The Best Websites and Apps to Keep Track of Your Books, Movies, Music and Video Games
This week in The Guardian, writer Rachel Sigi pondered why so many of us visit sites like Goodreads and Letterboxd so frequently to log our media consumption, and came up with an answer that seems obvious in retrospect: it’s dopamine .
Yes, the same addictive brain chemicals that make our neurons fire every time our phones light up a notification make us mark our progress in the books we’ve read or assign a star rating to every movie we’ve watched or tracked. . the hours we spent on a particularly addictive video game. Or (and this is where things get a little trickier) make lists of everything we want—or feel we “should”—read, watch, or play.
It’s worth considering (as Siji does) whether it’s useful to “gamify” what is essentially a leisure activity in this way, and as a hardcore media lover, I confess that I sometimes feel a sense of exhaustion when contemplating long lists of all the media information that I want to consume that I will probably never get to. Unless I find a way to live forever and also give up work and family responsibilities. But I’m also not going to stop doing it. Even before technology introduced methods to make life easier, I occasionally kept lists of, say, movies that I watched with my then girlfriend and now wife. Just like looking at photos on my phone, just mentioning the title of a movie on this list brought back memories of where we were when we watched it or the conversations we had after. Much of everyday life is ephemeral; keeping a record of every day—even if it’s something as unimportant as finally watching “Weekend at Bernie’s” (a surprisingly weird movie) can give you an anchor to cling to. the best sites and apps to help you start tracking your own media habits: books, movies, video games and music.
The best apps to log your reading
Goodreads is by far the most widely used book tracking tool, but there are alternatives if you don’t want to give even more of your data to an Amazon corporate owner.
goodreads. You know about it. Goodreads has been around for two decades, and since its acquisition by Amazon in 2013, the site has amassed nearly 90 million readers eager to catalog what they’ve read and provide status updates on what they’re reading. In many ways, it set the standard for these types of social cataloging apps, allowing you to list your books on different shelves, write and read reviews, befriend and follow other users, make recommendation lists, and more. It’s not perfect – the UX is basically the same since the site was created, the design is cluttered and unintuitive, and the mobile app is incredibly slow – but you’re probably using it anyway.
LibraryThing. Founded in 2005, a year before Goodreads, LibraryThing has always been a slightly more intrusive and serious competitor to this site. Originally a paid subscription, it has since moved to a free model, but it still strives to deliver products without flooding you with ads. While it offers many of the same social features as Goodreads, it’s definitely more geared towards the serious business of tracking and cataloging your own reading.
Other options to consider are Libib , BookSloth , and The Storygraph.
Best Apps to Register Movies You’ve Watched
There is a clear winner when it comes to tracking your movies (which is also one of my favorite sites on the internet). mailbox d. This app- and web-based movie-tracking social network has amassed a user base of over 20 million moviegoers, and for good reason: it’s incredibly easy to search and log every movie you’ve ever seen, add viewing dates (I recently found a stack of old ticket stubs and registered a bunch of movies I saw in theaters 15 years ago), wrote reviews and followed other users. You can create lists based on any esoteric, hyper-specific qualifiers you can think of . In addition, there is a view that shows you the posters of every movie you have registered on one screen, which is very convenient. ( Come in and say hello! )
SYMCL. This lesser-known competitor to Letterboxd has many of the site’s features and benefits, but with one big bonus: its database also includes TV series and anime (Letterboxd generally avoids TV entirely, except for a few “event” miniseries like WandaVision ). You can mark an entire series as watched or keep track of which episodes you’ve seen and how many you have left, making it much easier to manage the streaming series you’re trying to keep up with and can’t keep up with. But the coolest feature is a Chrome extension that integrates with your streaming service’s browsing history , allowing you to log your browsing history to SIMKL without even leaving Netflix.
The Best Sites to Register Your Video Games
There doesn’t seem to be a definitive alternative to video games like Letterboxd or Goodreads, and while I’ll discuss comparable options with those services below, none of them have reached the same level of awareness. Perhaps it’s because…
Your system probably does this for you. Most modern consoles eliminate the need to register your games because they already keep track of what you play and when, although you may have to dig through the system menus to find this. The Nintendo Switch, for example, keeps track of the games played by each user profile, but if you want really detailed information, including how long a particular game was played on a particular day, you need to download the appropriate Nintendo Switch Parental Control app . Here’s how to find out the number of hours played per game on PlayStation 5 and Xbox .
However, if you need more comprehensive accounting than just the amount of time spent on a given heading, you’re better off using a separate service.
. _Backloggd is most similar to a “video game mailbox” (hence the name, presumably). Currently only available online (although the app isreportedly in development ), the site allows you to catalog games as completed (along with whether you “mastered” them or “abandoned” them, or a few other variations), unfinished (meaning you have them but haven’t played them yet), games you’re currently playing, or add games to your wishlist. You can log “playthroughs” (the dates you actually played the game), view games you’ve marked as played, and view and follow other users’ profile pages if you wish. New features are constantly being added to the site, but it already offers just about everything I need.
Groovy . This one seems to be inspired by Goodreads. You can mark games as played, currently playing, delayed, or added to your wishlist; write (and read) reviews; and mark your play dates. What makes this site different is the ability to add status updates for current games, which is nice if you want to keep track of when you’ve beaten a certain level, boss, or whatever.
Other options to consider are GG , Completionator (which allows you to import your Steam library) and HowLongToBeat .
The best app to record your favorite music
As with video games, the music recording infrastructure is nowhere near as reliable – again, probably because services like Spotify and Amazon Music basically keep track of this for you. However, there is at least one social network for music lovers that deserves attention.
Music board. Musicboard bills itself as “a social platform that lets you keep track of all the music you listen to and develop your passion for music with friends”, and of course it does. You can use it to create a profile, track the albums and songs you’ve listened to, write reviews, and follow other users. There are cool tools to show your listening history, keep track of upcoming releases, and (if you’re willing to shell out $3.99 a month for a paid subscription) view ultra-detailed stats about your listening habits.
Or just use a spreadsheet (or notepad) to keep track of everything.
The most versatile and effortless way to keep track of everything you read, watch, or play is, of course, to simply jot it down by hand on a spreadsheet (or notepad, if you like tactile, “real” ones). items” crap). It’s certainly the right method – we love spreadsheets – but you’re sacrificing the visual and/or social aspects of sharing other app-based options. they are the only ones who care about your media habits. Personally, I like to encourage things like keeping up with Goodreads or filling out my Letterboxd diary to keep me updated; past attempts with pen and paper have failed, resulting in years of lost data. On the other hand, one reading site I frequented, Riffle , seems to have disappeared this year without warning, and there’s no chance your laptop will stop working.