In the last Sword & Laser episode of the year Veronica and Tom mentioned a nice post by Iain Bertram on Goodreads where he analysed all the books he read during the last year. While he focused on the authors’ and main protagonists’ gender, I wanted to take a look at the reading formats and genres I had been reading throughout the year. Goodreads itself already has a very simple overview page but I wanted to also see some other metrics here.
Genres read in 2016
After a bit of spreadsheet magic here’s what I’ve learnt: I’ve read 20 books, with about 30% of them being technical and another 30% being science-fiction. I’ve even read 2 fantasy books. Most of these books (50%) were PDFs purchased on platforms like Inkshares, O’Reilly, or even the respective author’s website. The average book had ~263 pages with the longest one ending after 720 pages (the usual suspect).
Format distribution in 2016
I’m actually pretty happy with the mix of genres and the lead of non-Kindle books this year. Inkshares, especially, has become an important place when looking for new things to read. I’m pretty that won’t change in 2017.
Sadly, I’ve also started to amass quite a pile-of-shame with Cooking for Geeks and Learning Swift having been on my “in-progress list” since January and June, respectively. I’m still trying to make my way through them 😉
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Alternatively, this website also supports Webmentions. If you write a post on a blog that supports this technique, I should get notified about your link 🙂