Why Goodreads is Bad For Books (newstatesman.com) 27
After years of complaints from users, Goodreads' reign over the world of book talk might be coming to an end. From a report: Goodreads started off the way you might think: two avid readers, in the mid-Noughties, wanting to build space online for people to track, share, and talk about books they were reading. Husband and wife Otis and Elizabeth Chandler say they initially launched the platform in 2007 to get recommendations from their literary friends. But it was something many others wanted, too: by 2013, the site had swelled to 15 million users. That year Goodreads it was bought by Amazon, an acquisition Wired magazine called "quaint", given Amazon's roots in bookselling before it became the store that sold everything. Even then, many Goodreads users already felt stung by the tech giant which had, a year earlier, changed the terms of its huge books dataset (which Goodreads used to identify titles). Goodreads had been forced to move to a different data source, called Ingram; the move caused users to lose large amounts of their reading records.Z
Most stuck with it, however -- not because of the platform itself, but because of its community. Writing in the Atlantic in 2012, Sarah Fay called Goodreads "Facebook with books," and argued that "if enough contributors set the bar high with creative, funny, and smart reviews it might become a force of its own." While newspapers mourned the decline of reading and literature, Goodreads showed that a large and growing number of people still had a real passion for books and bookshops. Thirteen years after the first Kindle was sold, printed books have more than ten times the market share of ebooks, but talking about books happens much more online. But now, for many, the utopia Goodreads was founded to create has become closer to purgatory. Goodreads today looks and works much as it did when it was launched. The design is like a teenager's 2005 Myspace page: cluttered, random and unintuitive. Books fail to appear when searched for, messages fail to send, and users are flooded with updates in their timelines that have nothing to do with the books they want to read or have read. Many now use it purely to track their reading, rather than get recommendations or build a community. "It should be my favourite platform," one user told me, "but it's completely useless."
Most stuck with it, however -- not because of the platform itself, but because of its community. Writing in the Atlantic in 2012, Sarah Fay called Goodreads "Facebook with books," and argued that "if enough contributors set the bar high with creative, funny, and smart reviews it might become a force of its own." While newspapers mourned the decline of reading and literature, Goodreads showed that a large and growing number of people still had a real passion for books and bookshops. Thirteen years after the first Kindle was sold, printed books have more than ten times the market share of ebooks, but talking about books happens much more online. But now, for many, the utopia Goodreads was founded to create has become closer to purgatory. Goodreads today looks and works much as it did when it was launched. The design is like a teenager's 2005 Myspace page: cluttered, random and unintuitive. Books fail to appear when searched for, messages fail to send, and users are flooded with updates in their timelines that have nothing to do with the books they want to read or have read. Many now use it purely to track their reading, rather than get recommendations or build a community. "It should be my favourite platform," one user told me, "but it's completely useless."
And yet they stay (Score:5, Insightful)
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They stay because there are few viable alternatives, and, it's (barely) better than nothing. I quit using Goodreads a while back. The search function and suggested books were pretty much useless for me, and the rating system was too often disappointing.
I will be trying The StoryGraph. If a fifth of what the article promises is true, it's a huge leap forward.
modern layout is generic (Score:5, Insightful)
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Amateurism should be expected to be Amateurish.
There seems to be the expectation of an Amature to enjoy their hoby, while producing professional near expert results.
We took our puppy to Agility Training. The expectation (from other people in the class (less from the instructor)) was to get our dogs ready for competition.
I have made a wooden furniture, I have been asked why did I use simple box joint where you could do a dovetail joint. Or compare my work with what is made my professionals.
A lot of "Amate
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The what? (Score:1)
What the hell are Noughties?
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A brief era before The Event. We know little about it anymore.
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That would be the time period between the years 2000 and 2009, inclusive.
All of the commercial sites are bad (Score:1)
That's why I started mine
And where is it exactly "bad for books"? (Score:5, Insightful)
I mean there was a lot of emotion and opinion in that article but no where does it identify how it is "bad for books". Books are doing fine with or without goodreads.
Yes, so ... WHY IS IT BAD FOR BOOKS FFS ?! (Score:1)
Good work quoting an article that fails to support THE TITLE.
Goodreads does seem to suck (Score:4, Insightful)
But I'm not sure how that extrapolates to "bad for books".
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It's bad for books in the same way that Microsoft has been "bad" for personal computers and web browsers. It's captured the market and is owned by a monopolist (of sorts) who does pretty much the absolute minimum to advance it, while stifling competition in various ways. As the article describes, it also is full of bugs that never get fixed and hasn't sufficiently respected users data (lost a lot of user data during an upgrade, and didn't seem to care to recover it). Its parent company, as a virtual monopol
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I actually decided - briefly - to try GoodReads recently after a many-years absence.
All of the recommendations, reviews, etc. seem to be tied to specific releases of a book. So a book / series that's been around for a long time - say Carl Sandburg's biography of Abraham Lincoln - is a complete mess on GoodReads because there are dozens and dozens of separate versions of the book, published over many decades. There doesn't appear to be a way to say "I want to rate and comment the actual six-volume biography"
Goodreads is OK, but this article isn't (Score:4, Informative)
I use Goodreads, my friends use it, we get book ideas and recommendations and it works exactly as intended.
Even most books that I read are on it. This is small miracle, as I read mostly in Estonian - a language with less than a million speakers, but a lot of books published in it.
This seems like plain and blunt advertisment for a new, competing platform that fills the second half of the original article.
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Yeah, it's clearly an advertisement. I use Goodreads just as a way to keep track of the books I've read and when I finish a book I like to see how other people's opinions compare to my own. I don't connect with any friends on Goodreads and use a pseudonym so I don't use it as a social media site.
However, even though this is just an advertisement, I have to admit I'm intrigued. Not because I'm upset that Goodreads hasn't changed their interface or added more features, but because Amazon bought it and getting
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My problem wtih Goodreads (Score:5, Interesting)
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Goodreads - bad deal (Score:2)
Anyone able to "set the bar high with creative, funny, and smart reviews" should do so on their own site with their own ads and their own revenue.
So what? (Score:2)
http:\\BadBooks.com can be had for $35000.
The problem with goodreads... (Score:2)
rocketstack (Score:2)
Mostly SF reviews, No ads.
Reviews with spoilers are printed upside down. So funny.