This one is not about research. It is about something I believe, and I want to be clear that it is a belief.

Where a child’s reading goes

Think about where the record of your child’s reading lives right now. Some of it is on a read-a-thon form that went back to school. Some is in a library’s summer program that closed in August. Some is in a classroom app that belongs to this year’s teacher. Some is in nobody’s records at all, because it happened at bedtime.

Every one of those is useful while it lasts. Then the program ends, the school year turns over, the family moves, and the log goes with it. By the time a child is twelve, years of reading have been recorded in pieces by half a dozen organisations, and the child owns none of it.

We noticed this the ordinary way. A read-a-thon form came home from our seven-year-old’s class, the kind where you log your reading for a few weeks and hand it back. It made us ask where all the other reading we were already doing was being kept. The answer was nowhere.

What I believe

Learning is personal. It belongs first to the learner, and then to the people closest to them. A school or a program is an important part of that life, not the container for it.

So a reading history should stay with the reader. A school or a library should be able to take part in it for a while. They should not end up owning it.

I do not have a study that proves children read more when they own their record, and I will not pretend to. This is a principle, and it is the one Readnauts is built on.

How we built for it

A book is logged once, to the reader. Every book goes into that reader’s own library. It does not belong to a challenge.

A quest is only a view. A family quest or a school read-a-thon is a window over the library for a set of dates. When the quest ends, the window closes and the books stay exactly where they were.

One book can count in many places. The same book can count toward the family quest and the class read-a-thon. Nobody has to log it twice.

Sharing is narrow. When a family joins a shared quest with others, the other families see a reader’s display name, avatar and reading totals. They never see titles or the library.

You can always take it with you. You can export your family’s data as a file, as a spreadsheet, or as a printable report for a teacher or a librarian. If your trial ends or you cancel, your account becomes read-only, and you can still see everything and still export it.

What is still imperfect

I would rather tell you this than have you find it. Today the record lives in your family’s account, which a grown-up holds, and the export covers the whole family together. A child does not yet have a record they can carry off on their own. For a twelve-year-old that is as it should be. For a reading life that is meant to last decades, it is the part we have not finished.

Why it is worth doing

A list of every book you read between five and eighteen is a strange and wonderful thing to own. It is a map of who you were becoming. Most of us do not have one, because nobody thought it was theirs to keep.