Publishing read posts is still pretty new, so there's a lot of experimenting and some more manual steps currently. That's definitely not the end goal, though. We want it to be as simple as possible for everyone to use, but we have to start somewhere.

If you haven't seen it yet, Quill is an app that makes it easy to publish different types of posts to your site without manually writing any microformats. Earlier this year I made some progress on adding read posts to Quill, but ran into some issues that needed to be solved in the microformats first (I was getting a bit ahead of myself). Publishing manually for a while helps us iron things out, try new things more easily, and catch issues.

cc http://boffosocko.com/2017/12/11/an-update-to-read-posts-for-physical-books/