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How Do You Track Your Reading? : Poll Results

Rebecca Joines Schinsky

Chief of Staff

Rebecca Joines Schinsky is the executive director of product and ecommerce at Riot New Media Group. She co-hosts All the Books! and the Book Riot Podcast. Follow her on Twitter: @rebeccaschinsky.

Every month, we turn the spotlight back to you, the Riot community, with a question about your reading lives. This time around, we wanted to know if you track your reading, and if so, how?

2859 Riot readers answered completed the poll over a two-week period. The survey was open-ended, and readers wrote in their own descriptions of their reading tracking methods, which I then grouped together and coded.

Here’s how it shook out!

Question 1: Do you track your reading?

2783 responses

do you track your reading

Yes: 2673

No: 110

The vast majority of readers responded with a clear yes or no. The “kind of,” “sometimes,” and shruggy emoticon write-ins were counted as yeses, since they indicate the presence of some tracking method.

It’s no surprise that most of the people who opt into a survey about reading tracking are people who do track their reading. I expected to see a strong turnout for the yeses here, and I would love to know how well (or not) the group in this survey represents Riot readers as a whole. Alas, the nature of opt-in, self-report surveys means that we can’t use these results to generalize.

Question 2: How do you track your reading?

We got 2675 usable responses to this item, which is funny since only 2673 people answered yes to the first question. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Here are the numbers.

reading tracking methods

Goodreads dominated here, and that’s no surprise. Back in 2014, we asked where Riot readers keep their TBR lists, and 64% also used Goodreads for that. The fact that the percentage holds is really interesting given that Book Riot’s audience has more than doubled since the 2014 TBR poll. Riot readers tend to be pretty tech-forward, so I was a tad surprised to see journals/notebooks edge out spreadsheets/databases. It’s possible, though, that most of the readers who want a digital solution have taken to Goodreads rather than rolling their own. What do you think?

And I know you’re wondering, so here’s how the 11.5% in the “other” category broke down:

  • Miscellaneous cataloging websites: 2.17%
  • LibraryThing: 2.13%
  • Miscellaneous book-related apps: 1.31%
  • “Website” (unspecified): 1.27%
  • Social media, Word/Text files, miscellaneous note-taking apps, non-journal/notebook handwritten methods, personal blogs, and library records/accounts each had <1%.

 

And that’s it! What do you make of the results? How well do they fit your habits?

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