I keep spreadsheets. I really love data, it's a weird thing to say. I do timecards at work, I've kept one for piano practice for nearly three years, and yes, I've kept one for what I'm reading.
The reading one started because of the fantasy series problem. If you read big sprawling series — Stormlight Archive, Wheel of Time, Malazan, the Cosmere generally — you know the pain. You finish a book, the next one isn't out for two years, you read forty other things in the gap, and by the time the new one lands you can't remember whose perspective the last chapter ended on. So I had a spreadsheet. Series name, current book, what I had left in the series, when the next one was projected, and a “where am I up to” column that was usually a half-written sentence I'd dashed in at 11pm so I'd remember the plot beat.
The spreadsheet worked. It still works, actually. But I started losing track of the metadata — page counts, publishers, release dates — and I couldn't find a clean way to slot in non-series books. So I went to Goodreads, like everyone does.
Goodreads was, at first, properly useful. Better than my spreadsheet at telling me when a sequel was due. There was a community, there were people who'd read what I'd read, and the social side felt like a small win. I made an account, imported my reads, and gave it a real go.
Honestly, I still use Goodreads. I've kept using it. But I use it grudgingly now, the way you use the only ATM at the corner shop. Goodreads was bought by Amazon in 2013 and you can tell. The design hasn't really moved, the iOS app is a wrapper that lags, the recommendation engine pushes whatever has commercial heat that week. The site is also the world's worst place to keep a private journal about a book you've just finished. I'm not interested in writing a public review. I just want to remember what I thought.
So I was sort of stuck running both. The spreadsheet for my tracking, Goodreads for the metadata and release alerts, and neither doing the whole job.
I started thinking about what I actually wanted a reading app to do. Not what Goodreads thinks readers want. What I want, as a reader who's mostly working through 800-page fantasy bricks and a steady drip of non-fiction. I wanted the spreadsheet on my phone, with a timer, and somewhere to jot a thought after a session before I forgot it. I wanted the calendar view I'd been keeping in my head — what did I read this month, what did I read last year. I wanted shelves I could organise the way I organise my actual shelves at home, by series and sub-series and “this hardback I haven't quite started yet.” And I wanted it to feel like my thing, not Amazon's.
That became Spindl.
