one. A 200-page novella isn't the same as a 900-page epic. A book that changes how you think isn't the same as one you've already forgotten. But they all count as "one book" in the annual tally.
The metric rewards speed over depth, quantity over impact. And most reading trackers are built entirely around this number. They'll show you a bar chart of books per month. They'll calculate your average rating to two decimal places. They'll gamify the whole thing with badges and challenges.
None of this actually helps anyone read more, or better. It's data without insight. Numbers that look good on a year-end Instagram post but don't change anything about how you read.
The stats I find myself wishing for are different.
I don't need to know that I read 12 books in March. I need to know that I read fastest between 9pm and midnight, and that I barely retain anything before coffee.
This isn't vanity metrics. It's useful. If I know my peak reading hours, I can protect them. I can stop pretending I'll read during my lunch break (I won't) and start blocking off Tuesday evenings (I will).
Most trackers don't capture when you log progress. They just know the date. But the difference between "I read 30 pages on Thursday" and "I read 30 pages on Thursday at 10pm on my phone" is the difference between data and insight.
I DNF very few books - I'm stubborn like that. Probably too stubborn. I'll push through 200 pages of something I'm not enjoying just to see if it improves. It usually doesn't.
But here's what I'd love to know about the books I do abandon: what's the pattern?
If I'm DNFing 60% of literary fiction but finishing 95% of sci-fi, that's useful information. That's not a reading problem - that's a book selection problem. Maybe I should stop buying Booker nominees because they sound impressive and start trusting what I actually enjoy.
Most trackers treat DNF as a shameful non-event. You mark it and move on. But there's signal in that data. How far do I typically get before giving up? Page 50? Page 150? Are there authors I keep trying and keep bouncing off?
The pattern matters more than the individual decision.
"You read 25 pages per day on average."
Right. Meaningless.
I don't read a 200-page thriller at the same pace as a 600-page history of the Byzantine Empire. Averaging them together tells me nothing useful.
What I want is pace by genre, or better yet, pace by book characteristics. Dense non-fiction with footnotes? Maybe 15 pages an hour. YA fantasy? 60 pages an hour. That's not a judgment - it's just how my brain works.
With this data, "estimated time to finish" stops being a generic calculation and starts being personalised. Not "at the average reading speed of 250 words per minute, you have 8 hours left." But "based on how you read books like this, you'll probably finish Tuesday."
Goodreads makes re-reads awkward. You can log them, but they feel like second-class citizens - afterthoughts to the "real" reading.
But re-reading is a signal of love. If I've read The Name of the Wind three times, that tells you more about my taste than a 5-star rating ever could. A book I return to is a book that's become part of my mental furniture.
I want a tracker that celebrates this. "Your most revisited book." "Books you've read in multiple formats." "The book you've spent the most total hours with."
Re-reads aren't repetition. They're relationships.
The "books read" count gamifies the wrong thing. It rewards short books, easy books, books you can blow through in a weekend. Nothing wrong with those - but optimising for count distorts your reading diet.
I'd rather see:
Spotify Wrapped gets this right for music. It's not just "you listened to 47,000 minutes" (though they tell you that too). It's "you discovered 200 new artists" and "your top genre shifted from indie to jazz" and "you listened to this one song 340 times like a completely normal person."
Reading deserves the same treatment.
I'm wary of social features that make reading feel competitive. A feed that shows friends racing ahead while I'm still on chapter three. Recommendations that just surface the most popular books in a genre. Badges that turn reading into a game to be won.
There's a version of social reading that works - sharing what you're reading with people whose taste you trust, seeing when a friend finishes something and loved it, maybe reading the same book at the same time. That's genuine connection.
The tracker should serve the reader first. Any social layer should feel like a book club, not a leaderboard.
A tracker that's quiet. That captures context without asking for it - when I read, where I read, what device I was on. One that builds a picture over time.
One that tells me things I didn't know about myself. Not "you read 47 books" but "you read best on Sundays" and "you abandon literary fiction at page 80 but push through non-fiction to page 200" and "this is the first year you read more women authors than men."
Estimates that are personal. "Based on your pace with similar books, you'll finish this one in 6 days."
Something that celebrates depth, not just breadth. Re-reads count. Long books count. The 900-page fantasy epic you spent two months with counts as much as the twelve novellas you skimmed in December to hit an arbitrary number.
No feed. No notifications. No gamification. Just a clear window into your own reading life, available when you want it.
That's what I'm building with Book Assembly. It's early days - right now it's a straightforward book tracker with a library, wishlist, and reading progress. But the foundation is there: every progress update, every DNF, every re-read is captured in a way that will power the kind of stats I actually want to see.
The insights will come. For now, I'm focused on getting the basics right and building something I'd actually want to use.
If any of this resonates, have a look. And if you have thoughts on what reading stats you'd find genuinely useful, I'd love to hear them.
Book Assembly is free during beta. Have a look at bookassembly.co.uk, or join the community at r/BookAssembly.
