How it works

Everything on the globe is a direct result of what you read. Here is exactly how.

1. Add a book

Search by title or author and pick a result, or add one by hand. Choose whether you have finished it, are reading it, want to read it, or did not finish it. The app looks up where the author was born (Open Library, then Wikidata); if it cannot find them, or you disagree, you can choose a place yourself. A book only grows something once you have logged some pages — a “want to read” book plants nothing yet.

2. Pages become Planting Power

Each book earns Planting Power equal to its pages read divided by 100, so a 300-page novel is worth 3. Power from every book by authors born in the same place adds up there.

The number of trees grows more slowly than the page count, so a single doorstopper cannot bury the map:

A single place holds at most 36 trees however much you read there. After that, more reading makes the trees greener and the lawn wider instead.

3. The lawn spreads

Where you have read, the barren land turns to grass. The more Planting Power a place has, the wider its lawn grows — roughly 2.5° of arc around the author's birthplace plus a bit more with the square root of the power. The grass takes the colour of the local climate: lush green in temperate forest, golden in savanna and desert country, and so on.

4. Trees: 118 real species

The trees are not generic. Each place grows the kinds of trees found in its part of the world — conifers in the far north, palms in the tropics, acacias on the savanna, cacti in the desert. Click a tree to identify its real species, see a photo and read a few facts. Every species you find is saved in the Nature Codex.

5. Flowers bloom at 300 pages

Trees appear from the very first page. Flowers are rarer: a place blooms once the books by its authors add up to 300 pages — one full-length novel, or two shorter ones. Its lawn then fills with wildflowers: 71 real species, from poppies and bluebells to proteas and lotus flowers, each native to somewhere on the map. More reading grows a fuller meadow.

6. Rivers come back to life

The world's 51 most famous rivers — the Nile, Amazon, Yangtze, Danube, Mississippi and more — start as dry riverbeds that you can see outlined on the map. Read books by authors who were born near a river and water returns to that stretch, from a trickle to a full flow. Filling a great river completely takes reading all along its course. Once a river has water, its story unlocks: a description and three facts.

7. Three ways to see your world

• The Garden — the default: lawns, trees, flowers and rivers on a lit globe.
• Night Satellite — a moonlit globe where your reading glows as lights.
• Political — countries you have read from are coloured by how many pages, with borders and names. Click a country to see what you read from it.

Zoom in on a place and the globe stops turning, so it holds still while you look. Click a lawn to see what you have read from there.

8. Goals, streaks and stats

• A yearly goal in books (and optionally pages), with a ring that shows whether you are ahead of or behind an even pace.
• Streaks for days in a row with reading logged, and a timer for reading sessions.
• Stats: pace by month, a calendar heatmap, average rating, longest book, and breakdowns by genre, biome and continent — for any year or all time.
• A shareable “year in books” card, and a picture of your own globe.

9. Ranks and achievements

Your lifetime pages set your reading rank:

There are also 37 achievements across eight categories — reading volume, geography, diversity, flowers, rivers, wonders, streaks and Planting Power — from “First Sprout” to “Around the World”.

10. Your data

Your library is stored in your browser. Download a backup file from Settings now and then, restore it on any device, or export a spreadsheet (CSV) of your books. See the privacy policy for details.

Try it