Leaf Reading Club

Track your reading and share it with your circle, book by book.

Leaf. Make reading count

Leaf is a mobile app built on a simple observation: nearly every popular activity now has a dedicated app and community layer except reading. Runners have Strava, hikers have AllTrails, film buffs have Letterboxd, but readers have had no equivalent place to track their progress and find each other. Leaf is designed to fill that gap.

How it works At the center of Leaf is a session timer. You pick the book you're reading, optionally set an aim, and hit start. The clock runs against the page you're on, not a social feed. When you stop, Leaf automatically logs the session's duration, pages read, pace (pages per hour), and how far through the book you are. Nothing needs to be entered manually.

From there, you choose what happens to that session:

• Keep it private, and it still counts toward your personal stats.
• Post it to the feed, where friends and followers can see it and react ("leaf" it).

Community features

• Clubs: groups organized around a single book, which can be public or private and can run entirely online or as in person meetups.
• Challenges: shared, time boxed goals (for example, "300 pages in August") where you can see your own progress alongside everyone else attempting the same challenge.

Personal record Every user gets a running ledger of their reading life: total hours read, current day streak, and a history of every book finished. This turns reading into something with visible, cumulative progress rather than something that just quietly happens or doesn't.

Why it exists (mission) Leaf's founders point to real declines in reading engagement, citing NEA data showing a drop in the share of U.S. adults reading at least one book per year, and national test data showing continued declines in reading scores among students. They argue the fix isn't more content, it's more culture around reading: people to read alongside, visible progress, and low pressure ways to participate. They point to groups like Silent Book Club, which has more than 2,000 chapters worldwide, as proof people already want this. The stated design goal is to make reading feel social and sustainable without turning it into homework; challenges and stats are meant to encourage people to come back, not to grade how they read.