Why has no one made a better Goodreads
uxdesign.cc
uxdesign.cc
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
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
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.
Seems other things came your way, but it seems like it's resolved now. There's plenty of stats on https://openlibrary.org/stats now and none are zero.
(Hi Mek! Thanks for the help so far)
If there were some way I didn't have this goodreads account at all, that would be preferable.
I didn't sign up for a goodreads account. I was given one. And it's sharing my email address with third parties by default.
That's scummy company behavior.
Huh?
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.
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.
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...
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...
Some would hate it, but if it actually improves the quality and the company has some security chops I’d see it as a selling point.
An anonymous review website could similarly rate limit how quickly reviews change, so someone spamming 1,000 reviews accomplishes little.
If it worked well, I’d use it in a snap.
I'm defining "anonymous to the world" or "anonymous publicly", whereas you're defining it as "anonymous to everyone, even the company".
But in the scope of a book review website, and this thread about preventing spam by having ID enforced, my comment made sense as that. The company knows you, but you can have an anonymous handle to the world. I had clarified that with the line about trust.
It's good opsec to assume all private data at companies may get leaked, including links between your ID and your name.
Consider the scenario where somebody is reviewing books on dangerous subjects (politics, religion, LGBT+, etc...) and is suddenly outed to the whole world due to a data breach.
For other types of applications you’d want to have a better system, like a writing platform.
But still, there’s ways to do it. You can validate the high res copies of whatever you want to validate, then make a hash using a few key numbers, in partial. Stuff like that gets you close to ideal, even the worst case break would expose almost nothing, and you’d prevent duplicate accounts. Only risk is losing the documents during validation before they’re deleted.
Neither site is fast, but "one of the slowest around" doesn't track either.
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.
Scalability + data aggregation + user adoption == lots of funding + a clever business model + a significant reason to switch from $DOMINANT_COMPANY + a good bit of luck.
That requires huge financial resources, and thus, a solid monetization scheme.
Now that I think about it, there probably are multiple projects already trying to do that.
What bothers me is that they clearly have the data to allow for very specific queries, but there's no way to make them.
But I would say that, in general, reviews are ok quality, and honest.
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.
https://onezero.medium.com/almost-everything-about-goodreads...
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.
Recommendations could be so much more helpful if they were done by an algorithm similar to what Netflix used to have - Cinematch. Then even people without friends could get good recommendations.
In terms of recommending what I am already likely interested in based on my previous reads, the "Readers also enjoyed" section seems decent to me. Is that what people think sucks? I've used that a fair amount and found it to be valuable. Or is it the whole "Browse" section that's bad? I never look under there.
I use goodreads every day, but that means spending 5 mins max on it (I hop in, add a book that I heard about somewhere to my to-read list, then I hop off). And, like I alluded to in my first reply, from what I can tell this behavior also holds true for my friends. I don't think I'm an outlier, though I totally understand that people use the site differently than me and they find it wanting.
A better way to do recommendations is to find readers who have rated books similarly to me and tell me what books they've rated highly that I haven't already read. This is what Netflix's Cinematch once did and it was good. It used singular value decomposition and other linear algebra techniques on a giant matrix of raters.
I don't remember ever seeing a rating system (for books or tv) that let me do fine grain rating. And if it had it, most people[citation needed] might not use it anyway. Also, how would I say that what I liked the most about a fantasy book is the magic system, for example?
I don't care HOW the recommendation is implemented, but what shows on the recommendation. For me, 'Readers also enjoyed' shows things that are sufficiently similar, and which people that I follow - friends and bloggers - gave good ratings.
The 'lists with this book' section is also good for discovering books, as the lists are user curated, and the title helps me know what's the common theme. Ie: books with cool magic systems.
A product has features in some high dimensional quality space. When you rate it, you provide information about your preference for those qualities without needing to explicitly rate them or even have a concept of what they are called.
I think it could be: you didn't 'dislike' many titles or; you are not browsing things that are too different from what you usually watch
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.
In aggregate the star rating is pretty good for literature and non-fiction. For mass fiction it's fairly useless.
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.
It doesn't really matter as long as everyone's on the same page I suppose. Sure, you clip stuff off the end.. but doesn't everyone just want a taxi that gets them A-B without problem? Who's actively seeking 'above and beyond'? Maybe 'would've scored >5 if I had them' is not a problem, because nobody cares?
(I should maybe say I've never actually used Uber!)
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.
Before I learned this Uber etiquette I would rate drivers the same way. "Well, he got me from A to B without issue, but was there anything that set this ride apart and elevated it?"
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.
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.
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
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 :)
There are so many great books that are also unknown, and I am trying to help people diversify their reading material and eventually map out people's "book dna" in order to do better recommendations. I am really worried that new authors have an even harder time to get traction than they did 10 years ago, even if a big publishing house picks them up it looks like most of the marketing burden is on them. I want to see if I can help in that department while giving readers better ways to find amazing books.
Curious to know - how did you curate 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.
It is a pretty easy sell as it is win/win for them. They recommend five books on a topic they already know well and then I feature them and their book alongside the list forever. Plus, what we are finding in early user testing is that by giving those little recommendations readers get to peek in their head and it increases interest in their book.
Half my long term goal with this website is to give authors better ways to market themselves and their books. There is a growing trend that authors have to do full time marketing and I worry that a lot of authors spend more time on marketing than their craft. And, for new authors it is a catch 22 to try to get that first book noticed.
[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?
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
Self-written mini-bios are not the answer here; the question "what makes this recommender different from the others?" is not something the recommender can answer in isolation, even if they're being maximally honest.
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.
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 :)
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!
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!
I bought it for mid 5 figures, so pretty good deal.
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...
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.
It's the same thing, but I get what you mean. By expensive, I mean too expensive to get to invest in building it, not as in expensive to buy off-the-shelf.
Not a recommendation, just a shoutout to them. Also, OpenRefine helped so much, kudos to all involved.
The most important thing I was given at University were reading lists. I often wondered if getting students from courses all over the world to send in copies of their University course reading lists would be possible/useful. To give a concrete example my Eng lit course in the 90s, each year we would get 6 reading lists covering different topics/historical periods and with a thematic direction: like (made up) Social Mobility in Renaissance Literature. These lists are produced by people with significant expertise and strong opinions, but also had to ensure certain ground was covered. It seems trivial in a sense, but actually when you come fresh to a topic it's hard to get a great list!
Anyway I think what you're doing is excellent. A question and an observation:
- Why not use openlibrary as referenced in the top comment here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26837057)?
- I like the author led lists and I get why the page is strongly focused on who the recommendation is coming from / why I should care...but there was also a part of me that wanted quickly to see the general tenor of the recommendations. Not sure how one could possibly satisfy both desires above the fold! But anyway it was a "feeling".
I don't want to get yelled at... but in my testing OpenLibrary data was some of the worst out of all the datasets/APIs I tested. I would love to see that project succeed. I am not sure how they are going to achieve what they are trying to do within the current labor/"business" model.
I hear you on the general tenor of the recommendations, if you have a second shoot me an email at ben@shepehrd.com as I'd love to get your thoughts on something.
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.
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.
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.
The social data that Goodreads aggregates is definitely a moat, because it powers their SEO efforts further.
Overall, I like Goodreads, but the Kindle integration is not a selling point in my experience.
[] 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'.
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?
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.
2. I've got more books than shelves.
3. Until I figure out my book/shelve situation, the bins make it easy to keep the books out of the way in storage, but turn up a particular book when I need it.
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!
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.
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.
I have been an amazon affiliate for 10 years or more and, to be fair, they behave much better than any other affiliate program I have been involved with.
It takes a lot of work but if you have the resources practically all of it can be outsourced. What I do is learn as much as I can about each role that is needed, then I hire virtual assistants and train them to do that role. That helps keep costs down since you aren't hiring an "expert".
I'm growing a couple sites right now that I haven't written a single word for or taken a single photograph because I have some awesome writers and a photographer. I've also never posted a single article to Wordpress because, you guessed it, I have an awesome VA that I trained to do that for me. I even have a content manager (the highest paid role) who manages the writers and tells them pretty specifically what to write.
Also the majority of people do not block ads. This also depends on the niche though. Gaming and tech niches are usually low RPM unless you get targeted affiliate traffic (like you show up on Google for "Best Gaming Laptops of 2021")
As far as affiliate revenue, they are very likely to be making a purchase soon if they are looking at book reviews so if you can get them to click your Amazon affiliate link there will be fairly high conversion. The revenue per purchase probably is quite low due to the price and margins on a physical book (although I wonder what it looks like for Kindle books) but with enough traffic you can absolutely make it work. I can think of some interesting ways to get a lot of traffic with Pinterest as well in this niche.
This is a numbers game. Keep your costs low and your time involvement low and even if it is only making $2k/month that is good enough because you can have several sites at the same time.
Btw as far as needing a ton of traffic to make money well sometimes that is true to an extent. Recently I was looking at a website that was the most popular user-created website for a specific mobile game. It is generating $6k/month despite having the lowest RPM I've seen so far (only making around $2 per 1000 visitors). Despite this the hosting cost was only $50/mo and I bet I could get that down to $15/month with even better performance.
Side note - you get paid commissions on everything people buy for a certain time after clicking your affiliate link. People buy tons of stuff on Amazon so you'll get lots of revenue for non-book things too.
If you want more info on this type of business model go look at these site (I am not affiliated with them at all):
If you refer via a the books category and then someone buys from some other random category you get a much lower percentage. This has been a recent move and makes such tactics very unprofitable - for good reason too.
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!
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
Have also looked a little into Library Thing (also mentioned in this discussion). Anyone use both and have useful comparisons, pros/cons for each?
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...
So, I believe the answer here is a better user experience, cheaper prices, and a modern approach.
Want to also swap video games? Pc parts? I just have to fill the database and add a filter option
The project looks cool and I wish you the best of luck in designing solutions to avoid bad actors.
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.
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.
Blog about this: https://blog.librarything.com/main/2020/03/librarything-goes...
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.
Due to this some companies are literally undethronable.
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:
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.
I am all for improving it but I really hope that it doesn't get ruined in the name of UX.
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.
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.
It seems odd that Amazon's recommendation engine isn't better. Perhaps it works for most people.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
Swapping those links for a competitor would be damn near impossible, and it has not much to do with the SEO.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Any feedback is appreciated
Recommendations are not that important to me and “social” features even less so.
Maybe one day.
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.
"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 ?
It’s currently in private beta.
A DNS lookup for uxdesign.cc produces IP adddresses for medium.com
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.
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.
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.