I’ve been a huge fan of Trakt’s tracking system for TV shows and movies, and the Year in Review is always a highlight. It’s the best way to reflect on my watching habits, and I’d love to see a book tracking feature with similar insights and stats!
Feature Request: Book Tracking & Year-End Stats
Expanding Trakt to include book tracking would make it an all-in-one hub for media consumption. Here’s what would make this feature truly valuable:
1. Comprehensive Book Tracking
Reading Progress Tracking – Mark books as “Reading,” “Completed,” “Paused,” or “Dropped,” similar to Trakt’s TV progress tracking.
Personalized Lists & Collections – Create lists like “To Read,” “Favorite Series,” or “Book Club Picks.”
Book Ratings & Reviews – Keep the familiar 1-10 rating scale, with options for written reviews and community discussions.
Syncing & Import Options – Integrate with Goodreads, StoryGraph, or allow CSV/manual imports.
2. Year in Review & All-Time Stats
Trakt’s Year in Review & All-Time Stats breakdowns are already fantastic for TV and movies—bringing that same level of detail to books would be incredible!
Year in Review (Annual Stats):
Total Books Read – Count of books finished that year.
Total Pages Read – Similar to the minutes watched stat for TV/movies.
Most Read Author – Based on the number of books completed from the same author.
Favorite Genre Breakdown – Pie chart of reading preferences (Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Non-Fiction, etc.).
Longest & Shortest Book Read – Based on page count.
Average Rating Given – Personalized based on the user’s book ratings.
Reading Streaks & Trends – Number of days in a row with book activity, busiest reading months, etc.
First & Last Book of the Year – Just like Trakt highlights the first/last TV show or movie watched.
Book Trends: Most Read Books of the Year – Showcases trending books from the year and how many the user has read. Can be filtered by genre to better match reading habits (e.g., “Most Read Fantasy Books of 2024”).
All-Time Stats (Lifetime Insights):
Total Books Read – Lifetime count of completed books.
Total Pages Read – Overall page count tracked since joining.
Most Read Author – The author with the most books read.
Favorite Genres Over Time – A historical breakdown of favorite genres.
Longest & Shortest Book Ever Read – The most and least page-heavy books logged.
Average Rating Given Across All Books – Lifetime rating trends.
Reading Streak Record – Longest uninterrupted streak of daily reading activity.
3. Advanced Filtering
Genre & Author Filters – Filter book lists, collections, and reading history by genre, author, publication year, language, and rating.
4. Custom Calendars & Notifications
Reading Calendar – Track upcoming book releases or personal reading schedules.
Notifications – Get alerts for new releases from favorite authors or genres.
5. CSV Exports & Automatic Backups
Data Exports – Enable exporting of reading history, collections, ratings, and lists in CSV format.
Scheduled Backups – Offer automatic backups of reading data to services like Dropbox, Google Drive, or via email.
6. Personalized Widgets
Reading Widgets – Provide embeddable widgets to showcase currently reading books, recently completed reads, or favorite books on personal websites or blogs.
7. Unlimited & Collaborative Lists
Custom Lists – Allow creation of unlimited personal lists, such as “To Read,” “Favorites,” or “Book Club Picks.”
Collaborative Lists – Enable users to invite others to contribute to shared reading lists.
8. Notes & Reviews
Personal Notes – Add private notes to any book entry, useful for jotting down thoughts or reminders.
Public Reviews – Share reviews and ratings with the community, fostering discussion and recommendations.
Bringing book tracking to Trakt would make it the ultimate entertainment tracking platform, letting users seamlessly log everything they watch and read in one place.
Would love to hear your thoughts on this! Thanks for considering, and keep up the amazing work!
A good old bookmark would do the job here. Personally I don’t see it being useful like it is for shows and movies. There’s really not a lot to track with books in comparison. Do you want it to remember what page you got up to?
Sounds to me like you would just be logging everything manually into a tracker. It seems a little counterintuitive and a spreadsheet with a few formulas would do the exact same job.
Not at all, using the trakt API it automatically marks content as watched and a spreadsheet can’t automatically inform you when the next episode of a show is out.
Well then we start a database. Everytime I smoke a cigar I ‘check in’ with what I am smoking. The server would need to decide if that cigar exists in the database. If it does it adds to the record. If it does not the create a record.
Then once you manifest the database others will most likely want access.
But I don’t know I’m a Network Engineer not DB guy but I could probably code it with AI.
Goodreads has book data but again idk if it’s api shareable
Also every published book has their own ISBN which is unique to them. Every single published book…
Open Library is a free, open-source digital library that offers an extensive database of free books, with nearly 30 million titles available and regularly updated. It is powered by the Internet Archive and provides users with detailed information about individual books, including page numbers, cover images, and book content. The ultimate goal of the Open Library is to make all the published works of humankind available to everyone in the world.
WorldCat, owned by OCLC (Online Computer Library Center), is a global library cooperative. It possesses a huge database.
However, access is restricted by a whitelist (for recognized organizations acting in the good of books).
GoogleBooks allows you to access the Google Books repository. In our case, it let you fetch book information via the “volumes” route.
The free access should be limited to a fair use (probably by IP).
ISBNdb API is a paid API to access book information. It provides access to a comprehensive book database and book-related data.
The New York Times Best Sellers. If you need to retrieve information about New York Times best-seller lists and look up reviews, use the NYT Books API. The service lets you get NYT book reviews by author, ISBN, or title—for free.
Penguin Random House. If you need access to one of the largest publishing house’s databases, you can use the Penguin Random House API to get information about books, authors, and events.
The API is no longer usable for anyone new. I use the API to sync GR with my Calibre library. If you didn’t already have a key prior to them turning it off for new people you can’t use it now.
Unfortunately, I don’t think there’s an equivalent of TMDB for books. The main issue is especially international coverage. You can probably find decent open data for books in a single language but I haven’t found a good database that covers multiple languages well.
I read books in four languages (English, French, German and Japanese) and tried many book tracking services over the years and couldn’t find one that had good coverage in all languages I need.
That’s not the case for Trakt/TMDB. While its coverage of non-English media is noticeably worse, it still has decent coverage, even for obscure non-English titles. Trakt is really creating a great UX on top of the TMDB data but they’re not in a capacity to start a database of this size and complexity on their own.
E.g. I just did a search of a Japanese book off the top of my head and only WorldCat found it, Open Library, GoogleBooks and ISBNdb all found nothing.
Excellent list. I’d like to add one to it, if I may:
BookBrainz: from the same people that brought us MusicBrainz that’s likewise 100% free and includes an API and webservice for exposing the information. It’s very much a work-in-progress, but that offers its own advantages in that they’re still completely open to what it should record and how it can be consumed. Really all of their projects are a ton of fun to collaborate on, and in particular I find that ListenBrainz scratches a lot of the same itches with music that Trakt does with movies and television for me.
