not op but just looking at the tag I’d say its often not clear what the author means—the tag is just used with no context on something which is not/does not contain a podfic. However some do seem to be using read as a shorthand for “beta read”, aka, the author self-beta’ed the fic as in this set of tags: «Not Beta Read, Actually kinda beta read?, Read by the Author» so I presume that’s the general source of the confusion