It could be kind of lame to poke fun at a site that I don’t use (anymore), but I find this funny enough to share: Goodreads has started changing and updating their site last year, but apparently they’ve broken a ton of things in the process, and now they’ve published an announcement with the list of 12 bugs they’re (supposedly) trying to deal with.
In short, literally the most essential functions aren’t working. In the iOS app some people can’t shelve books. On Android people can’t see all reviews. On desktop the search and sorting are completely random, the default editions that represent each book are also apparently random, though it seems the selection favours the editions in any language other than English, preferably also in a non-Latin script. The database is borderline impossible to navigate.
So if you search for Harry Potter, the first result is Random Harry Potter Facts You Probably Don’t Know: 154 Fun Facts and Secret Trivia. If you open the page of William Shakespeare, the first books that are presented to you are Romeo and Juliet in English, Hamlet in Italian, and Macbeth in Arabic. And after a while instead of showing his actual plays, the site just lists weird collected editions such as Romeo and Juliet; Hamlet; Othello; An Index (The Works of Shakespear, Vol. 8) by some scammy publisher that prints PDFs from Google Books.
I’ve spent enough time on GR to see how it’s held together by duct tape and inertia, and now it really seems to be crashing down. Still, kudos to the admins who are keeping up with the recent trends in technology, such as actively ruining your website, as also seen on reddit and Twitter. In fact I’d say GR has better chances of actually dying (i.e. having a massive user drain) than the other two sites.
Is there anyone here who’s still active on GR? Not trying to judge, but I really have to ask -what’s making you stay there? Are the alternatives too lacking in book data/users?
The story behind this is that Goodreads is actually owned by Amazon. They acquired it a long time ago hoping to use it as a way to drive book sales. The tl;dr is that it didn’t work, Goodreads never made money, and over the past 2-3 years Amazon has slashed its budget.
The site is now run by a skeleton crew that aren’t enough people to even keep the basics running. Amazon is happy to watch it wither and die, its cheaper than shutting it down.
over the past 2-3 years Amazon has slashed its budget
The site is now run by a skeleton crew
TBH it felt that way ever since I registered there, much more than 2-3 years ago. It’s been largely stagnating for over a decade with regards to design and functionality. It’s impressive if they somehow managed to reduce their budget even more and employ even fewer people. Which makes the recent half-baked redesign and similar interventions even weirder, they clearly don’t have the capabilities to do them properly…
Goodreads never made money
Was it meant to, though? I assume Amazon planned it to work (dunno if it really did) as a platform to advertise the books sold on Amazon.
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It’s also a competitor to Amazon Kindle
How is Goodreads a competitor to Kindle? The kindle is literally how I interact with Goodreads. It automatically marks what I’m reading and when I complete books, it is where I give star ratings, etc.
Shouting out Bookwyrm. It’s a fediverse version of Goodreads. You can even import your Goodreads shelves into it.
It interops with Mastodon and Kbin.
I just started migrating to bookwyrm, and I like it so far, I second your shout out.
So I’m on kbin.social. How might I go about finding Bookwyrm content through the federated services? I see that I can join Biookwyrm instances but I’d like to figure out how to just have Bookwyrm content gathered into my feed as it were.
I tried briefly to find that info on the Bookwyrm site but couldn’t locate it.
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Ah, ok. So Bookwyrm is closer to Mastodon than kbin in regards to subscribing to a magazine vs following an account. I’ll have to try that out. Thanks for the info!
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Huh. That’s odd. I’ve mentioned a couple of books via kbin and they were already in my “shelf” on bookwyrm.
I’ll be checking this one out. Thanks.
I’ve moved away from GR over to StoryGraph for the most part. Found it suits my use case quite well.
Thanks for this. I’ve been looking for something to replace Goodreads with for a while now. Just checked out StoryGraph and it looks really good and was easy to port over my lists from GR. Liking the experience so far.
But what are the chances that StoryGraph will undergo enshittification?
I love the Storygraph. The stats are awesome and have helped keep me interested in reading at times when my attention has waned.
I’m still there because my friends are mostly.
So i actually only started using it this year to track a reading challenge (finally started reading again after years out of the habit), but my wife’s been using it for years. I think she uses it because it has a massive record of all of her books read and reviews.
When I started using goodreads, I decided to go through and check off books I had read in the past to add to my “library”. Note that when you do this from Goodreads’ initial setup, it doesn’t give you titles, only the covers. A while later my wife was looking through and asked “why did you list that you read the sheet music for Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire?” I hadn’t, but it happens to use the same cover as the actual book, so I would’ve had no way of knowing that was what I clicked initially. Other things I mistakenly listed myself as having read were the Game of Thrones RPG book, a pop-up book of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, the (World of) Hunger Games (Companion Guide), and I’m only remembering the high-profile ones.
Similar reason for me, I’ve been using it for years and it has a record of all the books I’ve read and when. It’s easy to just pop on the site when I finish a book and record it.
Recently I’ve requested my data from them and got a zip full of stuff, the books seem to be in there so in theory I could migrate to another service. Or simply use any app that can record a timestamp and a piece of text, or even just a text file.
For this basic purpose it’s true I don’t need GR, I know which book I’m reading, I don’t need to look it up. But GR has value in looking up books by the same author, books in the same series, seeing what people think of a book or series so I can prioritize future reads, following an author etc. There is value in GR, too bad it’s being squandered.
I took that zip file and imported it at Storygraph. That site isn’t perfect either but at least it’s building up instead of falling down, and seems to have heart. Also its recommendations, while hit and miss, are a lot better than what Goodreads has offered in the last couple years.
The two things I occasionally go back to Goodreads for at this point are the list of releases by authors I’m following, as you mention, and an FSF book club I’m in over there. That said I haven’t bothered tracking my books on GR for a while now. I really can’t see it turning around any time soon, especially now it’s Amazon owned, and Storygraph deals with that aspect of things very well.
I’ve also seen Bookwyrm mentioned around here lately as a Fediverse alternative. I’m not familiar with it or its features, but it’d bear looking at for comparison.
I’ve spent enough time on GR to see how it’s held together by duct tape and inertia
GR has always felt like this to me, a legacy app that barely changes with time. I still use it simply for checking general ratings and keeping track of what I’ve read, but I’m old school I guess. What do people actually use them for other than these purposes? I had been using Reddit for book recommendations for as long I can remember.
I don’t really understand how such a widely used site can break a core functionally (like search), and not know how to fix it? Crazy to me…
Caused me to check out StoryGraph, and it seems pretty nice, or at least the core functionally works well 😂. There are some strange UX choices with how Friends / Follow functions and they are also lacking an API for 3rd party integration. Solid alternative though, especially with the ability to import from GR.
It’s owned by Amazon and they just don’t give a shit about it anymore would be my guess. There is no way with all of their resources they should be having any issues with it.
Something updated and made a lot of plugins/addons/packages incompatible is my guess.
Like when Wordpress used to update and suddenly 20% of the internet would look funny because their themes were no longer compatible. Or when the guy who made left-pad got screwed and retaliated by deleting it, and so so many things stopped working.
Downside of modern programming using so many plugins, is eventually they will start becoming incompatible. So you need someone on staff who can identify and implement new solutions when that happens, and they seem to have fired whoever that would have been.
I guess to me, it isn’t strange that something like that could break (I see that all the time). It is that they broke something as essential as search, and didn’t immediately rollback whatever changes they pushed out. Unless it has been a gradual / over-time issue, that has gotten worse? I only remember it working properly one day, then being unusable the next though.
I’ve found Goodreads to be a generally dependable source for synopses.
And that’s it. I don’t consider reading to be a competition to be won or lost, so all of the progress tracking stuff is pointless at best, and the reviews are some startlingly awful mix of egos vying for attention, edgelords trying to demonstrate how hiply counterculture they are and people who apparently can’t even manage to communicate using words.
It’s likely that if/when it closes down, I won’t even notice.
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Bookwyrm is nice, you can import your Goodreads history too
But it really needs apps
Book Tracker on iOS is fantastic for my needs. Not really any social features, but I don’t need those.
Come to storygraph its great :)
Never used it as I don’t like my data being mined and sold off to make Bezos richer.
Tbh good reads has always been a little garbage. The tracking features were nice, but I don’t think I ever found a decent recommendation through Goodreads.
I’m at a point in my life where I almost exclusively read cheesy historical romance. Romance.io has been a great resource for finding books and tracking my tbr/completed books. You can also search by trope, which is great when you are in the mood for something specific. I wonder if other genres have similar sites.
For non-romance reading, I hate to say it but booktube and booktok have been the best resources. There was a trend for a while where people ranked classic books, and I was able to find some great booktubers whose taste aligns nearly perfectly with my own. I know someone who ranks Franny and Zooey at S tier and The Scarlet Letter at F tier is going to have some great recs for me.
What a useful site! Thank you for bringing this to my attention.
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I’m hoping this thread can provide some good alternatives for keeping a running “want to read” and “have read” list, because that’s all I use GR for, and I do like that it syncs with my kindle and updates that automatically when I finish a book. The reviews are typical social media junk, not very useful for finding books to read.
However, I do enjoy how they do the occasional giveaway. I got a free copy of Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower that way.
I just recently learned that OpenLibrary.org has a similar “want to read”/“currently reading”/“already read” feature, so I may migrate my lists over there when I have time.
