Add "pages read" to Reading Journal that are not part of a book | Requests/Ideas

I've been eagerly awaiting the "not a book" features that just shipped, since I've been reading a lot of fanfiction and not a lot of novels. While the new feature will be really great for longer form fanfiction, I would love a way to track shorter items without having to go through the whole process of adding it to my library, having it be reviewed by librarians, etc. It feels a bit heavy handed for reading work that is less than 10000 words, but which I would really love to be tracking so that it doesn't look like I've been reading nothing at all for the last month 😅

My ideal way to track these things would be something like:

navigate to Reading Journal
have a button that says "track reading"
perhaps an affordance to ask me whether I'm tracking one of my In Progress books instead
then it basically takes me to a page like this, where it would have a field for Title, Date, Pages Read, and Summary

Comments

Nadia

May 19, 2022

Interesting idea! Thank you for sharing this.

Regarding adding Not A Books to your library, don't worry about librarians needing to review them!

jaina8851

May 27, 2022

Nadia I'm back with more thoughts about this!

I personally don't want fanfiction works to count as "books read". I want the pages to get logged, but not the book count to increase, particularly for the many shorter works I'm reading. There are a few novel-length stories that I will happily count as books haha, but for the number of <10k word stories I'm reading, it would look like I read hundreds of books this year, which doesn't feel truthful.

With the current "Not A Book" feature, I have to do the following workflow:

Add a fanfiction work using the import feature
Mark it as "Read"
Update the journal to include the pages that I want logged
Then reset the "Read" dates so that it isn't being counted in that total

It's a bit cumbersome, and feels heavy handed for short works, of which there are hundreds.

The workaround that I'm trying right now is that I just made a generic "Not A Book" called "Fanfiction" so that I can log my page total for each day using that (and add the list of works from each day to the journal entry, if I'm feeling ambitious), but this is causing some drawbacks as well:

I have to put a nonsensical page "total" on the not-a-book, otherwise the UI forces me to log in %, so right now it's set to 9999. This has the hilarious side effect of it effectively congratulating me on completing an increasing percentage of this fake book, and who knows what will happen if/when I (probably) will have to increase the page total.
The journal entry UI asks "what page are you on", not "how many pages have you read today", so I have to go look at my previous entry for the previous total, add my new total to that, and then log it, which is a lot of steps.
I imagine when this hyperfixation ends, I'm either going to have to mark this book as "Finished" or back into "To Read", neither of which feel quite right.

I will say, I am absolutely delighted that there is a way to log fanfiction at all on the site!! The last time I fell deeply into a fanfic hole was in 2020 and it made me feel really sad that my "real book" reading for the year seemed so low. Being able to track fic and give it the same validity as any other reading I do feels really nice! 😄