About ReadingRate

ReadingRate is a reading analytics platform. It answers the two questions every serious reader asks before opening a book — how hard is this? and how long will it take me? — and then keeps answering them more precisely as you read.

What it does

Every book in the catalog carries a difficulty score built from nine dimensions: vocabulary, sentence structure, abstraction, and information density on the technical side; narrative indirection, symbolic density, ironic distance, resolution withholding, and structural complexity on the interpretive side. Alongside it sits a literary regard score — canonical status, critical acclaim, influence, and the author's standing — so you can weigh a book's demands against what it gives back.

The tracker turns page counts into hours at your measured pace. You log reading day by day on iOS or the web, save quotes, and watch your own patterns surface: pace by genre, by author, by time of day. You can also connect Claude or WhatsApp through the ReadingRate MCP server and log by chat.

Who builds it

ReadingRate is built by Simon Stawski. It grew out of Simon's book club — years of reading difficult books in public, first as a personal reading log, then as scoring for everything in it, and eventually as the analytics platform it is now. The conviction behind it hasn't changed: life's too short to read bad books, and knowing what a book asks of you is the first step to reading more of the good ones.

Get in touch

Questions, corrections to a score, or a book we should cover: readingrate.com/contact.