A Goodreads alternative · currently in pre-launch

For the part that happens between the books.

Your library can tell you what you read. RUNU is built to remember what happened while you were reading it — the sittings, the hours, the pace, the thought you had on page 132.

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Not yet on the App Store or Google Play. The waitlist is how you hear first.

One row on a shelf

Piranesi

Susanna Clarke

Finished · 26 Nov · ★★★★☆

That is a true record of three weeks of reading. It is also almost all of it that got kept.

Goodreads starts with the book.
RUNU starts with the reader.

A shelf is a list of outcomes. It knows the book was finished. It doesn't know the Tuesday you read forty-one pages in half an hour, or the Sunday you managed fourteen and gave up.

RUNU is built the other way round: it records the reading first — each session as it actually happened — and lets the library, the statistics and the Reading Journey be assembled from that. Which means the record it keeps of a book is not one line. It's everything that happened inside it.

That's the whole difference, and it's worth seeing rather than reading about.

Piranesi · Susanna Clarke

One line in a library.

Open it.

Everything that happened in here.

There was more to remember than “I read this.”

recorded

pages logged

pages an hour

Margin · page 132 · private

Still thinking about the statues. Put the book down and couldn't start anything else.

Five sittings across thirteen days. A shelf would have kept the last one.

Recorded reading sessions

Fri 14 Nov · 22m18 pages · Settled in
Sun 16 Nov · 41m37 pages · Drifted
Tue 18 Nov · 34m41 pages · Settled in
Sat 22 Nov · 1h1263 pages · Lost track of time
Wed 26 Nov · 28m25 pages · Settled in

What one book leaves behind

One book had five sittings in it. A year has hundreds.

Every session you record is a small, exact fact. Enough of them and RUNU can tell you when you actually read, how long a normal sitting is for you, and which weeks you disappeared into a book — never as a guess, only from what you recorded.

How a session is recorded → Where the numbers come from →

Median session: 34m
Reading days, last 30: 21
Longest run of days: 18
Reading you can see: 65 hours

Two different records

A product can only show you what it wrote down.

Not a scorecard — a difference in what each one keeps. The left column is what a Goodreads library export actually contains; the right is what RUNU records as you read.

In a Goodreads export

The books, and your verdict on them.

Title & author ISBN Shelves Your rating Your review Date added Date read Read count Page count

A complete, portable record of a reading life measured in finished books. For a great many readers that is exactly the right amount of record to keep.

Recorded by RUNU as you read

All of that, plus the reading itself.

Session start & end Duration Pages that sitting Reading pace Session Mood Reading Rhythm Streaks Personal records Margins Goals Reading Journey

Library, statuses, progress, ratings and reviews are all here too. The session-level record is the part that has to be captured while it's happening — which is why it can't be recovered later.

Goodreads import

Your history comes with you.

Export a CSV from Goodreads and import it into RUNU. Map your shelves onto RUNU statuses, preview exactly what will be added, and review the result before anything lands in your library. Years of reading arrive intact.

Everything up to today · imported

Books, shelves, ratings, reviews, dates read.

Flat on purpose. This is a faithful picture of what was recorded at the time — nothing is invented to fill it in.

From here · recorded by RUNU

Sessions, time, pace, mood, rhythm, Margins.

The part no export can carry, because it was never written down anywhere. It starts the first time you press start.

Nothing is thrown away, and nothing is faked. An imported book keeps its dates and its rating; it does not gain reading sessions it never had.

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CSV import only — RUNU does not connect to or sync with your Goodreads account. See exactly what a Goodreads import brings across →

An honest answer

RUNU isn't better. It's built for a different reason.

Goodreads may still be right for you if…

Its established, large-scale community is the reason you open it — the reviews, the ratings from millions of readers, the friends already there.
You want the broadest possible catalogue of other people's opinions before you pick your next book.
Finished, reading, want to read is genuinely all the record you want to keep — and there's nothing wrong with that.
You need it today. RUNU is still in pre-launch.

RUNU may be right for you if…

You'd rather remember reading than log it — the sittings, the hours, the weeks a book took over.
You want statistics with a provenance: every number traceable to a session you actually recorded.
You leave thoughts beside a book and want them findable years later, in Margins rather than in a notes app.
You don't want to start over: your Goodreads library imports, and the deeper record begins from there.

Where this is going

RUNU today records your own reading. Social experiences are part of where RUNU is headed — built on top of this richer record rather than instead of it, because a reading life is a better thing to share than a shelf. None of that exists in the product yet, and this page doesn't count it as a reason to switch.

Your shelf will still say you read it. RUNU will remember the rest.

RUNU is a personal reading tracker currently in pre-launch. Join the waitlist to hear when it opens — and bring your Goodreads library with you when it does.

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