I'd like if the game just automatically had you read books you haven't read yet when you pick them up. I think it would be better if you could just pick them up like anything else then automatically open the read screen if you haven't read it yet. That saves some clicks. Part of the coding would necessarily mean the game knows which books have been read, so you could show that when you find a new book when hovering over it (e.g. "Book 1 (Unread)" or "Book 1 (You read this already)" or something like that).
