One Million Pages Per Lifetime discussion

There are different ways to count your pages and you should pick the one that works for you best, but I'll list some here so you'll know where to begin.

✦ Step one would be creating your personal thread under the correct alphabetized folder in the group (e.g. if your Goodreads name is 'Newbie', your thread should be in the folder including N, which, in this case, would be M-P.

✦ After you've done this, you need to decide which date you'd like to be your start date. As the goal is a significant number, you can of course choose to include all the books you've read, ever. Alas, Goodreads was only created a few years ago and most of us did not keep detailed notes on the books we read before, but for the books you have added on your read shelf it is easy enough to find the total number of pages.

✦ To do this you need to use one of Goodreads' features, the stats . That can be found on your My Books page on the bottom of the tool list on the left side under your bookshelves. The stats page by default shows you the number of books you've read per year, but by selecting pages you can see the number of pages per year instead.
✧ According to the start date you've picked, add up the numbers.

And there you have it!

After that initial step, it's entirely up to you how you decide to count your pages. As a few options:

✧ Some members post lists with the books they read followed by the page number and add them to the total, while
✧ others simply update the total by adding the number of pages they've read the previous month (or however long it was since their last update).

Most of you probably know this, but you can set up your bookshelves to show different columns - one of the columns you can add is num pages. If you want to keep track of the current year and to add the page numbers to the total manually, an easy way to do it is by checking that column on your read bookshelf books (if done while the list is sorted by date read then you should have the last book you've read on the top of the list).

Personally, I like spreadsheets, so I have created one with my bookshelves which I update regularly (after extracting the database from Goodreads - using the inport/export tool). In spreadsheets you can use all sorts of magic formulas to calculate things, and that's the way I update my thread, using the number of pages of the books read on each month.

You can use a combination of the methods above or one entirely your own - whatever works for you!

I hope that helped. Feel free to ask questions or offer suggestions in the comments below.

Since GoodReads only adds the pages for the first time you mark it 'read', how are you handling books that you read more than once?

Are you adding them in manually to your monthly/yearly counts, or are you not counting those pages again? I love to re-read certain books and I would hate to stop reading those books simply because it would take away from adding 'new' pages :)

Hi Bethany! For me personally, when I reread a book I just mark the book's shelf as 'currently reading', and write down on the review the date when I first read it. That way it will be as if I'm reading the book for the first time, so that its 'date read' is the reread date.

For my pages, I just add them manually. And I do count them as a book read, because I also love rereading books!

Hi Bethany, sorry for the delay in responding.

You can either do what Ayunda suggested or add a different edition of the book with each re-read. That way the same book counts as a different one with each addition. Hope that helps.

Hi Bethany,

I an new to the group and goodreads in general, but I just recently discovered that if you click on a book and go to edit details there is actually an option for rereading a book and adding a second set of dates.