I've read a brilliant article that Sarah Manavis wrote. The article is named Why Goodreads is bad for books, and is really worth your time.
I quite liked Goodreads when they kicked off:
Goodreads started off the way you might think: two avid readers, in the mid-Noughties, wanting to build space online for people to track, share, and talk about books they were reading. Husband and wife Otis and Elizabeth Chandler say they initially launched the platform in 2007 to get recommendations from their literary friends. But it was something many others wanted, too: by 2013, the site had swelled to 15 million users. That year Goodreads it was bought by Amazon, an acquisition Wired magazine called “quaint”, given Amazon’s roots in bookselling before it became the store that sold everything. Even then, many Goodreads users already felt stung by the tech giant which had, a year earlier, changed the terms of its huge books dataset (which Goodreads used to identify titles). Goodreads had been forced to move to a different data source, called Ingram; the move caused users to lose large amounts of their reading records.
@NewStatesman https://www.newstatesman.com/science-tech/social-media/2020/08/better-goodreads-possible-bad-for-books-storygraph-amazon
Goodreads is now up to 90 million users. Who'd thunk it?
My main problem is that Goodreads is owned by Amazon, who don't give a toss about readers. They care about shipping units, about selling, and about building concentration camps for ICE, and for fucking up the lives of authors. They're going to build a fort in Sweden, where I live, and every publisher is—reasonably—going haywire over it.
My other problems include these:
- Goodreads's mobile app is severely outdated and is seldom updated
- Goodreads's site is severely outdated
- Goodreads's recommendations engine is so completely off the rails that I don't care about it anymore
When I tweeted about wanting to leave Goodreads, I received an avalanche of recommendations for The StoryGraph from people across the English-speaking world. Though still in development, it already has tens of thousands of members, attracted by the promise of a place beyond Goodreads. Users tell me this platform could be our way out.
Nadia Odunayo is The StoryGraph’s founder. She tells me the inspiration for the platform came, unsurprisingly, from her frustration with Goodreads. Already a tech entrepreneur, she decided to drop everything in January 2019 to dedicate herself to making the idea work.
“For three months I didn’t build anything and I didn’t join in on anything, I just spoke to readers,” she tells me. “I spoke to Goodreads users, I spoke to book bloggers, I spoke to friends, and I just looked at a bunch of different people to try and find out: is there still an untapped reader out there?”
Odunayo didn’t want to simply create a rejigged version of Goodreads. Instead, she tried to find specific “pain points” where readers were truly desperate for something Goodreads didn’t offer them. “Through my research I essentially ended up on ‘choosing your next book to read’ and ‘finding persistently high-quality recommendations’ being the major pain points”. The StoryGraph has spent the past year fine-tuning an algorithm that throws up books its users will genuinely enjoy.
@NewStatesman https://www.newstatesman.com/science-tech/social-media/2020/08/better-goodreads-possible-bad-for-books-storygraph-amazon
I was in doubt. I've been using a lot of startups. I don't know how much copy I've edited, how many user guides I've helped out with, style, grammar, the works. But mainly, I've seldom trusted a recommendations engine.
I tried out The StoryGraph—and, I must say it: I dislike the name—and it's made for human beings. It's modern. It takes a beating.
It imports your Goodreads data (via your own export) fairly quickly and then recommends you stuff (if you want to).
It's—hands down—the best books recommendation site I've ever come across.
Granted, I don't use book-recommendation engines, but I've added dozens of books to my to-read list, a list that I actively trim and keep up with.
The StoryGraph isn't 'social'. You don't discuss books. You can read what other users recommend but you won't be able to comment, at least not for now.
The makers of The StoryGraph are kind, quick to respond to questions, and have genuinely thought their site through from start to finish.
Check out how simple it is to filter your own to-read pile to find something to read:
https://youtu.be/3KUdj6nir4s
I recommend that you read up on what Nadia Odunayo, one of the founders of The StoryGraph, says in the aforementioned article. One of the things that struck me:
“For three months I didn’t build anything and I didn’t join in on anything, I just spoke to readers,” she tells me. “I spoke to Goodreads users, I spoke to book bloggers, I spoke to friends, and I just looked at a bunch of different people to try and find out: is there still an untapped reader out there?”
Odunayo didn’t want to simply create a rejigged version of Goodreads. Instead, she tried to find specific “pain points” where readers were truly desperate for something Goodreads didn’t offer them. “Through my research I essentially ended up on ‘choosing your next book to read’ and ‘finding persistently high-quality recommendations’ being the major pain points”. The StoryGraph has spent the past year fine-tuning an algorithm that throws up books its users will genuinely enjoy.
@NewStatesman https://www.newstatesman.com/science-tech/social-media/2020/08/better-goodreads-possible-bad-for-books-storygraph-amazon
That's how you learn what an audience wants.
I love the end of the article:
The StoryGraph is nonetheless off to a good start, with 40,000 registered users, roughly 5,000 of which spend four to five minutes on the site a week, tracking their reading and picking out books. Odunayo says the backlash against Big Tech could help her site’s trajectory. “There are a lot more people who are looking for reasons to not just settle for Amazon products,” she says. She plans to launch The StoryGraph early next year, with a fully redesigned app.
“We don’t just want to be a better Goodreads”, she says. For the company that takes Goodreads’ crown, “the possibilities are so much greater”.
@NewStatesman https://www.newstatesman.com/science-tech/social-media/2020/08/better-goodreads-possible-bad-for-books-storygraph-amazon
Aaah. Brilliant.