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.
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.
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.
I love the Storygraph. The stats are awesome and have helped keep me interested in reading at times when my attention has waned.
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.
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.
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.
Come to storygraph its great :)
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.
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Book Tracker on iOS is fantastic for my needs. Not really any social features, but I don’t need those.
Never used it as I don’t like my data being mined and sold off to make Bezos richer.
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.
I moved into Oku Club, with a great design and growing user base, I think it was a great choice I made.
Interesting, I left oku club a couple years back because it had stagnated and seemed to be goin nowhere
In thelast month, I’ve had to rehome myself from reddit and Evernote. I’m not eager to move anything else right now.
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.
