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Comment by Paul_S | Hacker News Reader

Goodreads is only good (eh, decent?) as a database of books you've read. All the other functionality is pointless and or broken. The recommendation system is a joke and is obviously used to promote nonsense instead of giving you personalised recommendations.

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They have further hamstrung it recently by having it that non-moderators (or some euphemism for someone with such rights) can no longer add new books. I regularly read weird stuff not in their system and adding this extra barrier is disastrous.

I still use it...well, can I say I still use it if the last time I tried to add a book I couldn't? ... I just checked back - that was a month ago, and I even made a forum post about the book that it be added, but nope, book's not there...it seems nobody has even looked at the post. Sad times at goodreads. What a weird site. It's still charming in many ways.

Yes that is the most painful thing on the entire platform. And supposedly the only reason it exists is because Amazon the owner doesn't want to deal with copyright issues of the photographs of the book covers. Antiquarian bookshops might have a lot of books that never have been categorised in this manner and to read mostly niche stuff and essentially being told nope you can't keep track of this read the 2023 best seller instead, kills culture.

At least they integrated more automation so that many titles from Amazon's catalogs appear on Goodreads quite soon without manual work. So a lot of the recent stuff in the main languages at least often doesn't need to be added manually anymore.

It's crazy how much Goodreads relies on unpaid "librarian" contributions to keep their data in check. One problem with allowing the general population to add titles to the database is that the chance of getting malformed entries that will require manual fix ups (from these volunteers) later on is pretty high.

> I just checked back - that was a month ago, and I even made a forum post about the book that it be added, but nope, book's not there...it seems nobody has even looked at the post.

Volunteer librarians + zero dev support means that, if you really want to see the addition, you should bump your post daily or so until by chance it catches the eye of somebody...

For me, it's more of a database to keep track of books I want to read in the future. I can't read everything immediately after reading a recommendation or seeing it mentioned somewhere. Mostly I use goodreads to organize this list. It ends up getting into the "read" list after, but that part isn't as important. And when I am approaching an empty stack of books to read, I go on there and try to pop from the top of the stack on my "want to read" high priority list.

Also yeah, the recommendation system is pretty bad. I can't believe they can't do better with all the ratings data they have. I get recommendations externally, but track them in goodreads.

it's more of a database to keep track of books I want to read in the future.

I use a notepad.

I do that for a lot of things. Paper has no downtime, is robust, etc...

When it comes to longer term basic information, bitmaps and text are where it's at!

I can always convert my paper to a bitmap, and often from that to text if I want to. And authoring simple text basically works on every computer going back to the Apple //e I started on, which sits on my workbench to this day. (it's there to play various games people still write for it!)

I have trouble finding new authors or good books on there to the point that I stopped trying.

I only use it for reading up reviews.

I was kinda shocked reading through their top X list and finding absolute garbage, rated 8+. I wonder if they suffer from IMDB syndrome.

That can be solved with better tiering and categories.

I like low budget horror. I like how rookie filmmakers are capable of bringing brand new ideas out of the aether without even realizing it. I like it when a cheap actor has a single moment of greatness for no discernable reason.

I'm not stupid enough to think that any of them stack up with The Greats but I still like the films and personally rate them highly. Most film nerds would probably not appreciate my toplist, but it's not my fault everyone sorts by All.

What I've found as a better metric of 'good' (at least for fiction) is the number of ratings, especially combined with star rating.

If something has a high number of ratings it's popular enough that it's probably decent (at least if you're into that genre).

Like a 4.38 rating w/ 2.7 million ratings (The Fellowship of the Ring) is a better bet compared to a 4.98 star with 150 ratings (random new book by unknown author).

Also, Goodreads doesn't have a 10 point system like IMDB, right? I believe all the ratings are 0 to 5.

I present you:

Ready Player One Ernest Cline 4.23 1,099,069 ratings 99,154 reviews

It joined club of handful of books that I just stopped reading and threw into trash. Yet its 4.23 as of writing!

There are different tastes and likes, but that book is so poorly written and has such barebones plot... I don't know how it is popular

GPT4 is so far the best book recommendation system I've found. It did work better back when it was slow though.

I only use it to see if/where a book belongs to/in a series. No other aggregate-type website seems to provide this information in any usable fashion.

Used to use it for book release notifications too, but that broke some years ago for me and I've yet to receive a response to my support request from like 4 years ago.

It's great for following people who read interesting books and may leave reviews that are worth reading. Of course this is an an extension of the database of books you've read, because you can compare your ratings quite easily with those of other people and find things they liked that you didn't know about yet. That's a great source of recommendations, much better than the automated systems.

I'm not sure why people like it so much. My aunt-in-law is high pressuring me to use it.

I have my library listing all the books I checked out. I have a pdf/epub reader that has a history of the books I read(although a new phone will probably wipe that out).

For a while, I was merely writing down my books in a dedicated notebook, but I realized that it didn't really matter, if a book was important, I remembered it. If it was bad, I forgot about it. I could have typed these into google sheets so it was sharable. I wonder if that is an acceptable option.

It's social media for book readers. I user it to primarily see what my friends read and what they think about those books and about the books I read. It's not just place to keep note of books you read.

This is exactly why my wife, our friends and I use Goodreads as well. It's fun to see what everyone is reading, and to comment on a book or ask what they thought about a book they just finished. We also enjoy comparing our year-in-review infographic that Goodreads creates each year.

Couldn’t agree more. There seems to be some confusion in this thread about the product’s value preposition - it’s a social network, not an archiving system. Using GoodReads alone strikes me like using Facebook alone, there’s just not much value there without other users.

But you don't just track books you've read, you also track books you want to read, which is much harder to remember.

I also tag them to indicate if I already own them and in what format (physical, epub, audio).

Saves me from purchasing duplicates when I'm at the used book store.

> you also track books you want to read

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsundoku

I know exactly what books I want to read.

Wow. I didn't know there was a word for this. This is why I only use ebooks now because physical books would just pile up.

10 years in jail got my reading list down considerably though. Managed to read over 800 books, though the one book that I really, really wanted to read[*] I only obtained just before my release and never finished: In Search of Lost Time by Proust.

[*] Based on a comment by a character in Murakami's 1Q84 that the only time you will have enough spare time to read Proust is if you end up in prison.

I never understood that concept. What is wrong with having your own library? I have about 200 books on my shelves I haven't read and any time I want to I can find something interesting. It's s luxury but not anything I'm embarrassed about. Makes more sense than keeping the books I've already read on my bookshelves.

Nothing wrong with it as long as you have the space; anything else is more of a logistics challenge. I like owning books, sure they take up a lot of space and it's not likely I'll read or re-read them any time soon, but I think it's important to have it.

But also, more and more, having the physical space and safety to own a 'static' collection like books is becoming a luxury and a privilege.

I am into my first thousand books. If I have a queue of 10-20 already purchased (garage, deals, new, offers) and someone recommends a book somewhere such as HN, I add it.

I don't think tracking books you want to read is Tsundoku.

Neither do I.

I have over two shelf feet of books I plan to read and haven’t yet. No that’s a lie, it’s at least four.

I use a Google Sheet for the neighborhood book club list. It is handy for reference--did we read X, and if so, who picked it? The group has been going for something like 18 years, after which even the very good and the very bad can be forgotten.

Would you consider sharing the sheet? I am always looking for books!

I sent it to your Gmail address.

Thank you!!! :)

For me, I like it better than my own list because I was spending unnecessary time finding and organizing books. So I like having the spelling and year right and just list management of want to read, reading, read. I did it in a google sheet, but now I spend less time using it.

I also like that I can add friends and see what they read. There’s no chance that I’ll open my aunt’s book list sheet once a week to see what’s changed but I would love to see her reading in my feed along with my other friends.

I found it often did what social media is partly designed to do—-make one insecure about whatever the focus is. You’re either not reading the right books, not analyzing and commenting enough on books you read for enjoyment, or not reading enough regardless of your actual place on those subjective spectrums. All their to make you feed the social media machine with your free labor in the form of analysis/reviews or whatever.

I like Zotero, which is developed for academic reference management, so it can work with longform articles, blog posts, as well. It has zero recommendation features and very limited group support, which I see as a feature.

Zotero is great for keeping an inventory of your books. Super easy to add books just by entering the ISBN and sometimes tweaking the fetched entry a little.

I always export the books we have to a spreadsheet file for reference on my smartphone when we're going to a second-hand book fair.

There are two recommendations systems in Goodreads. One is the official, I agree it is completely broken. The other is "Readers also enjoyed" section on each book page and this one is very good.

It doesn't seem so good and I can't imagine it's using anything sophisticated to make recommendations. What would be great is if it copied Netflix's Cinematch of yore and did SVD on a giant matrix of what you're liked/disliked and what others who have read the same books have liked/disliked.

Isn’t that how literally every one of these is implemented for the last decade?

I don't know, but Cinematch is the last one I remember working well.

its not very good in my experience, within a few "next" clicks you're completely off the path of whatever you were looking for

The new UI "upgrades" make it much harder to use as a database of books you've read.

I accidentally marked the wrong edition of a book as read the other day and it took me like 20 minutes to figure out how to switch the entry to the correct version.

Genuine question, why does it matter which version?

It can mess with other views/lists on the site.

Like a series list might only have one version of the book listed and it'll show the book as unread for you which can be really confusing when you've read 1000+ books and you're checking if you completed something or where you dropped it.

Not OP, but

Different Translations

Corrections or Updates

Additions

Different Illustrations

But why does it matter when you mark it as read?

They are valuable the reasons you mention. I'm an avid reader, and sometimes people will ask me a question about a recommendation or what I've read, and I have a complete brain lapse (to the extent it's as if you'd wonder if I read at all). Having a list helps that anxiety. I don't really use the other features, and only settled on Goodreads after the Shelfari "merge".

I do the same with logging film watches on IMDb, which is actually useful because I can visualize exact watch behavior by the timestamps, and using exports I can also query my film history for personal recommendations (select documentaries that are horror tagged I've watched from the last 10 years).

ChatGPT is the best book recommender I've used. Tell it a few books (even one book works) you like and it will give you solid recommendations.

I guess all that reddit content scraping is a net profit.

It is good, but only for books published before the training cutoff date right? That’s sometime in 2021.

Well, I assume it'll get updated at some point and there are more than enough books in the time span until it does.

I will add that goodreads is the best metadata source I've found for calibre in terms of accuracy and completeness.

Similarly to Letterboxd, I use it primarily for maintaining my read and to-read lists. It's a pretty decent tool for that purpose.

Unlike Letterboxd, though, sometimes its reviews can be valuable, as long as you avoid big, popular books. Or you think gif extravaganzas are an acceptable means of literary criticism.

With Goodreads it's strange because the ratings and reviews are pretty central in the UI. Lots of web sites have or have had parts that were completely trash but were easy to ignore. For example, for years it seemed like most of the YouTube comments on any video were something like "die, <slur>" for no discernible reason, regardless of the video content or the demographics of the channel, but it didn't matter because it was so easy to not see that part of the page and just think of YouTube as a site that didn't have (useful) comments. With Goodreads the reviews and ratings seem so central and hard to ignore, it's weird that they can get away with putting garbage front and center, even if they have other core functionality that is useful.

> Goodreads is only good (eh, decent?) as a database of books you've read. All the other functionality is pointless and or broken.

Why would you need a service to keep track on what you read? I have a text file with a list of book and some notes about every book. Works perfectly for me.

Because it's prettier than a text file.

Because I can see what my connections (close and not-at-all-close friends) are reading.

Because I like it and have been using it pretty much since 2013.

Goodreads works perfectly for me as it was intended to be used: a nice book database

Why would you need a list at all?

If it's worth remembering, you'll remember you've read it, and if you want to refresh your memory what better than to reread?

My memory doesn't "iterate" very well. Ask me all the places I visited last year, and I'll fail to recall some of the big ones. But if you say the name of the place, of course I know I was there.

Same with books. I've had plenty of times where I'd start reading a book and then a chapter in recall it. It's just nice to have a list.

> Why would you need a list at all? > If it's worth remembering, you'll remember you've read it, and if you want to refresh your memory what better than to reread?

If it’s not worth remembering, you won’t remember if you read it or not — so you could waste time rereading a forgettable book until you realize. ;)

Your memory must be better than mine.

Having a couple notes about the things that stood out to me at the time is a great way to remind myself how I felt about books I’ve long since stopped thinking about.

Oh I'm sure I can't recall a bunch of (details of) books I've read.

On the flip side, I have a firm belief that every book worth reading changes you at least a little, so even if I don't remember it consciously, it has had an impact on me.

I did try writing notes at some point, and stopped after the first attempt. That was several years ago and I never read those notes :)

Yeah, I've read the same book multiple times before, years apart, without realizing it. Only when I went back to Goodreads later to mark it as read did I realize that... well, I had already read it.

On the flip side, I can enjoy a book more than once. This is a definite plus.

I don't keep a list of books that I read for exactly this reason. But the drawback is that I have a few nordic detective stories on my bookshelf and I don't remember which of them I read already.

I'm learning now that this is even something that people keep track of.

This next section isn't meant to be shitty: but what's the purpose of even keeping track of that? I've read hundreds, maybe thousands of books over my life and don't have a list of them anywhere, nor can I see a use for that.

To keep track of authors and series I follow, over many years. To collect quick notes. Both for myself and ready for recommendations to others. To avoid trying again authors I dismissed ages ago (but whose book covers and blurbs still tempt me.) To keep several lists/queues to things to read (theme-based lists most of them). A few years ago I added date marks for when I read or re-read each item. I general these lists have made my reading more systematic and I can now always, but always instantly pick something that I wanted to read AND is on the shelf at the library.

personally, having a list of books helps me keep up the reading habit. usually I have months of reading, followed by months of not touching a book.

having a list in notion reminds me to continue.

in addition having a list of books I want to read (ghost library in japanese?) reminds of the things I don't know yet or haven't read which in turn helps keeping the reading habits.

Thank you for the response. A list of prospective books to read is something I believe everyone should have.

It was the list of books already read that didn't make sense. I hadn't considered it as a motivator to pick back up the habit.

You may also simply have much better memory of author names and works titles than I or others have. I often can't quote a name on the spot even when I vividly remember the book (or movie, or track). Or be much earlier in your reading career.

For me these lists (which I regret starting far too late in my own reading career) now cover about 9000 items.

For me the prompt to starting the process was noticing that I was again and again giving a chance to really terrible authors. That had to stop. And it did.

I have lists of books I want to read. And books I'm "reading", which actually means have them on hand and ready to go and or actually reading them.

As a natural feature of clearing out those lists when I finish a book, you create a book read list. I don't have much use for this but it is interesting to review the stats on say author nationality.

I've been tempted to start foor gifts. Family buy me books for Xmas and having a big list of what i already own would make that easier.

Personal satisfaction. "Ooga booga, number get bigger" kind of thing

Same reasons to use a service instead of text file for anything else: ease of use (e.g. you can connect your Kindle to automatically add a book to the list on completion), metrics, challenges, etc.

I mean it's convenient to have quick links to extra resources and the like, but... those are a single search query away anyway, so a text file is fine.

I really should start a notes file or spreadsheet to log my collections of things; I'm at a risk to accidentally buy doubles of e.g. video games now with all the cross platform releases and promotions. Play them though? Nah, I got a backlog and I prefer my 10 year old comfort games.

For myself, it’s much less about keeping track of what _I_ read, and much more more about seeing what my friends read. Perhaps it’s trite or mundane, but there are people from high school I haven’t seen in years whose reviews I look forward to because it brings me joy to read their voice again.

I’ve always seen GoodReads as more of a social network than just a list of what one’s read because you’re right, the latter is well replaced by a document.

To be fair to the rec system, I've tried several alternatives and the results are either worse or as mediocre.

The most useful aspects might be community-driven, but I find the web app so sluggish that I tend not to bother with it now.

The lists are user made and can be good for finding stuff on a topic.

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