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Whatever the intent of Goodreads initially, once Amazon bought it, it became a subtle funnel to drive sales of books, ideally through Amazon. While there are op
by thetechimist 6y ago
Whatever the intent of Goodreads initially, once Amazon bought it, it became a subtle funnel to drive sales of books, ideally through Amazon. While there are options there for libraries and many other booksellers, no one should believe for a minute that Bezos is interested in helping Goodreads be a contemplative site that fosters multiple readings of a small number of deeper reads.
The reviews can be helpful, but “tracking” ones books (or simple exercise, etc) is just a Silicon Valley middleman insertion into our otherwise simple lives so they can profit... somehow.
Many people at struggle to read books, probably because of smartphones and “internet reading”, but the reality is that this article is spot-on about our modern curse of information overload which gets combined with anxiety. We evolved the internet from our prior librarian mentality.
And while it’s perfectly fine to have libraries, book stores, catalogues of information, and encyclopedias, this article is correct that our personal lives could be improved by removing our click-happy ways from not only our web surfing habits, but from some of our book reading habits.
Personally, being an avid reader, I found it a relief to delete my Goodreads account some time ago. I also got rid of a number of books on hand, dwindling down to only 12, not counting some reference books.
I initially exported my “to read” Goodreads shelf into a spreadsheet, but eventually deleted it (and the 300+ books I had on the list). Not because it was unlikely I would ever read through them all, but because I also had come to some similar conclusions as the author of this article.
- Mediterraneo10 6y ago> Whatever the intent of Goodreads initially, once Amazon bought it, it became a subtle funnel to drive sales of books, ideally through Amazon. Goodreads was originally a "subtle funnel to drive sales of books", as any book listing there offered links to buy it through various online retailers, and Goodreads got a cut of those sales as the referrer. However, since most people were buying through Amazon (which had already succeeded in marginalizing its competition), Amazon was paying Goodreads a fortune each month in referral fees. In the end, Amazon felt it was cheaper just to buy Goodreads out entirely than maintain the status quo.
- dorchadas 6y agoI think it all depends on how you use Goodreads. I used to use it to track how many books I read a year, participating in their challenges and stuff. I set one for 2020, but have since disregarded it thanks to browsing /r/bookscirclejerk, which convinced me deeper, wider reading was better than trying to do 52 books a year. Since then, I've mainly just categorized books I've read on goodreads, which is nice if I want to see what I've read over the past few years and go back to some of them. Especially when my memory is quite bad. Often I'll rank them, though on a personal scale where 3 is 'enjoyed'. I might stop doing that soon, and just switch to an analog version my grandmother does -- write the book and authors in a notebook and keep for years. I've already starte doing this somewhat: I use an index card as a bookmark and write the book and completion date for whichever books I use it with.