Books

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.

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’ve moved away from GR over to StoryGraph for the most part. Found it suits my use case quite well.

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.

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.

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.

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.

@antonim As for me, I use Bookwyrm and my libraries timeline feature in Libby.

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.

I'm still on there because at the very least it's a decent way to track the books I've read. I keep getting tempted to put my reviews on my blog instead ot Goodreads though.

In thelast month, I've had to rehome myself from reddit and Evernote. I'm not eager to move anything else right now.