Reddit thread recently: "what's your average Goodreads score?"
Didn't know there was such a thing but found it and rather than being illuminating, it was pretty depressing.
One number. 408 different moments.
There's a checkbox mentality in how we track reading. Read or unread. Rated or unrated. Every platform treats your library like a queue -- content consumed, logged, moved to the bottom of the pile.
Goodreads gives you five stars. The labels are "didn't like it," "it was ok," "liked it," "really liked it," "it was amazing." That's it. That's the entire emotional vocabulary they've given 150 million readers to describe the most important art form in human history. And they just launched a DNF shelf -- a Did Not Finish shelf -- after users begged for it for over a decade. Their biggest innovation in years is a new way to say you didn't consume something.
Sure there's reviews- where the longest ones are Advanced Reader Copy to funnel to book sales. The entire platform is an acquisition funnel dressed up as a community. Authors get review-bombed by fake accounts, and Amazon's response is to lay off the Goodreads team.
The alternatives? One gives you quarter-star increments. Great -- now I can agonize over whether Stoner is a 4.5 or a 4.75. That changes everything. Another turned book clubs into a subscription content platform and got acquired by a company whose business model is "unlimited reading" -- as if books are a buffet.
Everyone is building a better way to log what you consumed. Everyone is building a better way to consume it faster.
408 books reviewed on Goodreads in the last 10 years. 300 with 4 stars. All the same. All 4 star content.
The Brothers Karamazov. Dungeon Crawler Carl. Small Things Like These -- a 70-page Irish novella about silence and complicity. The Making of the Atomic Bomb -- 1,499 pages of physics and moral reckoning. The Tao of Pooh. Slaughterhouse-Five. The Mom Test. Pachinko. A Wizard of Earthsea. Blacktop Wasteland. The Prophet -- Kahlil Gibran, 1923.
Same number. All of them. Dostoevsky and a LitRPG about a man and his cat navigating a gameshow apocalypse. A startup advice pamphlet and a multi-generational Korean family saga. A 148-page prose poem and a 972-page space opera.
Four stars. Content consumed. At the end of 10 years, this is my "reading history."
This is my investment? Every one of those a work that carried me through some aspect of my life, in some meaningful time, in some meaningful way. Content?
I'm supposed to just click 5 stars and that's it. That's the whole gesture. The ceiling. The most a book can earn from me is the same icon, filled in one more time.
There's a difference between "I read All The Pretty Horses" and "I read it during the last summer I ever spent with my dad and knew what coming-of-age actually was." One is a checkmark. The other is a life event.
Lincoln in the Bardo wasn't content. It was a reckoning. I read it when grief was the background noise of my life, and Saunders gave me a way to sit inside that noise instead of running from it. Trust wasn't content. It taught me what metafiction could be, a book I thought bland, then turned a page and fell completely into. Stoner wasn't, and isn't, content. Three years later it sits with me. A quiet book about a quiet man.
Go look at how people talk about books and tell me the system works.
We are pushing harder and faster toward accelerating the consumption of our most precious art. Reading is becoming a metric. The platforms that track your reading are built by companies that will sell you more reading, agentically generate more content, and tighten the cycle.
I can't shout into that hurricane. I'm one person.
But I can preserve my own library.
Why do I spend time every two weeks manually reviewing open-sourced book covers -- not from publisher feeds, not from APIs with licensing deals?
Because I want the cover you see when you look at a book in your library to actually resonate with the emotion it brought you. Not a placeholder. Not a thumbnail. The real thing. I don't have publisher partnerships that give me hi-def covers and I don't want them. The moment you take that deal, the incentives shift. The covers that show up first are the ones someone paid for, not the ones that belong there.
This isn't an app for me. This is paying back the energy authors have poured into my life in a way that platforms haven't, and that I fear won't. Every author who wrote a book that changed me -- that changed how I think about grief, or structure, or what a quiet life means -- deserves more than a number. They deserve a reader who spent time with their work the way they spent time making it.
This is why InkTree doesn't ask "how many stars?" It asks where the book landed.
Five dimensions -- Craft, Mind, Heart, Pacing, Originality -- because the shape of the experience matters more than the verdict. If you want to know why star ratings fail readers, I wrote about that. If you want to know what happens when you import 10 years of Goodreads data into a system that actually cares about the difference between editions and works, I wrote about that too. And if you want to know why I spent weeks building a cover art pipeline from open-source APIs instead of signing a publisher deal -- that's the hurricane story.
In the coming weeks, you'll see how I'm rethinking every surface of this experience, not to ship features, but to pay homage to the investment authors have put into their own design. Every tile, every page, every piece of the library is being rebuilt to treat books the way they deserve to be treated.
I built this because I wanted my reading history to feel like a map of my life, not a spreadsheet. Some books are background. Some are foreground. And a few are the reason you think differently now than you did before you opened them.
Those deserve time.
I'm building InkTree -- a reading companion that replaces star ratings with five dimensions. No ads, no publisher deals, no affiliate links. Just a reader building a library that treats books the way they deserve. It's in beta, and I'm writing about what I'm finding along the way.