Why has no one made a better Goodreads

https://uxdesign.cc/why-has-no-one-made-a-better-goodreads-dfc9cb9e149a

by bagofbones • 5 years ago

405 276 5 years ago

dazc5• 5 years ago

Monetizing such a site would be difficult unless you happen to be already the world's biggest bookseller. Thus, any person/organisation with skills and talent to undertake such a task would be better off promoting something with wider margins.

Discounting this reason, and supposing it happened, then amazon could just turn up the dial and throw some resources at it. As things stand, they don't need to.

weird-eye-issue7• 5 years ago

No it wouldn't. You could just be an Amazon Affiliate. Also with enough traffic display ads can make a lot

stepbeek• 5 years ago

Genuine question: would Amazon suffer such an affiliate to live long term?

phpnode2• 5 years ago

both of these require very large audiences to make money, the amazon affiliate program pays very poorly and people hate & block ads. Not saying it's impossible but the days of slapping a few ads and affiliate links on your website and expecting to make decent revenue are long gone. Especially if you want to offer a good UX

bagofbones14• 5 years ago

Lack of an evident business model could be a reason that turns off smart founders from picking this problem. However, if the product adds enough value to enough number of users, one could figure ways to monetise it.

stinkytaco• 5 years ago

I assume the effort, time and money required to get to "enough value to enough number of users" will require you to answer the "ways to monetise" question for a VC or even yourself before you start.

macando• 5 years ago

No matter which book you search for, the top results will always have the Goodreads listing. In fact, Google surfaces the Goodreads rating in the Knowledge Panel. Goodreads is a monster at SEO.

Due to this some companies are literally undethronable.

minitoar• 5 years ago

Too Googleable To Fail

bagofbones14• 5 years ago

It's hard because of this reason. But I'm certain alternate acquisition channels/go-to-market could exist. It's a matter of understanding the customer's journey and capturing them at a stage other than "discovery" or "search".

FunnyLookinHat• 5 years ago

I've never been into Goodreads or similar sites much, but my wife definitely has and reads a lot. She has switched over to The Story Graph and has really liked it (minus the lack of friends that are present).

https://www.thestorygraph.com/

Saturdays• 5 years ago

Oooh this looks interesting.. I export my GoodReads data and play with it on a spreadsheet to learn more about my reading trends.

podiki2• 5 years ago

Same here, never used Goodreads (though looked on there for book info sometimes), but have been trying out The Story Graph. Is pretty nice for tracking reading and seeing your books, even in a beta stage.

Have also looked a little into Library Thing (also mentioned in this discussion). Anyone use both and have useful comparisons, pros/cons for each?

legobmw99• 5 years ago

I second Story Graph. Much cleaner, “just works”, and can import all your existing data from goodreads

sec400• 5 years ago

I've been enjoying using https://beta.readng.co/ as an alternative

mikedc• 5 years ago

I've also been enjoying Readng.

I'm mostly looking to share what I'm planning to read/am reading/have read with a small circle, and for that it's pretty much ideal. There's some basic collection functionality, but no complex library management, no discussions, no recommendation engine, and not very much metadata. It's probably not for everyone, but the minimal approach is refreshingly low-friction. Kudos to the creator(s) for the overall experience.

My only gripes so far have been that search is hit-or-miss (especially for non-fiction), all searches sometimes yield results in an unpredictable order (where an exact title match might be buried amongst partial or seemingly unrelated matches), and the cover they pick is sometimes less-common or downright obscure.

andycowley• 5 years ago

+1 for readng. But then, I'm not really fussed about other people's reviews or a recommendation engine. I just use it for logging what I've read and my own thoughts. I realise that's not everyone's goal though

heisnotanalien2• 5 years ago

If it's not broken, why fix it? I go to goodreads for the high-quality book reviews and community. I literally don't care about UX or fancy algorithms. I'd rather use an old algorithm called 'talking to someone I know' for book recommendations. Right now it feels like a clunky old site made for books reviews and I like that feel. I don't want some Amazon product manager who only cares about monetising (where can I smack ads?!) to touch it thank you very much. And god forbid some UX person gets hold of it and redesigns it in the boring/minimal feel (so it loads fast and we can smack lots of ads on it).

busterarm4• 5 years ago

the spam emails are pretty shit

inanutshellus• 5 years ago

Since you call them "spam", I assume you do not want the emails you're getting, rather than saying you want the communication but they're lower quality than you want. If that's the case, I've been a GR member for years and only get emails from them when a particular author does something I've asked GR to notify me about. Implies to me that merely unsubscribing and managing your preferences seems to work.

afterburner2• 5 years ago

You can turn that off in settings. I have and get nothing from them.

bagofbones14• 5 years ago

I hear you. It's not broken. It does serve the primal use cases like shelving, reviews/ratings, meta-information pretty well. But there is also so much more to the experience of reading. Is Goodreads really the best we deserve?

FalconSensei8• 5 years ago

But there is also so much more to the experience of reading

Like what? For me, most of the experience of reading is:

1 - actually reading the book

2- sharing my thoughts/recommending it

3 - seeing what other people recommend.

Goodreads, Youtube and Reddit cover all my needs for #2 and #3, and any attempt to cover the social aspect of it will pale in comparison to those 3, at least regarding #3.

For instance, there are things that I don't like about Twitter, and Mastodon has some things that I like, like being able to tag a specific post as NSFW, or add a spoiler tag to make part of the text hidden. But after a few months of using it in parallel to Twitter, I ended up abandoning it, because ''everyone''[0] is on Twitter.

[0] I mean: my real life friends, my online friends, bloggers, youtubers, cosplayers, illustratos, support profiles for online stores and services.

pavel_lishin• 5 years ago

And god forbid some UX person gets hold of it and redesigns it in the boring/minimal feel

It sounds like you care about UX a great deal, and the UX currently suits you fine!

I mostly agree with you; it has a few pain points, but I fear the day when it goes through the great Digg/Reddit redesign and becomes virtually unusable due to information density plummeting to zero.

I think it's not likely to go that route, though - since it's owned by Amazon, it doesn't have to be profitable by itself, it just needs to result in enough referrals to buy books on Amazon.

throwawayjcvbs5• 5 years ago

that is underway right now actually. theres a beta in-progress for a re-design of a couple pages including the book page.

gwern• 5 years ago

It actually is broken in a lot of ways, and I don't mean the complaints about stalkers or fake reviews or other community problems, just on the pure technical level. It's been slowly bitrotting, it feels like it somehow gets slower every year, and they've been removing features. I recently moved all of my stuff off GR and stopped using it because I asked myself why I was putting up with it when it clearly was only going to get worse over time.

For example: lists in reviews don't render, somehow they broke list markers, and this has been the case for like a decade now (?!); you can't add links to profiles anymore, and you can't edit your profile if it already has a link (because 'spam'); you can write book reviews which you can't then edit (because the edited, but somehow not the original, violates 'length limits' - which are shockingly easy to run into if you include any links); they disabled part of the export API recently, and I wouldn't be surprised if in a few years you can't even export your books...

bandAid0• 5 years ago

So a new goodreads minus the technical problems comes along.

It gets popular. The community becomes a mess, it becomes costly to police, you have people upload an ID and the world hates you for invading their privacy, management shifts resources away since its stable-y making money regardless (given some Byzantine model that matters to ownership anyway) and then it falls victim to bit rot.

So a replacement to your goodreads replacement comes along...

thelastwave2• 5 years ago

More React will solve everything.

stjohnswarts3• 5 years ago

Gets slower? It loads every page I tried in probably under 2 seconds? Is that slow these days?

billfruit• 5 years ago

It is broken in certain aspects, Goodreads is one of the slowest sites around, if nothing else is done that alone needs fixing. And it has been in this state for years now.

jacobsenscott• 5 years ago

I don't actually use good reads, but I clicked around - everything I clicked on loaded faster (less than 2 seconds, usually less than 1) than everything I clicked on in medium (always more than 2 seconds, where this blog post is hosted).

Neither site is fast, but "one of the slowest around" doesn't track either.

snarf212• 5 years ago

How do you make a better goodreads that is sustainable when Amazon will always make it free as a way to sell more books on Amazon? It is pretty easy to make a X that is better than the status quo. How will you compete with the big guys financially? People want everything for free.

bagofbones14• 5 years ago

This is the billion dollar question, but having the right answer at the outset may not be necessary. In fact, most successful business go through multiple iterations on monetisation opportunities before they strike gold.

It is more important to build a product that solves problems that Goodreads doesn't solve right now, and find a way to acquire customers that doesn't rely on Google SEO.

oauea• 5 years ago

Do you remember when people made websites to solve problems and build community, instead of to make a profit? You can always just shill for amazon using affiliate links, everyone wins.

x0x02• 5 years ago

Not to mention amazon will very aggressively react when you start cutting into an (effectively free) leadgen source from them.

distances• 5 years ago

Good first step would be to free the data under an open license. A MusicBrainz for books.

Now that I think about it, there probably are multiple projects already trying to do that.

throwawayjcvbs5• 5 years ago

goodreads is not supported by amazon. its self sustaining through ads, affiliate links and publisher promotions.

HKH2• 5 years ago

The recommendations generally seem reasonable.

What bothers me is that they clearly have the data to allow for very specific queries, but there's no way to make them.

zem• 5 years ago

what bothers me even more is that all the data for those queries is user-generated, which means that users have essentially contributed value to the site but cannot get it back. that's the competition I would really like to see - a site that crowd sources book metadata in the form of tags and then makes the data freely available and searchable.

dmos62• 5 years ago

How do you find high quality book reviews? Or, is it the average review that's high quality?

heisnotanalien2• 5 years ago

I follow people whose reviews I like.

FalconSensei8• 5 years ago

One things that is nice, is that if you have friends / follow people with similar tastes, when you see a book page, it'll feature their reviews first. For me, that's what matters. A review quality is very related to the taste of whoever is reading it in relation to you - although there are other things that matter.

But I would say that, in general, reviews are ok quality, and honest.

devchix• 5 years ago

The review page and discussion thread is hideous and painful to navigate. If a site is to be able to recommend $nextbook it has to curate inputs, either as ratings or text reviews. There are huge bookclub memberships but hardly anybody write anything substantial because it's a quagmire to wade through (thus implying few review readers). Lapsed readers like me would love a place to talk books, obscure, trendy or not. r/books is a never-ending loop of "I've just finished Ender's Game and I ..." and "Why we do $something when we read", and similar dross. If there's any space that could use a boost in "user engagement" I wish it could be for readers. But, as we bookish lot aren't terribly argumentative, and unwilling to shiv anyone who opines that they loved DaVinci Code, it's an unknown with what to bait us. I log into Goodreads probably twice a month, avert my eyes and then close tab.

IggleSniggle• 5 years ago

I think Steam is probably a decent model of what Goodreads could have looked like. Full of product reviews, with a carefully crafted recommendation engine that focuses in on genres/studios of interest based on a combination of what your friends are reading/reviewing/liking, your past purchases, new release, etc.

Video games have a similar problem to books in that there’s a lot of genre, and genre is also often a hazy line. And, too, some people really like stuff that I think is total crap (and vice versa).

These days I am almost exclusively shown content that I am at least somewhat interested in.

jborichevskiy• 5 years ago

Almost Everything About Goodreads is Broken

https://onezero.medium.com/almost-everything-about-goodreads...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20904549

ryantgtg4• 5 years ago

Counterpoint: Goodreads isn't broken.

It's not at all broken for me, nor for my friends. As the article up top says, there are two ways to discover books: incidental discovery and intentional discovery. On Goodreads, incidental discovery largely flows from a daily email showing me what my friends (who are all real life friends) are reading. That daily email is the #1 reason why I won't leave Goodreads. Any site can manage my read/to-read list, but if I don't have any friends on that site, then I lose out on a big source of discovery. And I can see from the email that my friends also use that email to discover new books.

FalconSensei8• 5 years ago

You can say that goodreads stagnated, in a technical sense, but it's still way better than all options. It works well on desktop, the android app let's me add books by pointing my camera to the cover or barcode. All book bloggers/youtubers are there, all my friends that read are there.

When you factor in those 2 things - everyone is on goodreads, and there's no better alternative to goodreads - there's no reason to leave.

jquaint• 5 years ago

I find goodreads has a bit of bias problem on their ratings. Most books are rated between 3 and 4. Its really hard to tell if that rating is accurate because most people who didn't finish the book (an indicator of low quality) will not leave a review.

zwieback• 5 years ago

Yeah, most review sites have the 5 or nothing problem. I look at the distribution and then find some medium to low starred reviews to see why I might not like a book that otherwise seems a good match for me.

In aggregate the star rating is pretty good for literature and non-fiction. For mass fiction it's fairly useless.

ipaddr• 5 years ago

I think that's honestly how most people score. If you read the entire book and it was okay you give it a 3 if it was great a 4 best book ever a 5. If you hated the book you may not finish or review.

The opposite is uber where rating affects future service and puts a lot of power over others in your hand. Not giving 5 is socially unacceptable like not tipping vs tipping less and complaining.

bscphil• 5 years ago

Most books are rated between 3 and 4. Its really hard to tell if that rating is accurate

Sometimes I agree with you (because it's annoying to me too), but other times I feel like that's accurate. The difference in quality between a book that's in the 75th percentile quality-wise among the books I've read and a book that's in the 25th percentile is not very large! I'd say, by and large, most books that get published are pretty good. Few of them are completely flawless or life-changing, and that's okay. 3-4 seems about right for 50% of the books I read.

If you combine that basic fact with a range of people with differing tastes, you get even more reversion to the mean, so just about every book has a 3-4 rating.

The same goes with beer. If you check the major beer rating sites, you'll see most beers end up with a 3-4 rating. Personally I think movies have a much wider range in quality, but you still see this effect somewhat with IMDb: a huge proportion of movies is in the 6-8 range.

You might think that the ratings would be more useful if what we got was a percentile rather than an absolute rating, and that might be right... or it might disguise the fact that I really would get close to the same amount of enjoyment out of a 3.5 as a 3.9, even though they're separated by 30 percentiles or whatever.

mhb5• 5 years ago

One aspect of this problem might be that there's no incentive to have a wider dynamic range in your ratings. A naive recommendation system which just suggests highly rated books similar in some metric to ones I rated highly could be improved enormously if it took into account books I didn't like. In return for accurate ratings, I would get good recommendations.

BikiniPrince• 5 years ago

I actually would like a better algorithm for suggestions. I can scroll fifty pages of their basic suggestions before I hit something I’m interested in and don’t already have. I would really like to fetch their catalogue and try the Netflix search improvement contest, but for books!

WalterBright• 5 years ago

Modern UX design seems enamored with sites that refuse to scroll smoothly, which is maddening and quite unpleasant.

cush• 5 years ago

Exactly. Same with boardgamegeek or old.reddit

rkachowski• 5 years ago

From reading the article, the answer seems to be something like "because Goodreads has optimised heavily for SEO and uses this to stay on top of search results".

input_sh• 5 years ago

I mean Google also made a conscious decision to make it an authoritative source in their knowledge graphs.

Swapping those links for a competitor would be damn near impossible, and it has not much to do with the SEO.

zozbot234• 5 years ago

The knowledge graph thing is something any site can opt into by using schema.org markup. So long as they don't get banned for supplying misleading info in their schema.org tags, it ought to just work.

CA0DA• 5 years ago

Do you think a more "privacy-centric" Goodreads alternative could thrive? One that's mostly focused around tracking your book lists and less on the reviews?

bagofbones14• 5 years ago

I think private shelving/tracking is an important feature to have in a product that serves the larger business opportunity of book social networks.

milofeynman• 5 years ago

I use LibraryThings to track what I've read, my collection, and what I want to read and I don't believe it's attempting to complete with GoodReads. It's in a different space of keeping track of your book collections and targeted at small libraries etc. I'm sure there is some community to it but I've never wandered into it and it's not the focal feature of the site

jeremiecoullon2• 5 years ago

There are probably a bunch of alternatives for this. For example a friend built Reading List which I've heard is good (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/reading-list-book-log/id121713...) (iOS app)

davidwparker2• 5 years ago

Reading List is mentioned in the article. It's in a list:

There is a long list of startups that tried to unseat Goodreads, but they’re either in the graveyard or floating in limbo. Examples include BookClub, RocketReads, LibraryThing, ReadingList, Booknshelf, BookBrowse, Booklikes, Libib, BookSloth, Bookself.

jeremiecoullon2• 5 years ago

I hadn't seen that; thanks!

thrower123• 5 years ago

I only use Goodreads because it is baked into the Kindle app on the Kindle Fire that I do most of my reading with. I don't remember if I ever set it up this way on purpose, but it is integrated so whenever I start reading a book, it marks it as "reading" on Goodreads, and when I finish, it marks it as "read".

mrkurt• 5 years ago

https://thestorygraph.com is a better goodreads. It's found my last 8 or so books for me.

whalesalad• 5 years ago

One of my closest friends and his wife are on a mission to improve this space. They’ve founded a company called Italic Type: https://www.italictype.com/

kome• 5 years ago

well... https://www.anobii.com/ is quite used here. It used to be bigger, but still, going quite strong.

intergalplan• 5 years ago

All of:

1) assembling a usefully-large initial dataset to gain traction,

2) keeping it updated, and

3) content moderation & anti-spam

Seem super dull and tedious for project that's probably going to fail, and there's little about the rest of the process of building an improved Goodreads clone to offset that and make it enticing to work on. I'd say the only folks likely to try would be those who already have & maintain at least a partial dataset of books for other reasons, and/or existing name-recognition and a community around books and reading.

bagofbones14• 5 years ago

All of: 1) assembling a usefully-large initial dataset to gain traction,

2) keeping it updated, and

3) content moderation & anti-spam

Seem super dull and tedious for project that's probably going to fail.

^i would say these are problems if you start off building a Goodreads clone. There are other go-to-market strategies to get to network effects.

werber• 5 years ago

I haven't logged into Goodreads in ages, but their e-mail updates keep me updated on what my few friends on the platform are or want to be reading. I engage with those e-mails, and have conservations that they ignite.

karaterobot2• 5 years ago

This article focuses on "better" in the sense of being a successful business, rather than "better" in the sense of being a resource for book lovers. That's a really gross way to think, but he is correct in a sense, and it's why I always preferred Librarything with its wonky, book-nerd centric interface to Goodreads and its growth loops.

bagofbones14• 5 years ago

Apart from the interface, in what ways is Librarything better than Goodreads?

karaterobot2• 5 years ago

I'd say the interface is not one of the strong points, since it confuses a lot of people and turns them away from the site. But, it is powerful if you want to engage with it.

For example, I could compare my library to yours and get a list of the books we share, that we both liked, but aren't generally very popular. Or I could get a list of books I've read, sorted by their Lexile score. Or get a list of all the epigraph quotes printed in the books I've read.

Basically, it's a database approach rather than a social approach. You can do all the above stuff on the website, but their API is also really powerful, and free. In fact the whole site is completely free.

Another thing I really like is the Member Recommendations. They have an algorithm that recommends books you might like, based on other books. But, in addition to that, they have a list of books recommended by actual people who have read both books, explaining what it is about book B that might interest you if you liked book A. So, more like what an actual librarian would do. Here's an example of what I mean:

https://www.librarything.com/work/1472#memberrecs

Lastly, I just think the vibe at Librarything is better than Goodreads. They're a tiny company made up of librarians and developers, and you feel the scrappy Web 1.0 charm from them and the community there in a way I never saw with Amazon-owned Goodreads.

crossroadsguy• 5 years ago

I believe a better GoodReads can only be a a non-profit. Maybe something federated. Financial possibilities are almost done for. GR is too big. Event LibraryThing has Amazon money in it.

There was this reco.com (now shutdown) which was more like "recos by famous people". I didn't like that idea but I had anyway checked it out hoping it might become something better. It didn't.

Jinni kind of permanently dissuaded me from building a profile on recommendation sites feeding their recommendation engines only to see a shuttered gate after a while. Though it's actually better in cinema space right now. There are some academic options (or were; not sure what is something like Movie Lens right now)

spillguard• 5 years ago

As an avid reader who has been using Goodreads for years, my reason for not switching to an alternative has almost nothing to do with any of what the author mentions. That reason is purely the promise of stability provided by a site that's been around for longer (not to mention the big-name ownership) - the faith that Goodreads will stay running for years and years into the future.

When it comes to the list of books I've read, I want to set it and forget it - and with a small upstart, there's always the worry that the maintainer will run out of money (or interest) and shut the service down. Sure, most of these book sites have import/export functionality, but why bother with that when Goodreads will likely be around for a long time?

bagofbones14• 5 years ago

This is a very valid argument. You have implicitly invested effort (in form of lists) in Goodreads, and wouldn't want to lose them. It's another reason why a challenger can't rely on book tracking as the primary feature to drive adoption.

superkuh• 5 years ago

As soon as someone does and it achieves network effect it will be bought by a mega-corp and we'll have to do this all again.

TOSSAWAY_1• 5 years ago

lol yeah. that does make me happy.

pauljonas• 5 years ago

So true.

And so sad.

And now excuse me while I dream of a world where gifted creators can build a flourishing web gathering space where it can thrive and grow and not be then harvested by the borg that encapsulates viewers as nothing but breathing credit card tokens.

bagofbones14• 5 years ago

lol. my strong hunch - it will only be a mission-driven founder who will take this to it's righteous end.

wizzwizz4• 5 years ago

That's why https://bookwyrm.social/ is so interesting; as part of the Fediverse, this can't happen.

vuciv14• 5 years ago

Hey, just wanted to throw it out there that I'm working on something slightly related

https://swapiverse.com/

I'm making a decentralized book swapping platform. You give a book away and get the right to access any book that anyone has listed.

Reduces waste, and saves everyone money

Not sure if we will add in reviews for the MVP, but it's definitely looking like a cleaner version of goodreads.

Here are some screenshots:

https://twitter.com/_joshuafonseca/status/138028946914478489...

miloszkowal• 5 years ago

Curious, how is this different from paperbackswap.com, which has been in operation for over a decade, and has hundreds of users online at any given time? The UI of swapiverse is good, but you might have to overcome the same network effects that Goodreads has.

vuciv14• 5 years ago

I personally found paperbackswap was outdated, does not have a constantly updated supply, and charges a large surcharge per book.

So, I believe the answer here is a better user experience, cheaper prices, and a modern approach.

vuciv14• 5 years ago

Oh, and worth considering I'm working very hard to make this expandable to any consumable.

Want to also swap video games? Pc parts? I just have to fill the database and add a filter option

the_lonely_road• 5 years ago

This feels like one of those things that will be ruined by bad actors. Finding cheap worthless books for free or next to free is quite easy. I could get my hands on 10K "books" right now for the cost of picking them up and storing them. If there is anything valuable on your site it will likely be quickly swapped out for garbage by some "entrepreneur" flipping them to a for sale site.

The project looks cool and I wish you the best of luck in designing solutions to avoid bad actors.

grok22• 5 years ago

But the swap is for free (+cost of shipping). So of no value to one of those kinds of entrepreneurs (unless maybe they find a way to arbitrage shipping costs).

vuciv14• 5 years ago

I hear you.

I've thought about this. I believe the cost of shipping will be paid for by the person shipping it out.

I am not an economist, but my idea is that even if someone is doing this, the economy works itself out because they still gave away a book that someone wanted.

And if the books are that garbage, nobody will request them.

Of course, this is all theory and I'll have to see/adjust as it happens.

tmcw2• 5 years ago

This missed the biggest technical moat by a mile: data.

Book data is scarce and expensive. Goodreads gets it for free because of Amazon, Amazon gets it subsidized because of Amazon's chokehold on book publishing. Any Goodreads competitor needs to license paid data and sort through the duds and the duplicates, and struggle to match up book with only ASINs that are on Amazon Kindles and nowhere else.

And Kindle integration. When you finish a book on a Kindle, it asks you to review it on Goodreads. If you want to add an option to review it on $otherstartup website, your best bet is a supreme court antitrust case.

bagofbones14• 5 years ago

The metadata itself is not a moat. ISBN APIs allow for easy access to primary data attributes of a book.

The social data that Goodreads aggregates is definitely a moat, because it powers their SEO efforts further.

pkilgore• 5 years ago

kindle integration.

tmcw2• 5 years ago

Which APIs? Worldcat, with decent data but paid licensing and lots of dirty data? Amazon’s, which they’ll shut down if you build a competitor? Try finding an API that gives you high-quality book cover images, too. And the ability to retain results.

imgabe• 5 years ago

I actually turned off the Kindle integration because it was horribly broken. Books would get marked read as soon as they were opened, and then it was a nightmare of navigating through the UI to try to edit the dates when you read a book.

Overall, I like Goodreads, but the Kindle integration is not a selling point in my experience.

heroprotagonist• 5 years ago

The Amazon takeover ruined it for me. It followed the now-familiar 'geeks, mops, and sociopaths' trajectory from there.[]

[] https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths

Instead of reviews and recommendations from other bibliophiles, it's filled with mass-market Amazon-quality reviews.

The fantasy genre there became dominated by romance for a while, with no ability for me to filter down based on criteria like 'Ignore ratings and reviews from anyone who gave Twilight a 4+ star review'.

arjunkava• 5 years ago

It is already doing what need to be done and you know what over innovation kill the simplicity of the product. Goodreads is pretty simple and great part is it is not suggesting me someone to follow based on books I've read. That is innovation for all the current social app and it sucks.

Daiz• 5 years ago

I did make a better Goodreads. But only for my very narrow use case.

Namely, I just wanted to keep track of what I read. I didn't care for the social aspects of it nor the discovery part of it. I did want certain statistics on my reading though, so a plain text file wasn't going to cut it.

Unfortunately, Goodreads was a huge pain to use UX-wise and didn't really provide the statistics I was looking for either. The one positive thing I can say for Goodreads is that the books I read were already there (I'm primarily reading Japanese light novels, so whether the titles are available on the service for tracking purposes or not is a real concern for me), which is probably a bigger problem than you might think for anyone who'd want to build a competitor? The friction to use an alternative service is obviously going to be much higher if you have to get the books you read added to the service first before you can actually track them on your list.

Anyway, with my sufficiently narrow use case, I just built my own book tracking with spreadsheets. I add new lines to a master read sheet and then I have some pivot tables that automatically compile statistics I care about from there.[1]

I'm quite happy with this setup for now and can definitely recommend doing something similar for everyone who just wants to keep track of your reading and doesn't care for the social features.

That said, I wouldn't mind switching to a "real" service again provided that a) it was sufficiently expedient to use when it comes to managing your list (this is especially important considering I'd obviously want to port over my existing hundreds-long read list to this new hypothetical service) b) it already had the books I've read catalogued in the service, because I sure as hell don't want to petition additions to their database for everything I read before I can actually keep track of it.

[1] https://twitter.com/Daiz42/status/1158123020596240391

bagofbones14• 5 years ago

You are not alone in this. https://debugger.medium.com/tech-savvy-readers-are-designing...

bbasketball• 5 years ago

I wish more people knew about https://rate.house - it's like all media sites combined into one, just need more people using it.

bwb18• 5 years ago

I am actually working to peel Goodreads apart and focus on doing one thing better, which is book discovery. I am actually launching into Beta on Monday -> https://shepherd.com/

If anyone is interested let me know what you think. The goal is to create an online experience that is like wandering through a bookstore and seeing little notes about which books are the staff's favorites.

waihtis• 5 years ago

Avid reader here, just signed up. There's always room for new methods for discovering reading material.

Not to pry on your secret sauce, but if you're open would be good to hear how you're trying to do the discovery part differently.

bwb18• 5 years ago

Thanks!

To start, I am focusing on asking authors/experts for their 5 book recommendations on a topic they are passionate about and know well. Here are some examples of how this is playing out:

The Best Books On The Soviet Space Program And The Space Race -> https://shepherd.com/best-books/the-soviet-space-program

The Best Books On The Ocean And Seas -> https://shepherd.com/best-books/the-ocean-and-seas

The Best Books On Content Creation And Content Marketing -> https://shepherd.com/best-books/content-creation-and-content...

Then I will relate those book lists to each other both distantly and closely in order to help a reader follow their curiosity through the website, kinda like walking through aisles of books: https://forauthors.shepherd.com/related-book-lists

Then toward July/August I will add Topic pages to help people find books on a topic they are interested in like World War 2, Grief, Startups, and so on: https://forauthors.shepherd.com/shelf-pages

My goal is as I build up the content that next year I will do two things:

1. Start playing with NLP to create even more unique ways to find books, such as browsing a timeline of Japan and inserting people and events and books/book-lists into

2. Start asking users for their 1-3 favorite books of the year. I want to make this an incredibly high quality vote that is limited. And, use that to help add more books to the mix.

ben@shepherd.com, hit me up as I could use feedback :), Thanks, Ben

krmmalik3• 5 years ago

What are you plans for helping authors establish a relationship with their readers?

bwb18• 5 years ago

Gosh so much as that is half the goal of this site!

There is a growing trend that authors have to become their own marketing team. That concerns me because it is very difficult to do and it takes time away from writing. One of my long-term goals is to make it easier for authors to market themselves and I am looking forward to working on this challenge.

How am I doing that?

Right now... trying to help them zero in on their target audience. So if they wrote a book about the Battle of Midway, I want to get them to recommend 5 books around that subject and then feed readers into their recommendation. As readers not only meet their book they get to see their voice and expertise. In early user testing I found these recommendations increase interest in the author and their book because you get to peek in their head.

Next? Full channels based on topics like WW2, Grief, Anxiety, Startups, etc. The goal being to give authors channels with interested readers to serve their book and book lists within. Details here and hoping to ship this end of July: https://forauthors.shepherd.com/shelf-pages

Lots more, but need to get the flywheel spinning.

I could talk a lot more about this, feel free to email me :)

bagofbones14• 5 years ago

I love the curation of topics - it's exactly the way people would think about discovering niche books.

Curious to know - how did you curate these?

bwb18• 5 years ago

Totally by hand over the last 3 months, I have quite a lot of automation in place to help me do it, but at the end of the day I work with each author to craft these.

With just me I should be able to scale up to 300 new lists each month, and I am looking to further accelerate that.

calrueb• 5 years ago

This is cool. Is there an ML component, or is everything hand curated?

bwb18• 5 years ago

100% hand curated for now, my hope is to get into NLP early next year to do some cool stuff :).

mrec2• 5 years ago

I think the "Topics" list really needs some curation [1] and some more layers of taxonomy. Right now the "topic" breakdown seems 100% isomorphic to the "recommender" breakdown - the links literally go to the exact same URLs - which isn't sustainable. Bookshops don't have separate shelves for each member of staff.

[1] Do we really need both "Anglo-Saxon England" and "Anglo-Saxon Britain"? Or three different "Norse Mythology" topics and two different "Norse Myths" topics and a "Norse Mythology and Polytheism" topic?

bwb18• 5 years ago

Totally, this is launching on Monday into beta and there is a lot of work to do here.

The cool thing is that those recommendations are vastly different depending on the person making them. So I do want the same topic from different angles and then I am going to change how they are viewed to make that more useful. As this scales I will be drastically changing how that is displayed on the homepage and topic pages.

For example, here is a future way to get books recommended on a topic one at a time... kinda like book dating: https://forauthors.shepherd.com/shelf-pages

gen220• 5 years ago

You should submit this! I think it’s a great idea.

One way that people discover books is by listening to / reading about authors they enjoy, talking about other books and authors that they enjoy.

There’s an NLP problem in there for sure, because they like to both bash and praise certain people.

It’d be amazing to have a searchable graph of “Tolstoi likes Turgenev likes Gustave Flaubert”. There could even be a time aspect to it, as certain writers hated or loved their contemporaries as time went on.

At present, authors and literary people have these graphs in their heads, it would be nice to write them all down and expose them. At present it’s quite laborious to bootstrap such a mental graph by yourself, as a student or hobbyist.

bwb18• 5 years ago

Thanks!! I was going to submit it Monday morning :)

Oh I am so excited about NLP!!! Toward July the backend is getting more details around the type of topics so I can start training models eventually.

You nailed it, I can't wait to get that going and start playing :)

evanmoran• 5 years ago

This is cool. Thank you for sharing!

I wanted to add to others suggestions to consider adding more genre-like categories. I realize they aren’t as specific as “world war 2”, etc, but I think you will miss out without the common popular genres there. For example, “best fantasy in 2021” or “best cooking book 2021”, etc, overlap with tons of interests and seem missing. Maybe write down every genre in Amazon search and see how your groupings compare? Just my 2 cents!

bwb18• 5 years ago

Thanks :)

Ya good point, when I looked at search volume I was surprised how many time sensitive searches there were. I would like to rank for those eventually but I am still playing with the best way to do that and make sure what people land on is specifically what they want. The Amazon tip is a good one, thanks!

elliekelly• 5 years ago

Open Library recently(ish) launched a bookshelf style browsing feature to mimic the organic discovery of titles based on your interests and, even though it’s frowned upon by some, the cover. It’s awesome. I’ve read so many books that I’ve scrolled past a thousand times on iTunes and Audible. It does help that I can flip through the books a bit before deciding to read it. Like you can at the store or the library.

busymom0• 5 years ago

How did you get such a good domain name? Did you purchase it for a premium price?

bwb18• 5 years ago

Thanks! I am a long time domain buyer and I had the opportunity to buy it a few years ago. I knew it would make a great brand one day.

I bought it for mid 5 figures, so pretty good deal.

stopachka• 5 years ago

This is a great essay.

I'm hacking on a competitor (zeneca.io) with my best friend, and can relate.

I think one of the other big challenges to overtaking goodreads, is figuring a "hair-on-fire" kind of problem, where people would switch and use a different product frequently.

For us, one such problem was displaying lists in a way that you could share on your blog. This is getting traction, but issue there, is that this isn't something that incentivizes people to use the product frequently. Without frequent use, iteration is much harder. We're experimenting with deeper social, discovery, and tracking to solve this. If anyone has ideas, feel free to ping me!

bagofbones14• 5 years ago

Quick question - why is "displaying lists of books" a hair-on-fire problem?

nezaj• 5 years ago

For a long time I had a "todo" to make a better way to display my favorite books. Before we started working on Zeneca, I had a bullet list on my personal website. I noticed so many other people did the same. For example in Naval's Almanack he also has a bullet list with some comments on his favorite books. It struck us that a better experience could exist, and for now most people just accept the status quo.

Having a nice way to display my books was enough of a "hair on fire" problem for us to start working on Zeneca. It's been cool to see other people using the platform and asking for more features to solve broader problems and engage more frequently.

You can check out a sample profile here: https://zeneca.io/joe

corobo• 5 years ago

Haha I have "make a like 30% better Goodreads" on an idea card somewhere

edly2• 5 years ago

Made an account just to comment: Goodreads seems to be way more interested in selling books than recommending books, and they want to sell books from Amazon primarily, then other major online retailers. I'll give points for including "smaller" retailers like Indiebound, but they're at the bottom of the list.

I just switched to LibraryThing and I'm in love with it. It not only predates Goodreads but it runs circles around it. Go to a book page on LibraryThing and you're treated to the most common tags for it, people with similar libraries to yours who have it in their libraries, member recommendations for similar books, lists the book appears on, forum conversations, and a full list of translators, editors, and illustrators. Want to acquire the book somehow? You can configure LibraryThing to have links to major retailers and even search for local book shops and libraries and have them appear in all book pages. AND, if you want to swap a book for another book instead, it gives you links to swap sites with how many are available and how many are requesting said book.

stonesweep2• 5 years ago

You're not the only LibraryThing user around - we get drowned out in these HN threads because the UI isn't sexy.

edly2• 5 years ago

Honestly? I think LibraryThing's UI is the best I've used when it comes to sites of that type. I think the only thing that's a little unclear is adding books, but for managing books and their metadata, the interface is detailed and offers very granular options for filtering and sorting.

pjmorris2• 5 years ago

Big LibraryThing fan. I paid a teenager to label bins and catalog the books in each bin and made each bin a LT collection. If I can't find something on my office shelves, I check LT to see if it's in a bin. It's really handy.

dcrtr• 5 years ago

Sorry to sound dumb but I don't follow, you had your physical books in a bin? And you paid this teenager to categorise them into LT? What was the value for you. Again sorry it will be making me sound like an idiot asking this ;)

wenbin• 5 years ago

Book metadata quality is extremely important and it's hard to get right in a short timeframe (e.g., < 3 years).

Over the past decade, Goodreads builds a huge army of volunteer members (120,000+) to help correct book metadata [1][2].

But to compete with Goodreads, a new service can start from a vertical, instead of ALL BOOKS IN THE WORLD. A subreddit could be a good MVP.

- [1] https://help.goodreads.com/s/article/What-is-a-Goodreads-Lib...

- [2] https://www.goodreads.com/group/show/220-goodreads-librarian...

villasv3• 5 years ago

In other words, good quality book metadata is expensive. Book recommendation/reviews aren't haven't been so profitable as to justify such investment. If I was a publisher, I'd put my money on the book influencers, not on Goodreads and alternatives anyway.

bwb18• 5 years ago

It isn't expensive... it doesn't exist. Ingram's API is probably the best and it is messy as hell. I've been playing with it and it will help augment data, but you have to have humans to really fine tune things. I just entered 2,500 books manually to launch this on Monday (https://shepherd.com/) and I still am going to need to go back to build relationships between the types of authors (lead, translator, illustrator, etc). It is a hard problem.

Ingram's is like $1k a month, maybe $2k for the full flat files. I can't find anything that is high quality and with a bigger data set.

Mediterraneo10• 5 years ago

The volunteer army is pretty shackled. There are certain problems with book metadata that cannot be fixed by ordinary members with librarian status. They can only be fixed by Goodreads staff. However, Goodreads Staff (apparently a skeleton crew that are barely keeping the lights on) no longer respond to reports about metadata problems.

throwawayjcvbs5• 5 years ago

this is the real reason goodreads wont be dethroned. book data is very very messy and requires lots of manual cleaning by humans and goodreads is where the humans are. its like trying to make a wikipedia competitor. it just wont happen.

skeeter2020• 5 years ago

Amazon bought CDnow which was all human-curated and had very high recommendation value, but that doesn't scale with the size of today's music catalog tail when people are only renting (aka streaming) music

BigBalli• 5 years ago

I created https://MyBookList.com many years back so have quite some experience in the field.

From a product owner's POV, Goodreads's strength is community and users' sunken cost. these people are used to the UI/UX and keep using it which proves a (costly) redesign is not urgent or critical.

phku• 5 years ago

I've been using readng.co lately and really enjoy it.

newbie578• 5 years ago

An interesting article, the now staple monthly "why isn't GoodReads fixed or disrupted?".

And again the answer is the same, which it seems like a lot of people keep avoiding.

There is no viable business model for an alternative to emerge, simple as that. If someone finds a viable business model for a social media network about books, then they got a billion dollar idea.

Although I doubt it, if there is someone like that, I wish them the best of luck.

aww_dang• 5 years ago

Link fails with infinite redirects here.

irrational• 5 years ago

This reminds me of the question "Why has no one made a better Board Game Geek?" (https://boardgamegeek.com/). It actually is slowly getting better now, but it is still shockingly stuck with a UI/UX from the very early 2000s.

Another website, Board Game Atlas (https://www.boardgameatlas.com/) was launched a year or two ago to compete with Board Game Geek but hasn't really caught on, despite having a superior UI/UX and some killer features.

Why has it not caught on? Mainly because everyone is already using Board Game Geek. That is where the community is so unless everyone moves over en masse it probably isn't going to happen.

However! After Board Game Atlas was launched, Board Game Geek suddenly started updating their UI/UX.

Here you can see the pre-Board Game Atlas homepage:

https://boardgamegeek.com/dashboard

Here you can see the post-Board Game Atlas homepage:

https://boardgamegeek.com/

They've made similar improvements for interior pages. Up until very recently the interior pages were totally unusable on mobile (the forums are still terrible), but now they are mostly usable.

My take away is this, if you want Goodreads to have good UI/UX, create a competing website that does the same thing as Goodreads with good UI/UX. When Goodreads feels threatened by the new site, even if people are not moving over to it en masse, they will start to find the time and money to fix their own UI/UX problems. Though, it may take awhile, BGG has been improving, but it is taking a long long long time. A shockingly long time.

hipnoizz• 5 years ago

Well, it is definitely true that BGG UI feels dated and disjointed, and if Board Game Atlas triggered some reaction on BGG side then great. I don't find BGA UI that much better. Cleaner, more 'modern' - yeah... which includes a lots of white space and rather low information density. On BGG I visit some forums, read reviews for games I'm interested in and browse the files section - even if UI could be improved here it is usable enough and the volume of information makes up for all the deficiencies, at least for me. And contrary to Goodreads BGG seems to have working search ;-)

donio• 5 years ago

I actually like the current BGG UI a lot. It certainly has its quirks but it could be SO MUCH worse. It is definitely more enjoyable to use than most "modern" websites out there. Clear textual links rather than figuring out mystery buttons, pages load reasonably fast (including those with very large lists) and it stays responsive too rather than slowly murdering the browser.

I am all for improving it but I really hope that it doesn't get ruined in the name of UX.

HDMI_Cable• 5 years ago

I don't really see why the UX needs to change, Web 1.0 design was/is very functional, and I find that Goodreads has a nice/balance between the simple things (Adding books to a list) and the complex (e.g. filtering). Of course, the writers design a UX blog, so they might disagree.

foobarbecue• 5 years ago

Goodreads is an excellent, mature, website with a vibrant community. I use it all the time and have never noticed it lagging or had trouble using a feature. I think it looks and works better than most of the space-wasting, feature-hiding, animated sites online today. I review a few books a month on there and end up in interesting discussions frequently. The amazon kindle integration, with ability to publish your notes on a book, is a killer feature for me. IIRC they had this before Amazon bought it, too.

People seem to dislike the recommendation engine. I can't comment on this because I didn't notice it even had one... it's not a feature I'm looking for. I guess I get that from friends and possibly from the main Amazon website.

gpapilion• 5 years ago

I think the issue with Goodreads continues to be that people want Facebook/Twitter for readers, and its not and will likely never be.

As an author, the specialty nature of Goodreads doesn't provide enough reach even though the segment of the population you are reaching is excellent. The additional eyes, and casual readers you pickup elsewhere makes the energy devoted to Facebook a better investment.

For readers, I just don't think the discovery aspect is as useful. I think a lot of this like last.fm, where logging listening could provide good recommendations. Books take longer to consume than songs or albums, and there was very little cost to music compared to books. Lastly I just think your average reader, doesn't read enough books to take advantage of the recommendations.

sayhar• 5 years ago

I'm flabberghasted that neither the article nor the comments so far talk about Open Library

https://openlibrary.org/

It's a nonprofit, it's tied to the internet archive, it's been around a long time, its improving very quickly, and it Lets You Check Out Books!

amatecha• 5 years ago

Was going to post the same. Huge omission. Turns out they were founded in the same year, interestingly.

girzel• 5 years ago

They're also working on some kind of recommendations engine: https://github.com/Open-Book-Genome-Project/TheBestBookOn.co...

I don't quite know how it works -- I've been meaning to spend some time exploring it, but haven't gotten around to it yet.

GCA10• 5 years ago

Author here. I'm going to join the argument that Goodreads may be clunky (in fact, it definitely is), but it's not broken. OP's criticisms all have some validity, but they overlook these far more important facts:

1. Goodreads has a LOT of users. It's the most extensive source of feedback on all my books. Lots of "wisdom of the crowd" that I can glean, looking at what people say. I'd rather have a kludgy site with 350 reviews than a UX masterpiece with only six.

2. Goodreads's huge user base means that reviews get noticed. This is crucial to keep the reviewing ecosystem going. When I put some energy into reviewing someone else's book that made an impact on me, I get a lively mix of upvotes and responses, which validates the time spent. Writing a crisp review on a minor site and getting no engagement is the worst user experience of all. Even if the official UX is beautiful.

3. Goodreads has pretty good tone control -- and that is not easy on any social site. People come to talk about books. Most threads don't get hijacked by MAGA/vs/woke. Anyone who overlooks this factor hasn't tried to operate a social site in the modern era.

4. Goodreads has the balance of power right between authors and readers. There are some things you can do as an author to drive engagement. But not a lot. You can't overwhelm the site with promo for a book that doesn't engage people. And Goodreads will stop you pretty quickly from flaming readers who give you one-star reviews.

All of these, I'll submit, are big, enduring advantages. They can't be swept away by a small new site with prettier UX or faster load times.

say_it_as_it_is• 5 years ago

Item #3 is why /r/books is dead on arrival

ankit219• 5 years ago

I agree Goodreads is not broken. At least not for me. The answer is simple - it's single player mode is so strong that it's hard to usurp. A good comparison would be IMDb. Even if you dont have friends on Goodreads, you can do all the things you need. You can discover books, read what others have said about it, discover more books from the same author, read the quotes, find similar books, and as an add on, find a community you can discuss books in. Then there is a list, not as prominent but added feature of finding what others like. In terms of jobs-to-be-done, it serves everything perfectly.

This is a huge underrated moat, and for any new startup, they have to usurp that. This moat is also why users stick and then the network effects kick in.

DavideNL• 5 years ago

I just started trying https://app.thestorygraph.com/ as an alternative...

manuelmoreale• 5 years ago

There is someone who’s working on a goodreads alternative at https://literal.club/

ngokevin• 5 years ago

20% or even 100% better UI/UX doesn't disrupt anything. Anyone can go to a popular service and nitpick on their UI and UX. But if someone wants to replace them, they'll have to be 10x better.

dhosek• 5 years ago

I consistently get recommendations for books in languages that I don't read. I wonder if that's because I have read books in languages other than English and recorded those editions on Goodreads. What's particularly aggravating is for the recommendation engine to surface a translated version of an English book to me. My general rule is that if I can read an untranslated version of a book, I'll read the untranslated version, so I'll prefer Cuentos de Eva Luna over Stories of Eva Luna but The Honorary Consul over El Consul Honorario. I still don't understand why Goodreads thinks I'd like to read Agatha Christie in Polish or Shakespeare in Arabic. Of course, I think the winner has to be https://www.dahosek.com/wait-what/

steviedotboston• 5 years ago

People said the same thing about the Reddit UI and look what we got...

Hitton• 5 years ago

What I like about goodreads is that it has reviews (not ratings, I noticed that those are becoming gamed a lot), description, quickly identifiable genre of book (shelves) and link to other books by the author. That's about it. I personally don't like posting reviews, especially if the book is bad, because it feels rather mean towards author and I know few authors whose first books were pretty terrible but they eventually improved a lot.

I would like a app where I could add my notes on a book, could easily see that I already read book by an author and also add note to this author (for instance "avoid", "read if nothing better available", "read only later books", "read everything except series Z" etc.) and it would have appropriate notifications. I don't need recommendation engine, some kind of search based on genre, tags, popularity and rating would be enough.

mcguire• 5 years ago

Shouldn't the title of the article be "Why no Goodreads alternative can (or has) beat Goodreads". I don't see anything about making a better one.

rebuilder• 5 years ago

So while we're on the subject, is there a good book recommendation service? I usually just browse the Kindle store, but the recommendations there are pretty awful. Most of them seem to be NYT best sellers, which usually seems to mean "derivative crud".

It seems odd that Amazon's recommendation engine isn't better. Perhaps it works for most people.

gvinter• 5 years ago

Yes! Readerly (readerly.com) delivers on what Goodreads doesn't - it doesn't rely on the 5-star rating system and learns what you like to give you better recommendations. This means it's a social network that improves for users as it grows, it doesn't weaken as Goodreads does.

vhpoet3• 5 years ago

Have you seen https://www.readthistwice.com? (fyi, I'm the founder)

podiki2• 5 years ago

Are there any decent self-hosted options? In my searches the best (or "best") I see are more full blown inventory tracking platforms. I wouldn't mind something that keeps track of your books, ratings/comments, lists, and is nice to look at. (Of course, I could just do this in org-mode and make a nice HTML export or something...but probably needs some database/searching functionality.)

bwanab• 5 years ago

Not to mention the very real threat that if anyone seriously started challenging Goodreads, Amazon could put what for them is a trivial amount of resources into making the changes it needed to keep in front.

mekarpeles3• 5 years ago

Mek here from internet archive's OpenLibrary.org.

Open Library was started by @aaronsw.

We're a library catalog with 3M+ books to read & borrow.

We've been around for 15 years, not going anywhere.

We're open source and non profit: https://github.com/internetarchive/openlibrary

We defend patron privacy, offer free APIs, and release all public data openly: https://openlibrary.org/developers/dumps

Most projects on this page have likely used our data.

We have a Reading Log and several other more substantial features in the works.

Our catalog spans more than 20M works: https://openlibrary.org/stats

You can help! https://openlibrary.org/volunteer

troyvit• 5 years ago

This is exactly why I came to this thread. Thank you!

toomuchtodo• 5 years ago

Are there any plans where metadata for Internet Archive patrons could be scoped to API tokens or applications (Oauth2), so that external applications could add value for users on top of the Internet Archive corpus?

mekarpeles3• 5 years ago

This is great! Thank you for the interest!

We've had a rudimentary bot system for the past 10 years or so. Let's please talk if you where others would like to get set up with a bot account and write access!

https://github.com/internetarchive/openlibrary/wiki/Writing-...

Contact: mek@archive.org

fastball• 5 years ago

Are you aware that all the stats at the bottom of the homepage except for "ebooks borrowed" are zero?

mekarpeles3• 5 years ago

Yes!

Here's the issue: https://github.com/internetarchive/openlibrary/issues/5022

Sorry about that, on the docket for this upcoming week.

We're currently staffed by two eng (myself included) w/ ~80 open PRs, 500 issues, just finalized a py2 to 3 migration, and reprovisioned all of our servers w/ docker so we're playing catch-up on some newly surfaced issues.

Please do open such issues so we're aware! It's a huge way to help.

The issue mentioned above is happening because our cron jobs got moved from one machine to another.

Will reply here when resolved.

lukasb• 5 years ago

Allow me to hijack - I'm working on something to make the experience of reading the text-only version of books on OpenLibrary better (if they decide to integrate it when it's done.) Email's in the profile if you want to help out.

(Hi Mek! Thanks for the help so far)

Grakel• 5 years ago

Apparently K.A. Applegate is the second most prolific science fiction author. That's amazing and hilarious. I think a bunch of Animorphs were ghost written though.

rsync• 5 years ago

From the article:

"Goodreads was acquired by Amazon in 2013. One would think that having Amazon’s customer ethos and resources would give muscle to create a delightful user experience."

Is this sarcasm ?

palehose• 5 years ago

Does Amazon make any significant revenue from Goodreads? I can see how it might be something that boosts their kindle sales but other than that they probably have a good reason not to focus on it like... because it isn't a business breadwinner. Why work on Goodreads when you can make more money on AWS? Does anyone really believe they are going to become the next hot social network because they nailed the market for people who read books in the most transparent/ community accessible way possible?

scanr2• 5 years ago

Does anyone know of a good book recommendation system? I wonder if it’s a Hard Problem. I’d love to find one that didn’t just recommend the same top 10 popular fantasy or science fiction authors.

vhpoet3• 5 years ago

Have you seen https://www.readthistwice.com ? (fyi, I'm the founder)

scanr2• 5 years ago

Thank you. I’ll check it out.

kaitai• 5 years ago

Yeah, I think some folks have mentioned it, but The Storygraph [1] has really gotten some traction as a replacement. Question for HN readers, then -- if you look at Storygraph vs Goodreads, what's the missing secret sauce? Just critical mass?

[1] https://app.thestorygraph.com/

superfrank• 5 years ago

One would think that having Amazon’s customer ethos and resources would give muscle to create a delightful user experience. Disappointingly, it’s remained an elusive dream.

Take this with a big grain of salt because my memory is terrible, but I thought I remember reading an article a while back from someone who was either working on Goodreads when it sold or at Amazon right after they bought it and they said the code for Goodreads is just terrible to work in and any change you make causes a ton of bugs. They basically added enough features to make it fit into the Amazon ecosystem and after that it's not worth the time or effort to improve it.

felixbraun• 5 years ago

Readmill (acquired by Dropbox) was a better Goodreads -- there is no app I miss more

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5DTNCLSoMho

mdoms• 5 years ago

Maybe this is a regional thing but one of the major premises of the article doesn't hold for me. I almost never see Goodreads in Google search results for books. I'm not even sure I EVER have.

forgotpwd16• 5 years ago

I read the article but didn't understood what is _wrong_ with Goodreads in first place. Comparing with some of the mentioned alternatives it's a simpler interface yet is more information rich. Even not considering its bigger community, it's still a better option to track books.

Johnny555• 5 years ago

Probably the same reason why no one has made a better IMDB -- Goodreads has a head start and it's "good enough" for most people. It takes a lot of time (or money) to build enough content to make a viable competitor. A book recommendation engine that has only 5% of the content of Goodreads won't be very popular.

bennysomething• 5 years ago

I'm just glad this didn't open with "good reads is broken here's why"

atomashpolskiy• 5 years ago

I find Goodreads UX tasteless and clunky, especially on mobile. My favourite website in this department is fantlab.ru, though it's mostly in Russian.

throwawayjcvbs5• 5 years ago

a redesign is underway

stakkur• 5 years ago

Goodreads is owned by Amazon. It's sole purpose is to drive customers to Amazon, not provide a 'delightful user experience' outside that goal. That's why they bought it.

randomsearch3• 5 years ago

From posts by former goodreads employees, Amazon bought it to kill it

throwawayjcvbs5• 5 years ago

this is false. they bought it 8 years ago, you'd think it would be dead by now if so.

randomsearch3• 5 years ago

Disagree with this post. All it’s saying is “goodreads dominates the Google sales channel” and any startup founder will tell you there a dozen alternatives to that channel. This is absolutely not the reason goodreads hasn’t been replaced.

I have tried all the alternatives that have been launched and I think they are all a bit rubbish. Add that to network effects and there’s just no reason to switch.

Why hasn’t anyone produced anything vastly superior? Because there’s no strong business model to justify a lot of VC investment and attention.

Amazon owns the online book market, so to make money from selling books you’re not competing with Goodreads but with Amazon.

There are lots of alternative solutions to the business model and related problems and it is very much possible to wipe out goodreads, but (1) there are many more attractive businesses to start rather that are easier to do, and (2) anything that gains traction could be met by huge investment in goodreads by Amazon or else will just be bought at an early stage for spare change.

vhpoet3• 5 years ago

Have you seen this? https://www.readthistwice.com/libraries

dnissley• 5 years ago

Here's a list of the alternatives to goodreads I collected from this thread, along with some thoughts on how each compares with goodreads.

1. OpenLibrary: https://openlibrary.org/

No user reviews, but they do at least have ratings. Other than that, no social features or lists -- just a way to keep track of your library. Awful suggestions.

2. Shepherd: https://shepherd.com/

Not a real directory -- short curated lists around various topics. Books don't have their own dedicated page. No suggestions. No social features. No way to keep track of your own books.

3. Readerly: https://www.readerly.com/

Mobile app only, invite only.

4. LibraryThing: https://www.librarything.com/

Good social features. Poor mobile web UX, although looks like they have mobile apps. Has been around since before goodreads but doesn't seem to have changed much for the better, so improvements in the future seem unlikely.

5. Zeneca: https://www.zeneca.io/

Decent social features, but still pretty empty feeling. Looks like they're just starting up though.

6. Story Graph: https://app.thestorygraph.com/

Only social feature seems to be ratings + feed of started/finished/rated. Also got that new reddit style slowness feeling.

7. Readng: https://readng.co

Decent social features. I like this one the best of all the alternatives here, it has the best UX by far. There's kind of a private feeling to it though -- there could be more discoverability / suggestions, and I don't think I should have to log in in order to do things with a website like this (don't have to with goodreads).

8. Bookwyrm: https://bookwyrm.social/

Part of the fediverse and this particular instance of this app is closed. Pretty basic, supports reviews, can't say too much about it though.

9. Rate.house: https://rate.house/

Supports rating/reviews of all types of media, not just books. Might not attract the right audience for a bookish community.

10. MYBookList: http://www.mybooklist.com/

Pretty basic, not even cover images are supported. Basic social features: reviews, ratings, lists.

gweinberg• 5 years ago

Say, does anyone know of an open reverse bibliography service (find boos that cite a given book)? When I read a good book it often helps me find other books worth reading, but I can only go backwards in time that way.

aasasd• 5 years ago

People keep mentioning reviews on GoodReads, but to me, aggregate scores there always seemed pretty much useless. The whole scope of grades from ‘eh’ to ‘jolly good book’ is in the range from 4.0 to 4.5—and it's not even a clear gradation from worse to better, they're sorta mixed up instead. Plus a lot of outliers: okay books above 4.5 or excellent ones at or below 4.0. Never once could use the site to see if I should or shouldn't read some book.

A compressed score range itself is not a problem, it just needs to have a clear gradation of values, with not too many outliers. E.g. on IMDB movies range from 6.5 for watchable to 7.0 for good-ish to ~8 for excellent, with 8.5 being genius. On Rotten Tomatoes, 75% is pretty good, 85% is excellent, >90% is either immediate classic or a superhero movie (not hard to tell apart). Metacritic is similar to IMDB in regard to games.

However, seeing as books are often politicized and get good reviews only due to the political message (e.g. Ayn Rand), perhaps the scores are bound to be bogus anyway.

manx• 5 years ago

I'm working on a project that tackles the recommendation problem from a different angle: Personal recommendations from friends have more value than algorithmic ones. Here is the work-in-progress app: https://listo.unote.io

Any feedback is appreciated

Marciplan• 5 years ago

Readng.co is a very good one :)

1vuio0pswjnm7• 5 years ago

Somehat misleading to put uxdesign.cc as the domain when this redirects to medium.com

A DNS lookup for uxdesign.cc produces IP adddresses for medium.com

throwawayr8q9f2• 5 years ago

I made a halfway decent recommendation engine. Still have all the backend tech and algorithms squirreled away but haven't done much with it beyond continually being reminded nothing useful like it exists.

Maybe one day.

throwawayr8q9f2• 5 years ago

... and looking thru some of the other comments, there's a bit of overthinking imo. I don't really think recommendations are all that hard, particularly if you're an avid reader.

I'm not talking about building communities, driving social engagement, blah blah, just a good recommendation engine. That's the bit that's not all that hard.

vietvu• 5 years ago

Because it's Amazon? They have money, power and control over all books publishing. And to me, it's not broken. For something I rarely use, it's fine.

tanto• 5 years ago

How about https://mojoreads.com ?

frankdilo• 5 years ago

Readng is a great alternative to GoodReads: https://beta.readng.co/

It’s currently in private beta.

LordNight• 5 years ago

Goodreads has been around for ~15 years now and it's still lacking the basic search functions. E.g. I'd would like to see a list of books published in 1965 in Science Fiction genre with at least 1000 votes, sorted by the number of votes. Hell, even just seeing a list of books, published in X year would be nice. IMDB can do this, progarchives can do this, a lot of similar sites can do this. But not Goodreads. And without the proper search function the "discoverability" tends to zero, which, in my opinion, should be the main focus of any site, devoted to books and book reviews.

On top of this, the UI is horrendous. Just as one example, compare Goodreads author page, say https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/3706.George_Orwell where the only useful things you could see is the short bio and the most voted books of the author with a similar russian site https://fantlab.ru/autor238 Fantlab displays all the works, categorized into novels/novellas/short stories/essays sorted in chronological order (and you can sort by other criteria as well) that gives you a clear overview of the author's works. The book pages are hardly any better.

The only advantage Goodreads have over other sites is it's huge user base, and because of this, I'm afraid, we are stuck with it for a very long time and it's not going anywhere.

bocklund• 5 years ago

I use Goodreads, but only like a letterboxd for books. Anyone have a recommendation of something with a better experience than goodreads where I can track my read, reading and wanting to read?

Recommendations are not that important to me and “social” features even less so.

Mikho• 5 years ago

Isn't it obvious? Goodreads doesn't need to make money on its own. It's a customer acquisition and retention tool for Amazon. The same way as DPReview is. They both are good for communities and don't try to be anything else or overload users with ads. They are just basic communities with tons of content.

To make a better Goodreads one first needs to make a better book store than Amazon, better reader than Kindle, and better audio book service than Audible. Goodreads and these services are in a virtuous flywheel.

bookworm58• 5 years ago

For recommendations try https://www.readgeek.com - has a top 30 or so personalized recommendations and gives you an estimate of pretty much any book on how much you will like it.

rahu_• 5 years ago

I tried making their Quotes section better. Contains 1m+ quotes. but since goodreads has lot of backlinks my site never comes on Google.

http://satya.co/

Why has no one made a better Goodreads

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