Three Questions with Italic Type Founder Emily Achler

She’s building a Goodreads alternative

Emily Achler is on a mission to help people build stronger reading habits and connections with the books they're reading. In 2020, she launched Italic Type, a website (and soon-to-be-app) designed to help readers find new books, keep lists of what they have read and what they want to read, make notes on their recent reads and connect with other readers.

I started using Italic Type last year and really like it. It's helped me wrap my head around my giant TBR and keep notes on what I appreciated about different books.

Emily, who previously worked in climate tech, is now working full time on Italic Type to bring it to more book lovers.

Emily and I chatted about her endeavor, Italic Type's recent State of the Reader Survey and more. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Italic Type wants to help readers build better reading habits. What do those look like?

I'm sure you're familiar with Goodreads. When designing Italic Type, my team wanted to think through if we were going to reinvent a platform that helped readers engage with books, how would we do it? That's what kicked off Italic Type.

So, when we talk about building stronger reading habits, one of those is having a place online to track your reading that's not cluttered with other ads, sponsored posts or big social feeds. That's one piece of building stronger reading habits. 

Another aspect is encouraging people not to be so focused on the quantity of books that they're reading, but to take pleasure in the experience and focus on what you're learning and feeling. So, we have different tools and features in the platform to encourage people to take notes, take pictures of pages and engage with discussion groups. Those are just some ways we hope to encourage stronger reading habits and deeper connections.

Italic Type recently ran a State of the Reader survey. What did you learn from it?

Many people reported they were reading more during the pandemic, reading different genres or participating in different sorts of book activities. Less than 8% of our survey participants said they read less during the pandemic. A little over half reported that they were reading more.

I hesitate to use the term 'silver lining,' but the destruction of our day-to-day patterns opened people up to reading during different times of the day, reading different kinds of books or trying new activities.

Many people reported they decided just to read what makes them happy. It's tempting online to see everyone is talking about the six books, or so, that you have to read. Instead, people are reading what they enjoy.

When you conduct interviews with bookish folks, you ask them to recommend three books off the beaten path that forged them into the person they are today. I love that question, so I have to ask you.

One would have to be The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster. It's one of my all-time favorites from childhood. I re-read it recently, and I love how it stokes imagination and this idea that if you're a curious person, you can't ever be bored because there's always something to discover.

The second book I would select is called Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman. It's a critique of the modern media environment. He wrote it in the '90s, so it's a bit old, but everything he talks about stays true today. The main thing he critiqued in that book is television, the way it changed how we process and receive information. That's led to this path of everything needing to have entertainment value and how that's not the best thing that's ever happened.

The last one I would mention is one of the novels that I loved in the last few years: Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk. It's fantastic. I loved the character. She developed a writing style with a murder mystery twist, and it brought all these different, interesting elements together. It was just an absolute pleasure to read.

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Thanks to Emily for talking with me. You can check out Italic Type here and follow her Twitter.

And, now, I’ll ask you Emily’s question. What are three books that helped to form you?

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