Good morning, Boundlings!

I know we’ve been very excited about the new stats features, and I’ve seen several discussions on some confusion when it comes to pages read not being accurate.

I thought I would provide a step by step visual guide for anyone needing help retroactively fixing their page counts so that they have an accurate reflection!

**edited for reflect the advice from @bbyoozi! Thank you!!

Step 1: Go to your finished shelf.

Step 2: Click on the reading dates for your book. This is the step where you also need to note the total number number of pages in the book. If they are not listed, you will want to either check with your book copy or find on an alternative source such as Goodreads or Google.

Step 3: Select the edit button.

Step 4: Unless you are editing reading dates, you will be clicking “next” for both your start date and finish date.

Step 5: This is where you will add the total pages for the book. For example, if you noted in step 5 that the total book pages for your book is 356 - that’s the number you will add to this page count. This counter is not for the total pages you read during that date, it’s the total for the entire book.

Once you’ve added the book’s total page count, you will see the pages reflected in your stats. You can also use this same process to add minutes listened for audiobooks. You can also choose to have audiobooks counted as pages read if you prefer. It’s up to you!

Credit to @mom.is.a.geek for going on this learning journey with me 🤣

I hope this helps someone! 🩷

I keep falling for a trap - as I’m sure you’ll be able to tell from the post title - I see a book, a romance or fantasy or anything in that vibe, and see what looks like sapphic characters [as implied by the genre choice] and upon closer inspection, I find out its a straight romance.

For example, I keep seeing The Princess Knight by Cait Jacobs and despite reading the synopsis I keep thinking the cover is femme/masc sapphic characters and get very disappointed when I remember it’s not gay 😔

I have two questions for you all:

1. Please tell me this happens to other people and it’s not just me seeing/hoping for sapphic love where it isn’t

2. Does anyone have any sapphic book recommendations where from the cover it’s obvious?

[EDIT: For clarity, upon further research The Princess Knight is intended as bi4bi m/f and the author has said that they intend for everyone in this world to be ‘queer until proven straight’ with room for interpretation]

the pizza hut book it program is a core memory of my childhood, and i think it would be really fun to do something like that but instead of getting a personal pan pizza every time i meet my reading goal i'll get like a cute charm to put on my reading journal. or maybe pagebound merch? just a little treat or something to celebrate me meeting my goal. and maybe that will motivate me to meet that goal multiple times! any other ideas for a fun little treat to reward yourself for meeting your reading goal?

update after some brainstorming:

welcome to maomi's bookit program!

where i, an adult, give myself little treats for little accomplishments! i'm putting this here so if anyone else wants to join me in this little venture you can! also feel free to riff on this if you want!

personally, i'm not going to be deviating too much from the original pizza hut formula. i'm going to have a set goal, and every time i meet that goal this year, i'm going to give myself a little reward.

my reading goal for 2026 is 15 books. each time i meet that goal, i'm going to make/get myself a little charm or a stamp for my reading journal. if i manage to meet this goal 4 times (60 books) i'll be getting myself either a big midori stamp or a sock yarn from my local yarn store.

rules (to de-incentivize myself from gaming the system):

1. i need to read books at my level (thank you meggirl94 for bringing this up).
2. short stories and novellas count, but i need to read more of them to equal one book. so 3 short stories = 1 book, and 2 novellas = 1 book.
3. unfinished books from the previous year don't count (so if i start a book end of 2025 and finish early 2026, it doesn't count). books need to be read entirely in the year of 2026.
4. no repeats. i can reread books from before 2026, but the same book will not count twice within the year.

tracking: to keep things kind of simple i'll be making a punch card (thank you for the idea thedimpledteacher) and using the pagebound counter to help me keep track of things. if i read a short story or novella, i'll mark it in my journal and punch once i hit 3 or 2 of them respectively.

if anyone has any other suggestions please feel free to drop them below!

Apologies if this doesn’t quite fit as a Pagebound Club topic, but I figured that, given how passionate most Boundlings are about libraries and about the broad use of AI, this could be of interest to our community here.

Last week, I attended a conference for academic librarians—the Ex Libris Users of North America (ELUNA) conference—and was disturbed by the amount of AI shilling I heard there. I know a lot of librarians/library workers use Pagebound, and I wanted to hear y’all’s experience with this: is it common for your colleagues to use AI in their work? How is AI generally viewed at your library, or by other library professionals you know? How do you feel about AI use in library services/systems, and do you have suggestions for how to respectfully engage in conversations with coworkers about AI’s negative impacts? (I very much welcome thoughts and observations from folks who don’t work in libraries, too! Especially if you regularly patronize a library.)

Some context: Ex Libris develops/sells library software and management systems. They host an annual conference attended by hundreds of their users—predominantly academic librarians/library workers—which is, of course, a chance for them to push more products on us, but it’s largely a professional conference for academic librarians to network, crowdsource knowledge, and generally talk library shop. Most of the conference is devoted to “break out” sessions designed and led by librarians on topics of their choosing.

Given that Ex Libris itself is basically a bunch of software developers and sales/marketing teams, I fully expected to hear AI shilling from Ex Libris representatives at the conference. (They’ve already deployed AI “helpers” for their various systems.) But what surprised and mildly disturbed me was how many of the librarians leading the break-out sessions were promoting AI in their work. I must’ve attended 15 to 20 sessions over the conference, and I heard AI tools mentioned positively at almost all of them (and I actively avoided the sessions that were specifically about AI tools). Not just Ex Libris AI tools, either: I couldn’t stop hearing about ChatGBT, Gemini, etc. and how much easier they made back-end library work. The overall climate of the conference felt very pro-AI, and I guess it just shocks me that people who are essentially professional researchers/information experts would embrace AI to this degree with zero real acknowledgment of the environmental harm it causes, or the ethical nightmare of AI development and training models.

I’ve been feeling kinda down about this since I returned from the conference, so I wanted to hear from other library Boundlings—what’s your experience been? Have you seen a similar broad acceptance of AI in library services, or was my experience perhaps (hopefully) an outlier?

Not me joining this quest even though I haven’t finished a romance book in weeks (maybe even months) and my most current read is literally about dinosaurs🥲🙂‍↕️ (I just really need that cute little flamingo badge OKAY)

I'm mostly asking because I have encountered books on here I have never seen in the wild, library, bookshops, on blogs, on social media, etc. Books that are super niche or even unhinged (non-derogatory). I'll look at some niche lists and think "how did you even find those books?"

I would not have known that a Minion spice book existed if it wasn't for PB 😂

I just got back into reading more actively last year and before that I wasn't in much bookish spaces other than bookstores/libraries and IG reels. I had storygraph which I'd just review books but never had goodreads. I have found so many cool and interesting books here on PB, either through Quests, Lists, or people I follow. And I really think PB helped me become a more active reader. And also introduced me to so many genres I would've normally not have tried.

So I'm really curious on where you found books before PB, or where you still find books in addition to PB? And/or if PB has also helped you expand the amount of books you find.