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Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

Google Trends shows that GoodReads seems to get at least 100x the popularity LibraryThing does.

Both sites were founded around 15 years ago.

But they're both still going. (GoodReads, of course, now being owned by Amazon.)

Which seems like a pretty unusual situation to me -- can't think of too many parallels where the extreme underdog doesn't either a) just call it quits or b) keeps innovating until they get some kind of "reasonable" market share, whether that's 10% or 30% or 50% or 80%.

Above all in a social network. (A big value of GoodReads for me is seeing my friend's books and activity too. As much as I'd be curious to try LibraryThing, I don't think any of my friends have even heard of it.)

I'm quite curious how LibraryThing has managed to keep going despite such a tiny userbase, comparatively? I'm genuinely impressed.

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They have a very small staff, and the website isn't their main source of income. A few years ago they spun off two other SaaS products for libraries, and that's what mostly pays the bills.

The data from LibraryThing powers book recommendations for libraries and other metadata for a lot of libraries, and they also sell a very low-cost cataloging system targeted at small libraries.

I switched to LT from GoodReads a few years ago, and really prefer it.

"The data from LibraryThing powers book recommendations for libraries and other metadata for a lot of libraries, and they also sell a very low-cost cataloging system targeted at small libraries."

So in this case there is actually is a sustainable business model for the company having it free. cool.

> I'm quite curious how LibraryThing has managed to keep going despite such a tiny userbase

LT got traction significantly earlier than GR (or Anobii, which is big in some countries). In fact, they could have gone hockey-stick, but basically chose not to - they kept it somewhat exclusive and expensive, àla Apple, while GR went free. It always felt like LT was a lifestyle business and GR was a VC-style business (I don't know if this perception actually matched their financials). When the chips are down, you need very little to keep going what is essentially an online book database, if you don't go chasing growth metrics.

I use both LT and GR for different things: GR is a record of what I've read, LT is a record of what I own. Among other things it makes it relatively easy for me to shelve my books by LoC call number which isn't possible at all with GR.

I really wish Amazon would do something with GoodReads instead of just parking it and running it with a skeleton crew. As a platform, it has so much potential, but for some reason Amazon doesn't see it or can't do anything about it.

What potential is left? I’m curious about what could goodreads add to make it better?

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

From what I understand, having followed them (and used them happily for a few years) is (1) they don't employ that many people. And, TBH, having used librarything for many years, very little has changed for probably 7+ years. I imagine maintenance is hard but they keep it slim.

And (2) they focused heavily on the medium-scale market with tinycat (an online catalog for "tiny" libraries like community centers/etc) and (3) used their extensive user-generated data to help 'enrich'/recommend/etc books from bigger libraries. These are all cool niches that were under-developed, especially b/c goodreads with amazon wanted to keep as much data as possible to themselves.

I do which they would update the main website more (it doesn't even have a mobile version of the site, although 2 stripped down apps). But they do have an API which is amazing and very useful. I use it for a lot of stuff (find books I want to read in my library/overdrive, find new books my authors I've liked, etc)

> I do which they would update the main website more

The surprise takeaway for me in this announcement was that a "2.0" complete redesign is apparently not only in the works but around the corner (just not entirely ready yet).

> Which seems like a pretty unusual situation to me -- can't think of too many parallels where the extreme underdog doesn't either a) just call it quits or b) keeps innovating until they get some kind of "reasonable" market share, whether that's 10% or 30% or 50% or 80%.

IIRC, in search Google has a ~93% share, and Bing is number 2 with something like 2.3%.

From what they said in the announcement they are able to get a lot of revenue from selling cataloguing software to libraries. Sounds like a different use case than GoodReads.

Maybe it's a labor of love and doesn't have shareholders who want big returns.

Yeah, and running something like LibraryThing would be quite inexpensive. It doesn't need a lot of updates, there would be minimal problems if a data leak happened (it's fairly open anyway AFAIK), and book cataloging is very light on resources. You could probably get away with a single developer dedicating a handful of hours in a given week, probably less, and hosting would be in the noise as well.

My understanding is that hard core literary readers tend to prefer Goodreads, so the S/N ratio is higher. That's the claim, no idea if it's true. I do recall a fairly popular article some years ago talking about rating inflation on the Internet in general, and they used GoodReads as the classic example - where medicore books often get a 3.5-4 overall rating.

I probably should see if I can go through all my LT books and compare the rating with that on GoodReads. Would make for a fun little project.

(Note: Just looked at a few random ones, and while LT ratings are lower, not really by much (e.g. 3.8 vs 3.9).

I think a lot of hardcore readers don't care that much for the GoodReads social aspects.

I made my account in 2010. I considered GoodReads, but LT won because they allow you to download all your data. Maybe GoodReads does, but they either didn't back then, or it was non-obvious. I haven't ever tried to look at GoodReads again, but to be frank, I kind of like that LT looks like it was made 15 years ago!

> iterary readers tend to prefer Goodreads

You mean LibraryThing?

Yup. My mistake.

I use goodreads as a catalog of what I read, easy access to quotes from kindle, and a list of future books to read. Ml

The social aspect pretty much does not exist for me.

GoodReads does let you download your data, but it's a weird complicated process. I've done it once or twice to try to update my LT library with Amazon ebooks, and IIRC every time I've done it I've used the kindly updated instructions on LT's own import page to remind me how to download the GoodReads data.

Yahoo search?

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