Goodreads Is Terrible for Books. Why Can’t We All Quit It?
Goodreads Is Terrible for Books. Why Can’t We All Quit It? | The Walrus
Do you use Goodreads or something similar like Fantastic Fiction?
Speak for yourself, eh?
I read a lot of books. I don't use Goodreads.
I use storygraph and love it, but hate the centralization of it. I like bookwyrm, but unfortunately there isn't really any iOS apps (or any apps) available for it. The mobile site is great and is able to function really well as a PWA iirc but the app issue is my biggest barrier personally right now. It's a matter of someone who's willing to make an app at this point.
I will say, I am currently tinkering with bookwyrm and potentially setting up an instance for literature.cafe users (and potentially others in the lemmyverse). It requires a bit of tinkering to get working right now, but we will see.
I use Storygraph but one of my friends is setting a Bookwyrm instance pretty soon, so I'll be migrating
Bookwyrm seems very interesting
I made an account on Bookwyrm and I'm for sure going to use it, I just need to actually get all my books logged on there first so I have to wait until I've got more free time.
I've never really understood the appeal. Goodreads is a pretty good source for synopses, and IMO that's it. The reviews are mostly shit, the ratings are useless and the recommendations are pedestrian at best.
If book sites were restaurants, Goodreads would be McDonalds.
That's an insult to McDonalds
I'm a huge reader and I've never been a fan of Goodreads. I don't know anybody who is or has been.
It was good for the time before it was bought by Amazon. Amazon has a habit of buying up everything book related and if they don’t see a potential to squeeze profit from it they will just abandon it.
They own the top level domains .book and .read and have been in existence since 2015. They do not allow anyone to register with those domains years after paying to own them. No one is able to register. If .read was actually purchasable this site would likely be called lemmy.read :(
I may have an account there from years (and years and years) ago. Haven't logged in since creating it. I just don't see the point. Maybe a decentralized alternative would make more sense.
Bookwyrm here. Mostly for reaching reads and the occasional recommendation.
I tried Bookwyrm and other alternatives. As awful as Goodreads is on mobile, it still works better for me than anything else I've tried. Recommendations through what friends read are a huge thing and also so, so many books missing.
I've never used Goodreads, I usually get my book recommendations from YouTube channels when I'm watching videos about other books or miscellaneous stuff.
I use Goodreads but not for it’s intended purpose. I just like keeping track of what I have read through the years, so it’s my personal reading history. I also rate almost everything I read, to compare with the global rating.
I created the profile because of this other website: novelty-insights.com (sorry, I don’t know how to make it a link)
if you have a Goodreads account, you can export your account data and upload them to novelty insight, it will give you some stats on your reading habits. It helped me notice some bias I have in my reading. Check it out!
I used to use Goodreads for keeping track of what I read/listen to, but with their latest redesign it was becoming unusable. I then moved to Fantastic Fiction, but they lack some basic functionality and their catalogue is very incomplete. BookWyrm is fediverse alternative, but it also lacks some basic features I need.
So now I just host my own database with a simple website and a crawler to scrape the metadata from other sources and keep everything to my own liking.
