2024 in books

Douglas Hill •

In 2024, I read about as many books as in the three preceding years combined. This is a post in two parts. The first part is about trends in my reading habits that helped me to read so much more and a complaint about big companies. Jump ahead if you just want to check out my favourite books from last year.

Reading trends

What helped me settle into a habit of reading such that I tripled the number of books I made it through?

Adding audiobooks

The biggest contributor to reading a lot more was consistently having an audiobook in progress. This listening time used to go towards podcasts, mostly while driving. Podcasts are nice, and I still listen to them a fair amount — for example, while cooking. I like having the choice of whether I want to listen to something more or less involved.

Audiobooks haven’t replaced reading written books at all. These are two distinct activities: it’s not as if, while driving, you can choose to read a book instead of listening, and I also don’t sit down to read and then end up listening to an audiobook instead. Therefore, I generally kept one of each type of book on the go at a time.

My preference is to read fiction and listen to non-fiction. I can’t exactly pin down why. It might be related to how listening while driving is an efficient use of time during the day, so it should be ‘useful’, while reading is for leisure in the evenings. I think you can learn and develop yourself through fiction as much as through non-fiction, so I don’t feel this reasoning holds up to logical scrutiny.

Apple Books dissatisfaction

I use Apple devices (I've never owned a Kindle), so Apple Books has been my default choice for electronic books. If a big tech company is going to take a cut of my book purchases, I'd rather it be Apple than Amazon. However, my sense is that the Apple Books app has been getting worse each year after peaking in iOS 15.

The library part of the app feels surprisingly overwhelming, considering that I don’t have that many books. I noted above how reading books and listening to audiobooks are distinct activities for me, so combining these in one app is unhelpful and messy. (It would be cool if Apple leveraged its integration to have a feature where both types of books were bought together and you could seamlessly switch modes. That’s the sort of thing not many companies could do.)

The more important part of the app is the reading experience since that’s where I want to spend most of my time in the app. Except for lines of text being too long in some configurations, the Apple Books reading experience was pretty good up to iOS 15.

The old Apple Books had a small number of well-considered appearance settings. In a light environment, I’d use the light appearance, which used black text on a white background for the highest possible contrast. When reading in a dark room, I’d use the dark appearance, which used grey text on a fully black background, reducing contrast to keep the amount of light emitted by the screen comfortably low. These two options did exactly what I wanted.

Now we have themes, which each adapt between the system light and dark mode, but you can’t pick a different light and dark theme. None of the themes match how Apple Books used to work. The first theme, ‘Original’, is the closest, but it uses pure white text in dark mode, which isn’t as comfortable to read in a dark room. This means that to set up the appearance I want, I have to constantly change the theme. And changing the theme also undesirably changes the font, which causes re-rendering and alters where lines break, so it doesn’t feel smooth. This is the worst of both worlds: the settings are more complicated and I have to keep fiddling with them to achieve the setup I want.

But it’s convenient to switch themes, right? On tapping to show controls in the older version of the app, a toolbar would appear with normal-sized buttons, providing easy access to most functionality you’d want while reading. Now, showing controls presents a single tiny button, which then displays a menu. I understand the appeal of a minimal look so you can focus on the words, but why require a tap to show controls and then still be really minimal? I tapped because I wanted the controls! This new design feels fiddly.

This all shouldn’t be too surprising: in the short term, it benefits Apple if you buy more books rather than read books you already own, and this seems to have influenced the priorities of this app.

I haven’t found the user experience in the Kindle app compelling either.

This year, I invested in seeking out ways to distance myself from big tech for books. Sadly, it’s not so simple to just switch apps due to digital rights management (DRM).

Moving away from DRM

Given my dissatisfaction with books from Apple and Amazon — both from a practical user experience perspective and in the sense that I’d prefer more of my money went to smaller businesses (ideally directly to authors) — I've been exploring alternatives.

The central problem is DRM. Whether Apple or Amazon, it’s not right that the same enormous company should control both the sale of books and the environment in which you read or listen to them. That might be an agreeable deal if the reading experience was stellar, but this isn’t the case. I only use these apps because of DRM and the consolidated market resulting in limited consumer choice.

For buying DRM-free audiobooks, Libro.fm (referral link) has been working well. The pricing structure looks complex but boils down to £8.50 per book as long as you don’t read more than two audiobooks per month on average. (Buy the two-credits-per-month subscription. Pause or cancel the subscription whenever you have enough credits. If you need more than two audiobooks per month, you pay a higher rate to buy books without credits.)

To take advantage of audiobooks from Libro.fm being DRM-free, I’ve been making choosing between audiobooks and podcasts even easier by putting them all in the same app. I download the file from the Libro.fm website, then upload that file on the Overcast website, then download it again in the Overcast app. This is a little convoluted, but having a single app for listening to everything is working really well for me.

I haven’t found an option for buying modern DRM-free written books except for rare indie publishers like Matt Gemmell. This has led me to mostly reading copyright-expired works from the wonderful Standard Ebooks.

Everything I complained about relating to the reading experience in Apple Books is addressed exactly to my liking in my reading app, so it’s naturally the app I want to use for books. I’ve been experimenting with EBUP support in builds for my own use, and while the opening performance needs some tweaks, overall I love it. (The public version can already show the single page online books from Standard Ebooks.) Having a great digital reading experience has encouraged me to make reading a more sticky habit.

Favourite books

Moving on to the more fun stuff. Here are seven books I particularly enjoyed in 2024. These are in three categories but not ranked within the categories.

Honourable mentions

Favourites

Book of the year

And now for something completely different. Never mind all this talk of DRM and memoirs. My book of 2024 is:

East by Meera Sodha: Yes, it’s a good old-fashioned hardback recipe book! I received this for Christmas 2023, and it’s been a delight. This is only paper book I’ve used this year, but I’ve used it a lot throughout the year. I leave notes, so it’s starting to look like the Half-Blood Prince’s copy of Advanced Potion-Making, but with more onions, garlic, chilli and ginger.

A few favourite recipes from East are:

Here’s to another year of good food and books!