A flexible tool for keeping track of what you read, when you read, how you read, all while being a hand-writable text format.

book-mode is a CLI. It might at some point also be an emacs mode, depending on how passionately I feel about that (PRs welcome 😬)

book-mode is written in Rust and can be built with cargo.

$ cargo build --release

book-mode fundamentally only parses text files. These can either be written by you, the user, or at a later point also the CLI. Each .books file contains several sections that use indentation to differentiate between keys and values in a very simple way. Headers use special indentation that's obviously distinguishable from entries. Here's an example.

Some Title 					2017
    Genre: Science Fiction
    ISBN: 1234-56789-123
    Pages: 420
  
Another Title					2017-2018
    Genre: Political fiction
    ISBN: 4321-98765-321
    Pages: 666

As you can see book-mode can also take into account that some books will be started in one year and finished in another. When generating graphs, books that span multiple years will be counted as 3/4 for both years, to make the graphs look as natural as possible. For raw numbers, it counts as 1 for both years because a book was indeed read, just not finished in time.

book-mode is free software, licensed under the "GPL-3" or later.