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Comment by habosa | Hacker News Reader

Someone, somewhere has to be able to make a better alternative to Goodreads right? The site is slow, ugly, and buggy. The functionality is so simple: I tell you when I read a book and what I think about it.

I'm just shocked Amazon has been able to own this niche with so little effort.

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I've been working on a competitor for a while now, and the hardest part of replicating functionality is the data. OpenLibrary is probably the best source for book metadata online, but even their library dumps are riddled with mistakes that manifest in weird ways as you start building your own library. The Goodreads site sucks, but they've got surprising data quality that I don't think anyone else has; and they have a super restrictive data policy so you can't repurpose book data, reviews, shelf data, etc, even when users auth with a Goodreads account.

It's a small moat, but definitely penetrable with more than a little effort.

You could nick the scraping code from Calibre...

The scraping part is probably not the complicated portion of the endeavor.

Demanding perfect data is a waste of time that will let you procrastinate your product indefinitely.

If you're aiming for "like X, but for people who are actually interested in the market X supposedly serves" then maybe this isn't true.

The good data quality is actually an artifact of humans being involved in every step of the cataloging process. There's a large group in goodreads called the GoodReads Librarians, and that group has around a hundred thousand dedicated people who go through and flag anomalies, correct titles and indexes etc

Book publishers or people who've worked in book publishing will know that the book database is one area you don't want to mess with unless you know what you are doing. ISBN's are not the be all and end all of the story, and when you start taking into account special editions, covers, ebook editions, language translations, you'll start to realize that the Book Catalog system going back in history, including Dewey decimal system is a marvel of human achievement.

Of course establishing a good quality index is going to take work. People often forget that quality take human work and effort.

EDIT: I lied. I changed the number from my original estimate of a "few hundred" to "hundred thousand". The Goodreads Librarians group has 103718 members as of when I just peeked now - so it's actually a large number of humans submitting fixes to their catalog.

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

If you take a look at the kind of discussions taking place, those are the kinds of things any competitor to Goodreads needs to know about.

Facts are not copyrightable and scraping has been determined to be legal. IANAL, but I'm not sure law would protect them from the factual metadata about books being repurposed.

Not being illegal wouldn't protect you from a crushing lawsuit though. Especially since the details likely vary (linked in data was publicly accessible, not sure if Goodreads requires a login).

I wonder if a partnership with Kobo, or even better Nook (Barnes & Noble) could help solve both the data problem and the issue with Kindle integration - while potentially bolstering the e-reader that integrates with it as well.

I for sure would take that sort of integration into account when looking at a new ereader. Although the primary thing I'd be looking for is library integration a la OverDrive.

As a regular Goodreads user, I've never cared about the site's relatively slow load times. What's important to me is the trust that the site will still be around in 20 years, largely thanks to the Amazon ownership and Kindle integrations. I wouldn't have that same faith in an anonymous competitor.

Goodreads was that anonymous site once upon a time. You're just not an early adopter and that's okay. That's no reason to not create a better alternative.

I think it's a little insincere to compare Goodreads' release 13 years ago with a competitor launching against it now.

The kindle integration, the amount of correct data, and the fact that it's not going to vanish in the next year is what keeps me using GoodReads.

Not to imply this functionality is complex, but really the most important thing for me are the lists:

I _love_ that I can take a book I enjoyed, see it's on a list of "Best Magic Systems", and note what was rated even better for its magic system

A simple method of discovery for me

https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/871.Most_Interesting_Mag...

https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/8497.Aliens_First_Contac...

I find the site decently fast, definitely ugly but then again I don't want it to get a reddit-style redesign either. The information density is ok right now, and I'm actually impressed by the wide range of functionalities they have, related to reviewing books and updating your progress.

The thing that goodreads has that will be hard to replicate is the Kindle integration.

This is the Achilles heel of any potential competitor. The lazy integration means there is a big subset of users who simply won't engage with a competitor because it requires more work. Couple that with the social graph Goodreads already has and you're looking at a huge moat.

Have you tried looking? There's LibraryThing and a couple others.

I don't think there's much value left on the table in the niche, though. Kindles have first-class Goodreads sync and even a Goodreads button in their global navbar. And Goodreads' competitors, for the few people who don't want to use Goodreads, already have a deep rut of incumbency.

Even you, who has supposed great issues with Goodreads, apparently wasn't bothered enough to even see if competitors existed all this time, much less before writing your comment. Doesn't bode well for the Goodreads' competitor market, lol.

None of the competitors I'm aware of have fuzzy search though, which is pretty annoying.

"color prple"

LibraryThing: 0 results

Goodreads: 2,000+ results and they're well sorted

Reddit has terrible search too, but you can appreciate that "Reddit but with good search" isn't all it takes to compete with Reddit. That's 0.001% of the work.

And of course Goodreads has issues of its own, but none of them are show-stoppers for most people, especially few of the people who just use it as a glorified Excel spreadsheet.

I only chuckle about this because, like many enterprising HNers, I myself have considered building a Goodreads competitor in the past and even managed to build the ol' weekend prototype (i.e. 0.001% of the work). It's one of those projects where you start and, after you get some of the easy things done like fuzzy search, you go "wait, wtf am I doing? Who would switch to this?"

Using and improving OpenLibrary is also alluring, but pretty hard to do without an application with actual users that have some sort of "edit book" functionality that you can then moderate and submit upstream to the OpenLibrary data source.

For example, look how ListenNotes.com lets users edit its podcast database: https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/the-joe-rogan-experienc... -> the "Edit" tab.

I think most people use Reddit to just browse the subreddits. GoodReads is about searching for books an adding then to your shelves, many of those might be books that someone just mentioned to you in passing, or you don't remember the full/correct name.

Different usage than reddit

GoodReads already doesn't look awesome, but whoa, LibraryThing looks like it hasn't been update in the past decade

Just signed up for FediReads[1] last week. It's a decentralized Goodreads with ActivityPub, and open source[2].

[1] http://fedireads-test.glitch.me/

[2] https://github.com/mouse-reeve/fedireads/

> This is just a demo, any data here may be deleted without warning. sign up for email updates

So basically, keep using GoodReads for now?

I've been working on something like this. Super simple, like an Spreadsheet of what you read but as a SaaS. I was thinking in monetize it a là Pinboard: focused on privacy. Like, $3 per month and you have it, without Amazon or Google knowing what books you read and how you rate them.

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