I took a quick look and there is a official Goodreads API that you can use to pull titles from people’s accounts (once they authorize your app). Yes, Amazon could shut it down but eh, might be worth the risk
I remember someone making open source version of IMDB (can't remember the link now), I think I saw it on Patreon. Would be nice to make something similar for books.
One feature I'd love as a user (specifically for non-fiction books) - given a book, show me all books referenced in that book (in the chapter, footnotes etc). I've found quite a few gems, simply by scanning the referenced books list in the books that I like. After all, the author is an expert on the subject, and it is safe to assume he/she would have read tons of books than me on the subject.
Of course I'm only searching for one book at a time.
1) I desperately want a feature that'll show me the books most-reviewed among my friends, or highest reviewed with >X # of reviews. You can see what individual friends have reviewed, but there is nothing I've found to aggregate.
2) More reading stats (right now it shows number of books, and total pages at the end of the year). I wanna see breakdowns of categories, authors, fiction/nonfiction.
3) I had an idea for per-book or per-series wikis that have spoiler-bracketed info. E.g., [spoiler b2p300 "King Soandso is murdered by Assassin Soandso"] would show in a book wiki if you are past book 2, page 300. I read a bit of fantasy and have a tendency to want to google 'who is x', but that is fraught with spoilers. This is a feature that could exist as its own site, but I think it'd be a good companion to a goodreads-esque site.
4) Book Discovery seems super weak on Goodreads and I feel I could build something significantly more useful.
It's basically just the momentum it has, alongside with crowdfunded book directory (you don't have to enter the metadata manually in like 99.999% of the cases). I'm not gonna say "don't bother", but I've personally used three Goodreads alternatives over the years and nobody mentioned a single one of them yet. I've settled on BookDigits[0], which is what Goodreads should be if you ask me.
> Yes, Amazon could shut it down but eh, might be worth the risk
Technically API isn't the only way users could extract their data from Goodreads. There's also export/import tool that exports data in CSV, and there's also RSS feed that you could ask for.
If there's one good thing I can say about Goodreads, it's that it's not a walled garden.
The reason “better frontend” is in quotes is because it wouldn’t stop at just making the UI/UX better, but also do better search using Algolia, a better book recommendation engine, etc. but there’s no reason it couldn’t just use the goodreads api as essentially the backend for user profiles and ratings