I'm currently trying to figure out how to corral my growing list of things that I'd like to read, some of which are books.
Having recently discovered goodreads, I've started scanning books into it, and have now set up a Zap to add them (and some metadata!) into a Trello list of unread things. Maybe I can do the same with long web articles, and manually add paper things.

Once I see them all in one place, the enormity of the task may provide its own solution. :-)

But my current piece of it is to understand the problem better...

@Philip: Or just replace Trello with Beeminder as the action! (Unless you also want books to show up in Trello anyway.)

EDIT: Accidentally said "trigger" instead of "action" at first. Beeminder can only be used as an action on Zapier currently.

To complete Danny's thought:

Another idea for beeminding GoodReads, though not pages read: https://zapier.com/zapbook/rss/trello/8512/books-from-goodreads-to-trello/

and then create a trello-fuelled beeminder goal:
https://www.beeminder.com/trello

Another idea for beeminding GoodReads, though not pages read: https://zapier.com/zapbook/rss/trello/8512/books-from-goodreads-to-trello/

I just noticed that suggestion: I love odometer goals when I have one specific book I want to finish, but I'd like to use a goodreads integration to cope with the fact that, as an English grad student, I usually have 10 to 20 books ongoing at a time, and I don't care which ones I'm reading as long as I'm making progress in them. It's possible the goodreads API makes it prohibitively difficult to determine 'how much bigger is this datapoint from the previous datapoint in the same book?' but I still haven't found a satisfactory workaround.

I've been using the Odometer trick and it works quite well for my reading lists, but it doesn't work well when I'm studying, since it often requires for me to read several books simultaneously. I prefer to track that with a timesheet.

Agreed! But did you know that you can create an Odometer goal (rather than Do More) in Beeminder and report your page number rather than number of pages read?