2024 Reading Wrapped

[leah_ackerman]

Hi All! My name is Leah Ackerman and I work on the Education team here at Airtable. When I joined the team earlier this year I decided to move my book review tracking into Airtable as a way to help myself become more familiar with the product (you can see the public interfaces here and here). As a tribute to Spotify Wrapped, I decided to create my own version using my app, so thought it would be fun to share here as well 🙂 Maybe a bit of a deviation from the typical use case, but IMO still worth it. I've attached some screenshots, but you can see the whole thing here - it's just over two minutes long. Happy viewing!

[kev]

Thanks for sharing, @leah_ackerman—this is AWESOME 🔥

Although I obviously loooove seeing how others leverage Airtable to innovate and transform their workflows from a professional perspective, this is a great reminder for all of the fun, exciting things we can accomplish with Airtable in our personal lives as well.

I wonder what other passion projects and personal use-cases may be out there in the Community 👀

[matthew_b]

Super cool!

[MaddieJ]

As someone who experienced a serious reading slump this year, this is giving me major fomo and inspo to get back at it! Thanks for sharing @leah_ackerman!  

[kuovonne]

Thanks for sharing. Building personal projects like this is a great way to learn Airtable.

Out of curiosity, what did you use to track you book reviews prior to Airtable?

[GCheung]

This is so cool!! I'm feeling inspired 😍

[leah_ackerman]

I just used a Google sheet separated into tabs by year (here's the original version). You can see I wasn't tracking nearly as much as I am now (library books vs purchases, page count, etc), but it was enough for me to look back at what I'd read in one place vs. these reviews just living in my Instagram stories. I much prefer the version now! Not only is it prettier, I also looove having control over my own data experience, so I can see in realtime my comparisons YoY in book reviews (how many A's did I give this year vs. last year, for example). That sort of insight is honestly the primary reason I don't use Goodreads - I wanted more ownership in how my reviews were structured.

[kuovonne]

@leah_ackermanI totally agree with you about the benefits of having ownership over one's data experience!

Thanks for sharing the original Google sheet. A side-by-side comparison really showcases why how the Airtable base is superior to the Google sheet for this use case. In addition to all of the other benefits, isn't it nice to know that in a few weeks, you won't have to create a new tab for 2025! You can just continue to add new records.