There is still the need for a better Goodreads alternative

And once again, as with any social media related site, the technical aspect is the smallest problem or hurdle to overcome rather than who's going to curate, who's going to moderate, etc. etc.

Everyone builds alternatives thinking it's like the freaking field of dreams...

I have switched to StoryGraph, and I don't look back.

I read books in five languages, and I read a lot of old ones, too, that are from pre-ISBN era. Not finding them on Goodreads and not being able to add them was a serious drawback. GR demands an online book webpage to add a book, which don't exist for a lot of niche books I read.

StoryGraph totally solved it.

And I also use Bookmory [0] for regular tracking and sharing pretty visuals. You should give Bookmory a try.

[0]: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.tonysoft.b...

I don't really care for the social aspect of goodreads, I just like to find other people's reviews and have a meta-data rich way to track what I've read and my TBR, and for that OpenReads is incredible. Pretty damn featureful, fetches metadata and reviews from various sources really well, beautiful modern Material You UI. Highly recommended

I’m a little bit embarrassed to share it at this point, but I’m developing an application, called Biblish, that is meant to offer small utilities that augment the process of reading, writing, publishing, and distributing literature. One piece of that is a note taking software, called Papertrail, that allows you to take notes for books you are reading in print, and other users can subscribe to these notes and see them on a page by page basis as they read the book themselves.

https://papertrail.biblish.com

I am a writer of literary fiction first and foremost, and I never really understood the interest in tracking or reviewing books. I can see its usefulness for a certain segment of the market, but what I come to read is mostly the result of following the map of influences of the authors who inspire my writing. The quality of these works is thoroughly vetted by their centuries of survival. Little reviews do not seem like a useful mechanism for finding the best in contemporary literature either.

In any event, little reviews and social features are a much better way to develop a user base for your platform. Papertrail works fairly well as intended, and I use it extensively, but we found pretty early on that asking users to take extensive notes on books was too large a barrier of entry for people to cross and start producing the content the site needs to grow. My lead developer, who really functioned, perhaps a little too well, as cofounder, found a good job opportunity elsewhere, and I have not been able to replace him. Me and another developer are still working on it, but it looks to be on the road of another application that did not quite find a market.

My profile on Papertrail can be found below.

https://papertrail.biblish.com/russell

Hey, author here. First of all, thank you for sharing my post on Hacker News, and secondly, thank you for all the comments. Based on them, I updated the post and added StoryGraph and BookWyrm to the post, both lovely recommendations and alternatives.

> There is room for a platform that not only allows people to track their reading progress and books, but also connect with fellow readers. At the same time, I would like to take one step further and state that the very same platform could allow readers to connect with authors, and allow authors through unique social features to interact with their readers. And to go another step further, why not use the same platform to highlight independent book stores in the regions of the users whenever they discover a new book

Doesn't Goodreads do all of this (except the last), just hidden behind a poor UI?

My main interaction with Goodreads is to take part in a discussion group called "Evolution of Science Fiction". They read and discuss a scifi novel and a short story every month, cycling through the decads from old to new. It's very social and I've had a tonne of recommendations through it.

The author of this article should give Hardcover a fair shake, rather than admitting "I felt a bit of a social reading fatigue from Goodreads, Oku, and Literal, and since Hardcover also has a dedicated focus on connecting with others and explore their bookshelves, it was not the alternative I was looking for."

Yes, Hardcover has some degree of social component - but it also isn't a component that is in your face or that you have to use. Indeed, it isn't as dedicated to the social component (yet) as TheStoryGraph is... and yet the author highly praises TSG.

Full disclosure: I've been a paying Supporter of both TSG and Hardcover for a couple of years now, and I'm a Librarian in both systems. I'm also the staff-level Head Librarian at Hardcover. :)

here you go lol https://github.com/bookwyrm-social/bookwyrm

It's part of fediverse. Open source, decentralized software

A new alternative that I came across recently: https://www.literary.salon/

The underlying book and author data for many of these is sourced via a lower layer of openlibrary.org and wikidata (which in turn are building on isbns and the collective records of many national libraries) and when they aren't, they should be. The underlying data should be a shared endeavour.

Openlibrary.org provides book tracking (want to read, currently reading, have read) itself, as long as you can cope with it being neither beautiful nor social, which seem to be the key selling points of many of these.

Does anyone know of a good offline or at the very least local-first app for keeping track of read books, to read books, and search for books by ism, author, etc.

I don't care about any social features. I'm asking for essentially a glorified crud app with a nice UI and isbn lookup and goodreads scraping.

It’s extremely hard to defeat “good enough”.

I don’t care about the social features so I just made my own that I use myself. But that way I get to make it work exactly how I want :)

WeRead (微信读书) by Tencent is the best reading app. I immediately turn to WeRead even if I have tons of reading history in Goodreads about 3-year ago.

They introduce social aspects in the book you are reading, and you can see how other comments on the sentence you read.

They also provide the insights on what book you reads, how much time you spent on this book, etc.

I remember using Librarything some fifteen years back before switching to Goodreads. I wonder if anyone still uses it.

I think what all these sites get wrong, is that the reading and the tracking is separate. The reason why for example Spotify playlists work really well is because the proximity between the music and the tracking is very close to each other.

I would be fine with just a better UI

Why do you need apps for books. Stop. Buy a bookcase.