The numbers you didn't know you wanted until you saw them

I did not want to build this. I had a whole position about it. Reading is not a productivity activity, quantifying it turns a pleasure into a KPI, we've all watched what step counters did to walking.

Then I built a rough version to test something else, looked at my own numbers, and sat there for a genuinely embarrassing amount of time.

Because the numbers aren't about performance. They're a mirror. I had read one author eleven times and would have sworn under oath I'd read three, maybe four of their books. My brain was just wrong about my own life. Very humbling, would recommend.

What you get

• Books read — total, and this year specifically.
• Pages read — a number that gets absurd faster than you expect.
• Hours read — estimated, and the one that reframes reading as a real chunk of your life rather than a thing you squeeze in.
• Top author — the one you actually read, not the one you'd claim.
• Ratings given and your average rating — a quiet measure of how generous you are.
• To be read — the size of the queue. Handle with care.

Hours and pages are estimates. I want to be upfront about that: we don't watch you read, there's no timer, nothing runs in the background. It's derived from book lengths and standard reading speeds. The trend is real, the third decimal place is not.

The value isn't the number. It's finding out you were wrong about yourself.

Zero extra work, which was the whole condition

The rule I set: if stats require any effort, they don't ship. Every logging app dies the same death — great for three weeks, then you miss a day, then it's a monument to your inconsistency.

So stats are a byproduct. You already mark books read to keep your progress straight. The stats page just does arithmetic on that. Nothing extra to maintain, nothing to fall behind on, nothing to feel bad about.

The compare thing

Stats have a share link — its own link, separate from your profile, with view counts so you can see whether anyone actually clicked or whether your friends are liars.

And there's a compare toggle. Two people, two years, side by side.

I added it as a small thing and it became the reason a noticeable number of people use the app at all. Turns out "I read more than you did" is an extremely powerful motivator among people who would never describe themselves as competitive. Reading is a solitary hobby with a deeply social scoreboard hiding underneath it.

December is a whole thing

Every year-in-review that circulates in December comes from a company that has been watching you constantly. Yours comes from marking a checkbox when you finish a book, and you can look at it in March if you feel like it.

Same dopamine. Considerably less surveillance.