Pagio: Bookworm's Diary

A reading app should be easy to open and hard to put down. We spent the summer on the first half. This is the biggest update Pagio has had since it launched. HOME Your library had quietly taken on a second job. Streak at the top, goals in the middle, whatever you were reading wedged in above the shelves. All useful, all in the wrong place, and together they turned a library into a dashboard. So they've moved to Home, which is where the app opens now: what you're in the middle of, how your streak is doing, where your goals stand, and the book you've lined up next. Your library gets to go back to being a library. UP NEXT You already have a to-read pile. It's mental, it's never written down, and it rearranges itself every time a friend won't shut up about something. Up Next is that pile with an address. Add books from anywhere in the app, drag them into the order you actually mean, and the one on top gets the good seat on Home. Start reading it and it slips out of the queue without being asked, which is more than can be said for the stack on your nightstand. STATISTICS The old stats tab told you what you'd read. This one tells you what kind of reader you are, and it brought receipts. Four sections instead of three, Overview, Collection, Habits and History, and most of it can be pointed at any month or year you have data for. Which genres, publishers and formats your shelves quietly lean on, and how much of your money agrees. Whether you're a morning reader who's been telling people otherwise, how long you last in one sitting, how often you finish what you start. History keeps a calendar of every day you read, your year laid out month by month, and a small pile of personal records that exist to be beaten. MONTHLY RECAP Sharing your reading month used to mean sharing a calendar. Now it means four artwork styles, ten backgrounds, three shapes, and a live preview you can nudge until the whole thing looks effortless. Eleven attempts in private, one post. Nobody has to know. LIBRARY And it didn't only give things up. Your authors, genres, tags and publishers used to live in Settings, filed somewhere between your reminders and the legal notices, or tucked behind your stats. Strange place to keep the people who wrote your books. They've moved into the library, each with a section of its own, next to books, collections and series. That's four more ways in: by who wrote a book, what kind it is, how you labeled it, and who published it. On iPad it's all sitting in the sidebar. Settings, meanwhile, is a deeply boring screen these days, exactly as intended. Plenty more changed that isn't written up here. You'll bump into it.