Booketlist: the lifetime reading plan app
The avid reader will make it through about 5,000 books in a lifetime. With an estimated 130 million published titles out there, we need to choose wisely. Who should we trust to guide us on those 5,000 deeply personal journeys? Booketlist wants to help.
This isn’t about being a slave to a list (that’s no fun!), but rather helping readers come up with a plan that suits their aspirations, from classics to current best sellers.
I wrote the above copy a couple years ago with high hopes for taking my long-time day-job experience in tech product management and using it to build Booketlist, an app to help readers build a lifetime reading plan*. So far I haven’t done much besides buying the domain name and the below-mentioned social media accounts, but my aspirations remain.
I continue to noodle on the use case, because the more I use existing reading management apps out there (including Amazon-owned Goodreads), the more I think that we readers are missing a really good app to manage a very basic task: keeping track of what we read.
Existing options have focused heavily on the social and reviewing aspect of reading, but you may have noticed some of us tend to be introverts. And even when we’re not, there are already plenty of other non-reading-specific sites out there that have mastered social. We don’t always want to write reviews that get published to the masses, but we already have a way to do that anyway. I suspect many of us just want to take our own notes (but not for the purpose of publicly criticizing an author). I’ve also noticed a shift at the existing players to focus more on monetizing author services, eg giveaways, than basic reader experience.
So building out the lifetime-reading-plan thing is like the whipped cream and cherry on top of that.
Anyway, I do hope to get this into a simple beta later in 2020. I have no illusions that there is any money in this, like most of the book world! I just want to make something nice for readers. If you love books and reading too and are interested in collaborating on booketlist, please do get in touch.
*So lifetime reading plans are a thing?
Yeah, this was news to me too, and I’m both a reader and a compulsive planner. I first heard about the concept in a charming column in the Weekend Financial Times (which, BTW, also has a terrific multi-page Books section) by Nilanjana Roy.
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