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Let's talk about Goodreads: Publishing obsesses over Goodreads, but does Goodreads actually sell books?
(misshelved.substack.com)
this post was submitted on 19 Feb 2024
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Literature
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I have no idea.
I do know that I'm not super enthusiastic about Amazon being the one controlling my reading history, but I've tried migrating to several of the alternatives and it's just too much.
Goodreads has a nice page where you can see 50 books at a time, skim down the list, and checkbox to make bulk changes. I'm willing to painstakingly reconstruct lists like that with an alternative, even though it will still be kind of a pain. But I'm not willing to manually search every title to add it to a list, or go through my reading history and need multiple clicks and backwards navigations for every book I want to add to a list, and that's the state of anything I tried a couple months ago. Bookwyrm specifically sounds really nice, as a way to use federated tools to find people with similar interest and follow their reading and share. But the transfer is a lot.
I’m in the same boat. I tried Storygraph and the error rate importing from Goodreads was too high for me and it was missing some features I use to keep my books organized.
I’d love to move away from an Amazon-owned company, but all the alternatives are lackluster, at least for me.
I think what I'm eventually going to have to do is roll my own. I don't need crazy complexity, but I do want some features nothing seems to have. I want the bulk editing that's only on goodreads, and I really want series to be first class citizens. That means series nesting in other series and being able to have a blurb/rating for a series instead of each individual entry, mostly. I just haven't got to it yet.
I don't necessarily have to have the metadata all the public social network style tools use to combine everyone's input to one book object, though I definitely understand how it's frustrating for services to lose information when you import your lists. But organization tools are critical to me.