Plotted.io

All the best books have a map at the front, right? At least, all of my favorites. I love two genres: fantasy/scifi in an invented world (Narnia, Earthsea, etc) or a travelogue in an exotic place. Either way, I’m always flipping back to the front of the book to peek at the map.

But! I also often want to annotate those maps - or in some cases, I want to supply my own. So: I made plotted.io. It’s a simple little web app that lets you add maps from books and annotate them.

You can upload an image of a map - like the drawing on those first pages - of the fantasy world. Or if the story you’re interested in happens in the ‘real world’ (even in fiction), you can choose a ‘real world’ map to annotate.

I have a personal reading journal site, but that’s only for me. I’m the only one who can post there. But Plotted is for everyone! Anybody can grab an account and add a map.

This is a little half-baked for now, but it absolutely scratches my itch. I can:

• upload a map
• associate it with a book
• draw lines on the map
• add pins on the map
• and label things
• and share that map with others

Is this going to satisfy the real obsessives? Probably not. For fiction worlds where there is a deep bench of expertise - Middle-Earth, Westeros, etc - there’s already going to be some other mapping project. But for the rest of us, we can use this.