[HN Gopher] Why has no one made a better Goodreads
___________________________________________________________________
Why has no one made a better Goodreads
Author : bagofbones
Score : 307 points
Date : 2021-04-16 15:09 UTC (6 hours ago)
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(TXT) w3m dump (uxdesign.cc)
| CA0DA wrote:
| Do you think a more "privacy-centric" Goodreads alternative could
| thrive? One that's mostly focused around tracking your book lists
| and less on the reviews?
| bagofbones wrote:
| I think private shelving/tracking is an important feature to
| have in a product that serves the larger business opportunity
| of book social networks.
| Daiz wrote:
| I did make a better Goodreads. But only for my very narrow use
| case.
|
| 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.
|
| [1] https://twitter.com/Daiz42/status/1158123020596240391
| bagofbones wrote:
| You are not alone in this. https://debugger.medium.com/tech-
| savvy-readers-are-designing...
| manuelmoreale wrote:
| There is someone who's working on a goodreads alternative at
| https://literal.club/
| stakkur wrote:
| Goodreads is owned by Amazon. It's sole purpose is to drive
| customers to Amazon, not provide a 'delightful user experience'
| outside that goal. That's why they bought it.
| randomsearch wrote:
| From posts by former goodreads employees, Amazon bought it to
| kill it
| throwawayjcvbs wrote:
| this is false. they bought it 8 years ago, you'd think it
| would be dead by now if so.
| corobo wrote:
| Haha I have "make a like 30% better Goodreads" on an idea card
| somewhere
| milofeynman wrote:
| I use LibraryThings to track what I've read, my collection, and
| what I want to read and I don't believe it's attempting to
| complete with GoodReads. It's in a different space of keeping
| track of your book collections and targeted at small libraries
| etc. I'm sure there is some community to it but I've never
| wandered into it and it's not the focal feature of the site
| jeremiecoullon wrote:
| There are probably a bunch of alternatives for this. For example
| a friend built Reading List which I've heard is good
| (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/reading-list-book-log/id121713...)
| (iOS app)
| davidwparker wrote:
| Reading List is mentioned in the article. It's in a list:
|
| > 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.
| thrower123 wrote:
| I only use Goodreads because it is baked into the Kindle app on
| the Kindle Fire that I do most of my reading with. I don't
| remember if I ever set it up this way on purpose, but it is
| integrated so whenever I start reading a book, it marks it as
| "reading" on Goodreads, and when I finish, it marks it as "read".
| foobarbecue wrote:
| Goodreads is an excellent, mature, website with a vibrant
| community. I use it all the time and have never noticed it
| lagging or had trouble using a feature. I think it looks and
| works better than most of the space-wasting, feature-hiding,
| animated sites online today. I review a few books a month on
| there and end up in interesting discussions frequently. The
| amazon kindle integration, with ability to publish your notes on
| a book, is a killer feature for me. IIRC they had this before
| Amazon bought it, too.
|
| 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.
| rsync wrote:
| From the article:
|
| "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 ?
| gpapilion wrote:
| I think the issue with Goodreads continues to be that people want
| Facebook/Twitter for readers, and its not and will likely never
| be.
|
| 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.
| sayhar wrote:
| I'm flabberghasted that neither the article nor the comments so
| far talk about Open Library
|
| https://openlibrary.org/
|
| 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!
| amatecha wrote:
| Was going to post the same. Huge omission. Turns out they were
| founded in the same year, interestingly.
| girzel wrote:
| They're also working on some kind of recommendations engine:
| https://github.com/Open-Book-Genome-Project/TheBestBookOn.co...
|
| 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.
| ngokevin wrote:
| 20% or even 100% better UI/UX doesn't disrupt anything. Anyone
| can go to a popular service and nitpick on their UI and UX. But
| if someone wants to replace them, they'll have to be 10x better.
| dhosek wrote:
| I consistently get recommendations for books in languages that I
| don't read. I wonder if that's because I have read books in
| languages other than English and recorded those editions on
| Goodreads. What's particularly aggravating is for the
| recommendation engine to surface a translated version of an
| English book to me. My general rule is that if I can read an
| untranslated version of a book, I'll read the untranslated
| version, so I'll prefer _Cuentos de Eva Luna_ over _Stories of
| Eva Luna_ but _The Honorary Consul_ over _El Consul Honorario_. I
| still don 't understand why Goodreads thinks I'd like to read
| Agatha Christie in Polish or Shakespeare in Arabic. Of course, I
| think the winner has to be https://www.dahosek.com/wait-what/
| Hitton wrote:
| What I like about goodreads is that it has reviews (not ratings,
| I noticed that those are becoming gamed a lot), description,
| quickly identifiable genre of book (shelves) and link to other
| books by the author. That's about it. I personally don't like
| posting reviews, especially if the book is bad, because it feels
| rather mean towards author and I know few authors whose first
| books were pretty terrible but they eventually improved a lot.
|
| 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.
| vuciv1 wrote:
| Hey, just wanted to throw it out there that I'm working on
| something slightly related
|
| https://swapiverse.com/
|
| 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...
| miloszkowal wrote:
| Curious, how is this different from paperbackswap.com, which
| has been in operation for over a decade, and has hundreds of
| users online at any given time? The UI of swapiverse is good,
| but you might have to overcome the same network effects that
| Goodreads has.
| the_lonely_road wrote:
| This feels like one of those things that will be ruined by bad
| actors. Finding cheap worthless books for free or next to free
| is quite easy. I could get my hands on 10K "books" right now
| for the cost of picking them up and storing them. If there is
| anything valuable on your site it will likely be quickly
| swapped out for garbage by some "entrepreneur" flipping them to
| a for sale site.
|
| The project looks cool and I wish you the best of luck in
| designing solutions to avoid bad actors.
| grok22 wrote:
| But the swap is for free (+cost of shipping). So of no value
| to one of those kinds of entrepreneurs (unless maybe they
| find a way to arbitrage shipping costs).
| aww_dang wrote:
| Link fails with infinite redirects here.
| edly wrote:
| Made an account just to comment: Goodreads seems to be way more
| interested in _selling_ books than _recommending_ books, and they
| want to sell books from Amazon primarily, then other major online
| retailers. I 'll give points for including "smaller" retailers
| like Indiebound, but they're at the bottom of the list.
|
| 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.
| stonesweep wrote:
| You're not the only LibraryThing user around - we get drowned
| out in these HN threads because the UI isn't sexy.
| pjmorris wrote:
| Big LibraryThing fan. I paid a teenager to label bins and
| catalog the books in each bin and made each bin a LT
| collection. If I can't find something on my office shelves, I
| check LT to see if it's in a bin. It's really handy.
| bwanab wrote:
| Not to mention the very real threat that if anyone seriously
| started challenging Goodreads, Amazon could put what for them is
| a trivial amount of resources into making the changes it needed
| to keep in front.
| bbasketball wrote:
| I wish more people knew about https://rate.house - it's like all
| media sites combined into one, just need more people using it.
| bennysomething wrote:
| I'm just glad this didn't open with "good reads is broken here's
| why"
| mekarpeles wrote:
| Mek here from internet archive's OpenLibrary.org.
|
| 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
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Are there any plans where metadata for Internet Archive patrons
| could be scoped to API tokens or applications (Oauth2), so that
| external applications could add value for users on top of the
| Internet Archive corpus?
| troyvit wrote:
| This is exactly why I came to this thread. Thank you!
| wenbin wrote:
| Book metadata quality is extremely important and it's hard to get
| right in a short timeframe (e.g., < 3 years).
|
| 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...
| villasv wrote:
| In other words, good quality book metadata is expensive. Book
| recommendation/reviews aren't haven't been so profitable as to
| justify such investment. If I was a publisher, I'd put my money
| on the book influencers, not on Goodreads and alternatives
| anyway.
| bwb wrote:
| It isn't expensive... it doesn't exist. Ingram's API is
| probably the best and it is messy as hell. I've been playing
| with it and it will help augment data, but you have to have
| humans to really fine tune things. I just entered 2,500 books
| manually to launch this on Monday (https://shepherd.com/) and
| I still am going to need to go back to build relationships
| between the types of authors (lead, translator, illustrator,
| etc). It is a hard problem.
|
| 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.
| villasv wrote:
| > It isn't expensive... it doesn't exist.
|
| It's the same thing, but I get what you mean.
| Mediterraneo10 wrote:
| The volunteer army is pretty shackled. There are certain
| problems with book metadata that cannot be fixed by ordinary
| members with librarian status. They can only be fixed by
| Goodreads staff. However, Goodreads Staff (apparently a
| skeleton crew that are barely keeping the lights on) no longer
| respond to reports about metadata problems.
| throwawayjcvbs wrote:
| this is the real reason goodreads wont be dethroned. book data
| is very very messy and requires lots of manual cleaning by
| humans and goodreads is where the humans are. its like trying
| to make a wikipedia competitor. it just wont happen.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| Amazon bought CDnow which was all human-curated and had very high
| recommendation value, but that doesn't scale with the size of
| today's music catalog tail when people are only renting (aka
| streaming) music
| [deleted]
| scanr wrote:
| Does anyone know of a good book recommendation system? I wonder
| if it's a Hard Problem. I'd love to find one that didn't just
| recommend the same top 10 popular fantasy or science fiction
| authors.
| vhpoet wrote:
| Have you seen https://www.readthistwice.com ? (fyi, I'm the
| founder)
| mcguire wrote:
| Shouldn't the title of the article be "Why no Goodreads
| alternative can (or has) beat Goodreads". I don't see anything
| about making a better one.
| mrkurt wrote:
| https://thestorygraph.com is a better goodreads. It's found my
| last 8 or so books for me.
| GCA10 wrote:
| Author here. I'm going to join the argument that Goodreads may be
| clunky (in fact, it definitely is), but it's not broken. OP's
| criticisms all have some validity, but they overlook these far
| more important facts:
|
| 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.
| say_it_as_it_is wrote:
| Item #3 is why /r/books is dead on arrival
| superfrank wrote:
| > One would think that having Amazon's customer ethos and
| resources would give muscle to create a delightful user
| experience. Disappointingly, it's remained an elusive dream.
|
| 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.
| felixbraun wrote:
| Readmill (acquired by Dropbox) was a better Goodreads -- there is
| no app I miss more
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5DTNCLSoMho
| rebuilder wrote:
| So while we're on the subject, is there a good book
| recommendation service? I usually just browse the Kindle store,
| but the recommendations there are pretty awful. Most of them seem
| to be NYT best sellers, which usually seems to mean "derivative
| crud".
|
| It seems odd that Amazon's recommendation engine isn't better.
| Perhaps it works for most people.
| vhpoet wrote:
| Have you seen https://www.readthistwice.com? (fyi, I'm the
| founder)
| gvinter wrote:
| Yes! Readerly (readerly.com) delivers on what Goodreads doesn't
| - it doesn't rely on the 5-star rating system and learns what
| you like to give you better recommendations. This means it's a
| social network that improves for users as it grows, it doesn't
| weaken as Goodreads does.
| tmcw wrote:
| This missed the biggest technical moat by a mile: data.
|
| 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.
| bagofbones wrote:
| The metadata itself is not a moat. ISBN APIs allow for easy
| access to primary data attributes of a book.
|
| The social data that Goodreads aggregates is definitely a moat,
| because it powers their SEO efforts further.
| arjunkava wrote:
| It is already doing what need to be done and you know what over
| innovation kill the simplicity of the product. Goodreads is
| pretty simple and great part is it is not suggesting me someone
| to follow based on books I've read. That is innovation for all
| the current social app and it sucks.
| whalesalad wrote:
| One of my closest friends and his wife are on a mission to
| improve this space. They've founded a company called Italic Type:
| https://www.italictype.com/
| palehose wrote:
| Does Amazon make any significant revenue from Goodreads? I can
| see how it might be something that boosts their kindle sales but
| other than that they probably have a good reason not to focus on
| it like... because it isn't a business breadwinner. Why work on
| Goodreads when you can make more money on AWS? Does anyone really
| believe they are going to become the next hot social network
| because they nailed the market for people who read books in the
| most transparent/ community accessible way possible?
| bwb wrote:
| I am actually working to peel Goodreads apart and focus on doing
| one thing better, which is book discovery. I am actually
| launching into Beta on Monday -> https://shepherd.com/
|
| 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.
| calrueb wrote:
| This is cool. Is there an ML component, or is everything hand
| curated?
| bwb wrote:
| 100% hand curated for now, my hope is to get into NLP early
| next year to do some cool stuff :).
| elliekelly wrote:
| Open Library recently(ish) launched a bookshelf style browsing
| feature to mimic the organic discovery of titles based on your
| interests and, even though it's frowned upon by some, the
| cover. It's awesome. I've read so many books that I've scrolled
| past a thousand times on iTunes and Audible. It does help that
| I can flip through the books a bit before deciding to read it.
| Like you can at the store or the library.
| waihtis wrote:
| Avid reader here, just signed up. There's always room for new
| methods for discovering reading material.
|
| 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.
| bwb wrote:
| Thanks!
|
| 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
| mrec wrote:
| I think the "Topics" list really needs some curation [1] and
| some more layers of taxonomy. Right now the "topic" breakdown
| seems 100% isomorphic to the "recommender" breakdown - the
| links literally go to the exact same URLs - which isn't
| sustainable. Bookshops don't have separate shelves for each
| member of staff.
|
| [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?
| bwb wrote:
| Totally, this is launching on Monday into beta and there is a
| lot of work to do here.
|
| 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
| mrec wrote:
| I dunno. It's all well and good having multiple "angles" on
| a given topic, but if a new user has no meaningful way of
| distinguishing between those angles then it's just going to
| be confusing and noisy for them.
|
| 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.
| gen220 wrote:
| You should submit this! I think it's a great idea.
|
| 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.
| bwb wrote:
| Thanks!! I was going to submit it Monday morning :)
|
| 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 :)
| gkop wrote:
| How is DBpedia for books? Could it play a role in
| bootstrapping your database?
| bwb wrote:
| Very cool, I just talked with a NLP expert and they had
| recommended it as well. I honestly haven't dug into that
| aspect yet as I've just been grinding away to get the
| basics going. This might help a lot!
| krmmalik wrote:
| What are you plans for helping authors establish a relationship
| with their readers?
| bwb wrote:
| Gosh so much as that is half the goal of this site!
|
| 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 :)
| krmmalik wrote:
| Sounds very interesting. Thanks for the detailed reply. I
| wrote a book about 4 years ago. It was very well received
| by those that read it and still gets a 5-star rating to
| this day but marketing it was real hard and getting the
| kind of distribution I would have wanted has been really
| hard.
| bagofbones wrote:
| I love the curation of topics - it's exactly the way people
| would think about discovering niche books.
|
| Curious to know - how did you curate these?
| bwb wrote:
| Totally by hand over the last 3 months, I have quite a lot of
| automation in place to help me do it, but at the end of the
| day I work with each author to craft 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.
| mariushn wrote:
| How do you get in touch with authors? What's their
| motivation to contribute a list? Getting more exposure?
| evanmoran wrote:
| This is cool. Thank you for sharing!
|
| 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!
| BigBalli wrote:
| I created https://MyBookList.com many years back so have quite
| some experience in the field.
|
| 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.
| [deleted]
| kome wrote:
| well... https://www.anobii.com/ is quite used here. It used to be
| bigger, but still, going quite strong.
| phku wrote:
| I've been using readng.co lately and really enjoy it.
| randomsearch wrote:
| Disagree with this post. All it's saying is "goodreads dominates
| the Google sales channel" and any startup founder will tell you
| there a dozen alternatives to that channel. This is absolutely
| _not_ the reason goodreads hasn't been replaced.
|
| 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.
| podiki wrote:
| Are there any decent self-hosted options? In my searches the best
| (or "best") I see are more full blown inventory tracking
| platforms. I wouldn't mind something that keeps track of your
| books, ratings/comments, lists, and is nice to look at. (Of
| course, I could just do this in org-mode and make a nice HTML
| export or something...but probably needs some database/searching
| functionality.)
| intergalplan wrote:
| All of:
|
| 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.
| bagofbones wrote:
| All of: 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.
|
| ^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.
| stopachka wrote:
| This is a great essay.
|
| 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!
| bagofbones wrote:
| Quick question - why is "displaying lists of books" a hair-on-
| fire problem?
| nezaj wrote:
| For a long time I had a "todo" to make a better way to
| display my favorite books. Before we started working on
| Zeneca, I had a bullet list on my personal website. I noticed
| so many other people did the same. For example in Naval's
| Almanack he also has a bullet list with some comments on his
| favorite books. It struck us that a better experience could
| exist, and for now most people just accept the status quo.
|
| 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
| werber wrote:
| I haven't logged into Goodreads in ages, but their e-mail updates
| keep me updated on what my few friends on the platform are or
| want to be reading. I engage with those e-mails, and have
| conservations that they ignite.
| karaterobot wrote:
| This article focuses on "better" in the sense of being a
| successful business, rather than "better" in the sense of being a
| resource for book lovers. That's a really gross way to think, but
| he is correct in a sense, and it's why I always preferred
| Librarything with its wonky, book-nerd centric interface to
| Goodreads and its growth loops.
| bagofbones wrote:
| Apart from the interface, in what ways is Librarything better
| than Goodreads?
| karaterobot wrote:
| I'd say the interface is _not_ one of the strong points,
| since it confuses a lot of people and turns them away from
| the site. But, it is powerful if you want to engage with it.
|
| 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.
| stonesweep wrote:
| > In fact the whole site is completely free
|
| Blog about this:
| https://blog.librarything.com/main/2020/03/librarything-
| goes...
| crossroadsguy wrote:
| I believe a better GoodReads can only be a a non-profit. Maybe
| something federated. Financial possibilities are almost done for.
| GR is too big. Event LibraryThing has Amazon money in 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)
| spillguard wrote:
| As an avid reader who has been using Goodreads for years, my
| reason for not switching to an alternative has almost nothing to
| do with any of what the author mentions. That reason is purely
| the promise of stability provided by a site that's been around
| for longer (not to mention the big-name ownership) - the faith
| that Goodreads will stay running for years and years into the
| future.
|
| 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?
| bagofbones wrote:
| This is a very valid argument. You have implicitly invested
| effort (in form of lists) in Goodreads, and wouldn't want to
| lose them. It's another reason why a challenger can't rely on
| book tracking as the primary feature to drive adoption.
| mdoms wrote:
| Maybe this is a regional thing but one of the major premises of
| the article doesn't hold for me. I almost never see Goodreads in
| Google search results for books. I'm not even sure I EVER have.
| dnissley wrote:
| Here's a list of the alternatives to goodreads I collected from
| this thread, along with some thoughts on how each compares with
| goodreads.
|
| 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.
| irrational wrote:
| This reminds me of the question "Why has no one made a better
| Board Game Geek?" (https://boardgamegeek.com/). It actually is
| slowly getting better now, but it is still shockingly stuck with
| a UI/UX from the very early 2000s.
|
| 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:
|
| https://boardgamegeek.com/
|
| 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.
| donio wrote:
| I actually like the current BGG UI a lot. It certainly has its
| quirks but it could be SO MUCH worse. It is definitely more
| enjoyable to use than most "modern" websites out there. Clear
| textual links rather than figuring out mystery buttons, pages
| load reasonably fast (including those with very large lists)
| and it stays responsive too rather than slowly murdering the
| browser.
|
| I am all for improving it but I really hope that it doesn't get
| ruined in the name of UX.
| hipnoizz wrote:
| Well, it is definitely true that BGG UI feels dated and
| disjointed, and if Board Game Atlas triggered some reaction on
| BGG side then great. I don't find BGA UI that much better.
| Cleaner, more 'modern' - yeah... which includes a lots of white
| space and rather low information density. On BGG I visit some
| forums, read reviews for games I'm interested in and browse the
| files section - even if UI could be improved here it is usable
| enough and the volume of information makes up for all the
| deficiencies, at least for me. And contrary to Goodreads BGG
| seems to have working search ;-)
| gweinberg wrote:
| Say, does anyone know of an open reverse bibliography service
| (find boos that cite a given book)? When I read a good book it
| often helps me find other books worth reading, but I can only go
| backwards in time that way.
| DavideNL wrote:
| I just started trying https://app.thestorygraph.com/ as an
| alternative...
| forgotpwd16 wrote:
| I read the article but didn't understood what is _wrong_ with
| Goodreads in first place. Comparing with some of the mentioned
| alternatives it's a simpler interface yet is more information
| rich. Even not considering its bigger community, it's still a
| better option to track books.
| dazc wrote:
| Monetizing such a site would be difficult unless you happen to be
| already the world's biggest bookseller. Thus, any
| person/organisation with skills and talent to undertake such a
| task would be better off promoting something with wider margins.
|
| 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.
| bagofbones wrote:
| Lack of an evident business model could be a reason that turns
| off smart founders from picking this problem. However, if the
| product adds enough value to enough number of users, one could
| figure ways to monetise it.
| stinkytaco wrote:
| I assume the effort, time and money required to get to
| "enough value to enough number of users" will require you to
| answer the "ways to monetise" question for a VC or even
| yourself _before_ you start.
| weird-eye-issue wrote:
| No it wouldn't. You could just be an Amazon Affiliate. Also
| with enough traffic display ads can make a lot
| stepbeek wrote:
| Genuine question: would Amazon suffer such an affiliate to
| live long term?
| dazc wrote:
| Since they would be still making money, possibly?
|
| 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.
| phpnode wrote:
| both of these require very large audiences to make money, the
| amazon affiliate program pays very poorly and people hate &
| block ads. Not saying it's impossible but the days of
| slapping a few ads and affiliate links on your website and
| expecting to make decent revenue are long gone. Especially if
| you want to offer a good UX
| bagofbones wrote:
| agreed. if affiliate were to the only revenue stream, it'd
| be quite a small opportunity.
| weird-eye-issue wrote:
| You guys don't know how wrong you are. I analyze
| affiliate websites for sale every day.
| maest wrote:
| That's very interesting! Can you talk some more about
| what you see?
| weird-eye-issue wrote:
| I see a lot of sites grow to thousands in monthly revenue
| fairly quickly and sell quickly for a minimum of 40x
| monthly multiple. There are tons of resources and tools
| out there to build sites that will generate a lot of
| organic traffic.
|
| 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.
| weird-eye-issue wrote:
| Actually they aren't long gone at all. Go look at Empire
| Flippers, Flippa, etc. I build, buy, and operate affiliate
| and display advertising websites. Lots of sites can make
| $30 per 1000 visitors just on ads depending on the niche.
| Some affiliate sites make over $700 per 1000 visitors.
| Again it depends a lot on the niche.
|
| 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")
| phpnode wrote:
| would you consider a book reviews website a profitable
| niche? seems like it'd be a gamble in terms of effort vs
| reward given that most books are pretty inexpensive
| weird-eye-issue wrote:
| People looking for books online likely have more
| disposable income than the average population. So I would
| say ad revenue will probably look pretty good but this is
| just a guess. Sometimes this can be surprising for
| different niches. For example, you might not think recipe
| websites make much money but in fact they often make $30
| per 1000 visitors (on ads alone) due to their audience
| profile. I got turned down offering $140k for a recipe
| website a few months ago. They were making around $3k per
| month.
|
| 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):
|
| https://thewebsiteflip.com/ https://fatstacksblog.com/
| HDMI_Cable wrote:
| I don't really see why the UX needs to change, Web 1.0 design
| was/is very functional, and I find that Goodreads has a
| nice/balance between the simple things (Adding books to a list)
| and the complex (e.g. filtering). Of course, the writers design a
| UX blog, so they might disagree.
| superkuh wrote:
| As soon as someone does and it achieves network effect it will be
| bought by a mega-corp and we'll have to do this all again.
| pauljonas wrote:
| So true.
|
| 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.
| bagofbones wrote:
| lol. my strong hunch - it will only be a mission-driven founder
| who will take this to it's righteous end.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| That's why https://bookwyrm.social/ is so interesting; as part
| of the Fediverse, this can't happen.
| TOSSAWAY_1 wrote:
| lol yeah. that does make me happy.
| Johnny555 wrote:
| Probably the same reason why no one has made a better IMDB --
| Goodreads has a head start and it's "good enough" for most
| people. It takes a lot of time (or money) to build enough content
| to make a viable competitor. A book recommendation engine that
| has only 5% of the content of Goodreads won't be very popular.
| vhpoet wrote:
| Have you seen this? https://www.readthistwice.com/libraries
| macando wrote:
| _No matter which book you search for, the top results will always
| have the Goodreads listing. In fact, Google surfaces the
| Goodreads rating in the Knowledge Panel. Goodreads is a monster
| at SEO._
|
| Due to this some companies are literally undethronable.
| bagofbones wrote:
| It's hard because of this reason. But I'm certain alternate
| acquisition channels/go-to-market could exist. It's a matter of
| understanding the customer's journey and capturing them at a
| stage other than "discovery" or "search".
| minitoar wrote:
| Too Googleable To Fail
| FunnyLookinHat wrote:
| I've never been into Goodreads or similar sites much, but my wife
| definitely has and reads a lot. She has switched over to The
| Story Graph and has really liked it (minus the lack of friends
| that are present).
|
| https://www.thestorygraph.com/
| podiki wrote:
| Same here, never used Goodreads (though looked on there for
| book info sometimes), but have been trying out The Story Graph.
| Is pretty nice for tracking reading and seeing your books, even
| in a beta stage.
|
| Have also looked a little into Library Thing (also mentioned in
| this discussion). Anyone use both and have useful comparisons,
| pros/cons for each?
| Saturdays wrote:
| Oooh this looks interesting.. I export my GoodReads data and
| play with it on a spreadsheet to learn more about my reading
| trends.
| sec400 wrote:
| I've been enjoying using https://beta.readng.co/ as an
| alternative
| mikedc wrote:
| I've also been enjoying Readng.
|
| 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.
| newbie578 wrote:
| An interesting article, the now staple monthly "why isn't
| GoodReads fixed or disrupted?".
|
| 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.
| kaitai wrote:
| Yeah, I think some folks have mentioned it, but The Storygraph
| [1] has really gotten some traction as a replacement. Question
| for HN readers, then -- if you look at Storygraph vs Goodreads,
| what's the missing secret sauce? Just critical mass?
|
| [1] https://app.thestorygraph.com/
| [deleted]
| heisnotanalien wrote:
| If it's not broken, why fix it? I go to goodreads for the high-
| quality book reviews and community. I literally don't care about
| UX or fancy algorithms. I'd rather use an old algorithm called
| 'talking to someone I know' for book recommendations. Right now
| it feels like a clunky old site made for books reviews and I like
| that feel. I don't want some Amazon product manager who only
| cares about monetising (where can I smack ads?!) to touch it
| thank you very much. And god forbid some UX person gets hold of
| it and redesigns it in the boring/minimal feel (so it loads fast
| and we can smack lots of ads on it).
| gwern wrote:
| It actually is broken in a lot of ways, and I don't mean the
| complaints about stalkers or fake reviews or other community
| problems, just on the pure technical level. It's been slowly
| bitrotting, it feels like it somehow gets slower every year,
| and they've been removing features. I recently moved all of my
| stuff off GR and stopped using it because I asked myself why I
| was putting up with it when it clearly was only going to get
| worse over time.
|
| 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...
| thelastwave wrote:
| More React will solve everything.
| bandAid0 wrote:
| So a new goodreads minus the technical problems comes along.
|
| 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...
| askafriend wrote:
| GoodReads is absolute trash even amongst trash, I don't
| understand how you could be defending it.
| notahacker wrote:
| I think what actually happens is a new Goodreads minus the
| technical problems and also minus the reviews and community
| comes along. Turns out people prefer having actual book
| reviews to faster page loads and more stable link
| structures, and everyone stays where they are...
| nwienert wrote:
| You can do ID (or just validate a few other ways) with
| anonymous accounts, done properly seems a good balance.
|
| 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.
| throwaway3699 wrote:
| By definition, you cannot have ID for anonymous accounts.
| Not without a third party (who I want nothing to do with
| anyway).
| thelastwave wrote:
| Furthermore, is it really up to a book review site to
| solve the problem of identity and anonymity on the
| Internet? Seems like the wrong place in the stack to
| focus on that.
| nwienert wrote:
| Yea, I think it's a good model for other type of
| companies and have thought of it before which is why I
| brought it up here, just felt like clarifying it is
| possible to do if desired.
| nwienert wrote:
| Communication issue:
|
| 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.
| throwaway3699 wrote:
| I considered that, but most people who get annoyed about
| privacy are upset that private companies have any data at
| all. e.g. location data on Facebook.
|
| 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.
| nwienert wrote:
| For some set of people it would be a problem, I think for
| book reviews that's a tiny set, not to be dismissive of
| them, but still.
|
| 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, all depends on
| the application.
| Retric wrote:
| You can actually do validation for completely anonymous
| accounts. The most common version is DDOS protection
| where even read only websites can still benefit.
|
| An anonymous review website could similarly rate limit
| how quickly reviews change, so someone spamming 1,000
| reviews accomplishes little.
| [deleted]
| dmos62 wrote:
| How do you find high quality book reviews? Or, is it the
| average review that's high quality?
| heisnotanalien wrote:
| I follow people whose reviews I like.
| devchix wrote:
| The review page and discussion thread is hideous and painful to
| navigate. If a site is to be able to recommend $nextbook it has
| to curate inputs, either as ratings or text reviews. There are
| huge bookclub memberships but hardly anybody write anything
| substantial because it's a quagmire to wade through (thus
| implying few review readers). Lapsed readers like me would love
| a place to talk books, obscure, trendy or not. r/books is a
| never-ending loop of "I've just finished Ender's Game and I
| ..." and "Why we do $something when we read", and similar
| dross. If there's any space that could use a boost in "user
| engagement" I wish it could be for readers. But, as we bookish
| lot aren't terribly argumentative, and unwilling to shiv anyone
| who opines that they loved DaVinci Code, it's an unknown with
| what to bait us. I log into Goodreads probably twice a month,
| avert my eyes and then close tab.
| IggleSniggle wrote:
| I think Steam is probably a decent model of what Goodreads
| could have looked like. Full of product reviews, with a
| carefully crafted recommendation engine that focuses in on
| genres/studios of interest based on a combination of what
| your friends are reading/reviewing/liking, your past
| purchases, new release, etc.
|
| 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.
| busterarm wrote:
| the spam emails are pretty shit
| afterburner wrote:
| You can turn that off in settings. I have and get nothing
| from them.
| busterarm wrote:
| That's not the point.
|
| 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.
| inanutshellus wrote:
| Since you call them "spam", I assume you do not want the
| emails you're getting, rather than saying you want the
| communication but they're lower quality than you want. If
| that's the case, I've been a GR member for years and only get
| emails from them when a particular author does something I've
| asked GR to notify me about. Implies to me that merely
| unsubscribing and managing your preferences seems to work.
| busterarm wrote:
| I have a GR account due just to having a Kindle
| subscription and I don't use it and haven't configured
| anything (nor want to). Just for having the account I get
| emails like "the official adult site <some url> of
| Goodreads."
|
| If there were some way I didn't have this goodreads account
| at all, that would be preferable.
| BikiniPrince wrote:
| I actually would like a better algorithm for suggestions. I can
| scroll fifty pages of their basic suggestions before I hit
| something I'm interested in and don't already have. I would
| really like to fetch their catalogue and try the Netflix search
| improvement contest, but for books!
| billfruit wrote:
| It is broken in certain aspects, Goodreads is one of the
| slowest sites around, if nothing else is done that alone needs
| fixing. And it has been in this state for years now.
| jacobsenscott wrote:
| I don't actually use good reads, but I clicked around -
| everything I clicked on loaded faster (less than 2 seconds,
| usually less than 1) than everything I clicked on in medium
| (always more than 2 seconds, where this blog post is hosted).
|
| Neither site is fast, but "one of the slowest around" doesn't
| track either.
| ryantgtg wrote:
| In my experience, Goodreads loads slower on a phone than on
| a desktop browser (and it's only the initial load that I
| notice being slow). I've long suspected (without evidence)
| that this is intentional because they nerf the mobile web
| experience in an attempt to get you to use their app.
| davidwparker wrote:
| I think it may be more so for logged in users. When logged
| in, and I go to the homepage, which is essentially an
| activity feed, it has 93 requests, 4.4MB of resources
| (1.5MB transferred), and took 7.66 seconds to finish.
| bagofbones wrote:
| I hear you. It's not broken. It does serve the primal use cases
| like shelving, reviews/ratings, meta-information pretty well.
| But there is also so much more to the experience of reading. Is
| Goodreads really the best we deserve?
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| > _And god forbid some UX person gets hold of it and redesigns
| it in the boring /minimal feel_
|
| 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.
| throwawayjcvbs wrote:
| that is underway right now actually. theres a beta in-
| progress for a re-design of a couple pages including the book
| page.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Modern UX design seems enamored with sites that refuse to
| scroll smoothly, which is maddening and quite unpleasant.
| jquaint wrote:
| I find goodreads has a bit of bias problem on their ratings.
| Most books are rated between 3 and 4. Its really hard to tell
| if that rating is accurate because most people who didn't
| finish the book (an indicator of low quality) will not leave a
| review.
| ipaddr wrote:
| I think that's honestly how most people score. If you read
| the entire book and it was okay you give it a 3 if it was
| great a 4 best book ever a 5. If you hated the book you may
| not finish or review.
|
| 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.
| bscphil wrote:
| > Most books are rated between 3 and 4. Its really hard to
| tell if that rating is accurate
|
| 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.
| ALittleLight wrote:
| It's strange to me that this is the pattern for things like
| books, movies, or beer but with Uber drivers the pattern
| seems to be "Give 5 stars unless something was wrong."
|
| 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?"
| Tagbert wrote:
| That is due to Uber corporate misunderstanding ratings
| and penalizing drivers who get anything less than a
| perfect rating.
| zwieback wrote:
| Yeah, most review sites have the 5 or nothing problem. I look
| at the distribution and then find some medium to low starred
| reviews to see why I might not like a book that otherwise
| seems a good match for me.
|
| In aggregate the star rating is pretty good for literature
| and non-fiction. For mass fiction it's fairly useless.
| snarf21 wrote:
| How do you make a better goodreads that is _sustainable_ when
| Amazon will always make it free as a way to sell more books on
| Amazon? It is pretty easy to make a X that is better than the
| status quo. How will you compete with the big guys financially?
| People want everything for free.
| bagofbones wrote:
| This is the billion dollar question, but having the right
| answer at the outset may not be necessary. In fact, most
| successful business go through multiple iterations on
| monetisation opportunities before they strike gold.
|
| 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.
| snarf21 wrote:
| That is a good approach but the risk is that if the feature
| you add that people _really_ want is trivial for Amazon to
| copy after you 've proven it.
| distances wrote:
| Good first step would be to free the data under an open
| license. A MusicBrainz for books.
|
| Now that I think about it, there probably are multiple
| projects already trying to do that.
| oauea wrote:
| Do you remember when people made websites to solve problems
| and build community, instead of to make a profit? You can
| always just shill for amazon using affiliate links, everyone
| wins.
| dlivingston wrote:
| The value of a social network is directly proportional to
| the number of edges in the network graph (I.e.,
| SocialNetworkX might be better than Facebook, but if none
| of your friends are on it, it's worthless). For Goodreads,
| couple that with the vast amount of book metadata they have
| + Kindle integration, and any startup would have a long way
| to go to even reach parity.
|
| 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.
| x0x0 wrote:
| Making money (and this site will take a lot of money to
| build, even if it's just to break even) via Amazon -- while
| competing with an Amazon property -- is not something that
| is going to work. I frankly think this is the central
| reason there's no goodreads competitor: how to make enough
| money to break even when Amazon becomes your enemy...
| throwawayjcvbs wrote:
| goodreads is not supported by amazon. its self sustaining
| through ads, affiliate links and publisher promotions.
| x0x0 wrote:
| Not to mention amazon will very aggressively react when you
| start cutting into an (effectively free) leadgen source from
| them.
| HKH2 wrote:
| The recommendations generally seem reasonable.
|
| What bothers me is that they clearly have the data to allow for
| very specific queries, but there's no way to make them.
| zem wrote:
| what bothers me even more is that all the data for those
| queries is user-generated, which means that users have
| essentially contributed value to the site but cannot get it
| back. that's the competition I would really like to see - a
| site that crowd sources book metadata in the form of tags and
| then makes the data freely available and searchable.
| jborichevskiy wrote:
| Almost Everything About Goodreads is Broken
|
| https://onezero.medium.com/almost-everything-about-goodreads...
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20904549
| ryantgtg wrote:
| Counterpoint: Goodreads isn't broken.
|
| 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.
| mhb wrote:
| It's great that your tastes are similar enough to those of
| your friends' that that works for you. But I doubt that
| that is universal.
|
| 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.
| ryantgtg wrote:
| My tastes are not necessarily similar to my friends.
| That's actually what makes the email feed cool. I am open
| to branching out and reading books that I normally
| wouldn't expect to read.
|
| 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.
| seppin wrote:
| While the phrase "X is broken" is maybe the most overused in
| our society, GRs is functional but far from optimal. And there
| appears to be no incentives to get better.
| steviedotboston wrote:
| People said the same thing about the Reddit UI and look what we
| got...
| atomashpolskiy wrote:
| I find Goodreads UX tasteless and clunky, especially on mobile.
| My favourite website in this department is fantlab.ru, though
| it's mostly in Russian.
| throwawayjcvbs wrote:
| a redesign is underway
| rkachowski wrote:
| From reading the article, the answer seems to be something like
| "because Goodreads has optimised heavily for SEO and uses this to
| stay on top of search results".
| input_sh wrote:
| I mean Google also made a conscious decision to make it an
| authoritative source in their knowledge graphs.
|
| Swapping those links for a competitor would be damn near
| impossible, and it has not much to do with the SEO.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| The knowledge graph thing is something any site can opt into
| by using schema.org markup. So long as they don't get banned
| for supplying misleading info in their schema.org tags, it
| ought to just work.
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