Tracking your reading --- by type of content?

[Matt]

Hi everyone!

I'm curious if people have tried to track the reading they're doing by the type of content? Or set goals by type of content?

Thanks in advance!

[Cassandra]

I'm going to move this to the Let's Chat forum where it will hopefully get more visibility.

I'm not sure if I totally understand what you mean by tracking by content, but I've decided to track statistics about my reading here. Other members have taken the same format/idea and are using it as-is or have changed it to suit the types of stats they're interested in. Or do you mean tracking by content as in what happens during the book?

[Matt]

Hi Cassandra,

Thanks for helping me out! Your tracking method is exactly what I was thinking of. I'll continue the conversation over there :)

[Beth]

I track it by pages every day and then every month as well. I may only finish 5 books in a month but all the books may have been near 500 pages so that's usually what I go based on. I do like seeing a lot of books read in a month, but pages read is more important to me.

[Scott]

I like the way goodreads has the bookshelf system (tags) it allows users to group there books anyway they want.

[Scott]

Has anybody tried using the goodreads api? It might for some interesting things. I'm thanking along the lines of using the api to dump my bookshelfs then importing them into mongodb. Then trying some queries. Alternatively I might try accessing the api from an iOS app

[Cassandra]

I've never used a NoSQL database like MongoDB, but I do have experience with other databases. I've also never had any use for the Goodreads API, but have experience with other APIS. I'm curious what kind of queries would you run on your books and what you would do with them when they're in database format.

[Scott]

Here is are examples how many scifi or fantasy did I read in the 90s that have
Female authors? How many unique authors have I read? How many with settings outside the USA? Etc

[Caro]

I try using the statistics of Goodreads but they are limited compare my option to tracking so I create an excel table and run pivot table and create graphics. I found it very interesting get results of gender, pages, pages by gender, The country of authors, language I am reading... I had never use a database to run my queries. I am not a developer or similar so my knowledge in that area is very limited, so I am really proud of my use of excel.

[Cassandra]

That's awesome! Pivot tables are great as well.