welcome to better reading
Addabook is a free publishing service for tracking notes on books you read. By writing a few notes about the books you've read, you'll retain the key lessons and memories from each one.
Take a look at this demo collection to get an idea of how things look as you build out your bookshelf...
Log in using your Amazon.com credentials
No password or profile information is shared with Addabook
See FAQ for more info & privacy policy
how it works
Step One: Read
You've got this part covered...
If you've found your way here, you probably already like to read, or at least appreciate the importance of doing it regularly. Maybe you read business books to try to get an edge; maybe it's sci-fi for an escape; maybe it's philosophy books to find the truth.
Whatever your passion, once you've wrapped up a page-turner, head over here to Addabook and...
- Charlie Jones
Step Two: Write
Here's where we come in
At it's essence, Addabook is a writing platform to collect thoughts on the books you're reading.
Log into Addabook, and begin jotting notes on your book. It can either be a bulleted list, or lengthy prose; a few quotes you liked, or a full-on review, it's up to you how you want to use it.
Samples
Here are a few different samples of the kinds of reviews you can keep.
Step Three: Improve
Remember More
It's all too easy to burn through a good book, and months or years later only remember vague themes and general impressions. Sometimes that's fine - but sometimes you need more. If you want to remember a specific lesson, or a particular quote, you're going to want to write it down.
Not only does writing create a tangible record that you can refer to later, but the simple act of writing something down makes you far more likely to remember it.
When you write something out, you're forced to think about it more clearly. Why did you like a book? What faults did you find? Thinking critically about the content you read (vs just clicking a thumbs up and moving on) challenges you to consider more than what was just on the surface. You'll find that as you write more about what you read, you'll become a more thoughtful and more critical reader, getting more out of books than someone who just passes through.
Stats
Addabook tracks statistics on the books you read - including the diversity of the authors you're reading, so that you know when it might be time to get a new perspective.
Step Four: Collect
Do you love the convenience of digital books, but miss the bookshelf? Do you miss the sense of pride and achievement that comes from looking at your various completed books? Do you find yourself reading through a whole book, and forgetting the author's name, or what the cover looks like?
So did we, so we build the site around a bookshelf view - letting you easily see and scan all the books you've read - going back decades!
other features
Sure, that's a bit objective, but the benefit of having a relatively simple scope is that it isn't weighed down with extraneous baubles. Simple text, nice fonts, and a design that loads fast and gets out of the way.
Track statsTrack number of pages read, author diversity, physical vs ebooks, and much more in the future. Use stats to make more informed decisions about what you're reading.
Tag your topicsWant to see all the books you've read about WWI? Behavioral finance? Russian literature? Dragons? Time-machines? Malaria? You get the picture. Just tag topics for easy reference and search later on.
We're not trying to build a walled garden. You can easily export every word you've written here, at any time.
No distracting social garbageWe're not trying to build the next mySpacebook over here. You want to share a link to a book you've read, that's fine. But you won't find us pushing you to invite your friends, posting to your social timelines, or asking you to do our marketing for us.
No spamWe won't email you. (Impossible, we don't have your address!) We won't send you browser notifications. We won't ask you to rate us 5 stars. We won't do any of that, because, duh, everyone hates it and no one should put up with it.
diversity
Every time you add a book to your profile, we'll ask you for the author's gender and heritage information. Literature in North America is dominated by white-male authors, and consequently, it is their perspective that is shared the most. We've found it personally very affective to calculate and display the % of pages you've read each year that were written by "non-white-guys" - it's probably lower than you think.
Example image - stats from one year of reading.
"What you see is all there is". If you only get a single viewpoint of information, it's easy to come to conclusions that just aren't true. Not to mention that staying within the same echo chamber is destructive for society.
The internet and social media is already such an effective 'filter bubble' that it's easy to follow, watch, and read people with experiences and opinions already like your own. Diversity of authors doesn't necessarily lead to diversity of thought, but it's a great start. We track, publish, and highlight author diversity for you to serve as a small reminder to seek out new perspectives and contrarian positions whenever possible -- you'll be better for it!
FAQs
Go for it, if it does what you need. Goodreads is fantastic, and a great tool for discovering new books you might like (as well as a social platform for following others with your tastes). But if you just want a quiet place to review your own books and recall what was important to you, we think those other services just have too much baggage.
What is your privacy policy?Addabook stores your username (as specified by you), as well as any book-related content that you enter into the platform. We do not know your name, email address, etc. While it may be possible to get other information on our users (e.g., location data, browser data, based on your IP address or advertising cookies) we make no effort to do so. We do not sell or share data with any other entities.
In plain english: Addabook aims to be a useful platform for retaining notes about books you've read. We hope to make money by selling books via Amazon and receiving a referral fee. There are no other shenanigans.
Why do you only support Login with Amazon?Password management is a mess. Most people use the same passwords across many different sites, dramatically increasing their risk of identity theft if any one of those site's databases is hacked. We don't want to create one more account you need to remember your username/password for. (And most of all, we don't want to be responsible for having lost your data in the event we get hacked). Most people already have an Amazon account, and using 'Login with Amazon' here allows you to login to Addabook without having to manage a new set of online credentials.
Addabook does not receive your Amazon password, just an arbitrary authentication token from Amazon. We do not request and do not receive any of your Amazon data. To be explicit about it, we do not request, and have no ability to receive, things like your purchase history, wishlists, home address, payment information, etc. Literally, the single piece of information we receive from Amazon is a gibberish authentication token. You can read more about this from Amazon here: https://login.amazon.com/