I like reading. I enjoy tracking what I read, and have been using Goodreads since 2020. However, I like Obsidian’s local-first even better because a) your stuff stays your stuff, b) it’s more flexible.
E.g. if I really enjoy a book, I can give it 11 stars instead of the usual maximum of 10.
In the attempt to move away from Goodreads, I’ve been working on emulating several of their functions, such as the scatter chart of the years of publications of books read.
In this example vault I’ve intentionally kept the books to a minimum, as this is just supposed to be a tech-demo, because with the amount of books I currently have in their Dataview will take up to a minute to render tables, etc. Therefore the scatter chart found in [[Reading Stats]] is pretty minimal. But it can also look like this, if you enter more books:
Thanks to the awesome Chartsview Plugin for making this possible!
Then there’s also the chart that shows the amount of books you’ve read over time:
This is courtesy of an awesome redditor who really helped me out with this last year.
I like folders. I like being able to sort my notes into them. I’ve seen lots example videos on YouTube where it seems that all the notes are in the root directory. This Book Tracking vault is based on folders, but I don’t think it would be too difficult to adapt if you’d prefer not using folders. You do you!
The homepage is directly inspired by Rainbell’s Homepage, I just simplified it and am just using the bullet points to buttons snippet. On that homepage I also used the Advanced URI plugin to trigger the “New Book” (via the Book Search Plugin) and the “New Movie” (via the Quickadd Plugin) commands via links (that look like buttons).
On the Obsidian Forum lots of people have really helped out too, including but not limited to holroy, justdoitcc, mnvwvnmm and others (sorry if I’ve forgotten!)
This whole thing is based on Minimal Theme’s Card layout, which is really awesome!
I’ve not yet found a satisfying way to organize my Want to Read books. In this sample vault there are only three books in that folder/category, but in my personal vault there’s almost 2000 so I’m having a hard time coming up with a good way to sort them.
If anyone has any ideas or improvements please try doing a Pull Request or opening an Issue, I’m always open for ideas and suggestions :)