7 ms·

Goodreads’ reign over the world of book talk might be coming to an end

123 points by J253 6y ago

garmaine 6y ago
Is this a hit piece? I’ve never once had a problem with goodreads. Am I alone?
- dontremeber 6y ago
  Not sure but I do know that when I first found out Goodreads was owned by Amazon I was very surprised and began to look at Goodreads (perhaps unfairly?) under a very different light. I was suddenly underwhelmed with what it was. I remember thinking surely someone like Amazon could build something better than this. Not sure what I suddenly expected it to be, exactly, but it just felt like the whole UX was something from a decade ago. Sure it’s great for keeping track of books I’ve read and whatnot but I’ve tried to use it to dig deep and find new authors and books similar to my tastes but didn’t find a lot of success. In the music world I’ve had a ton of success finding new artists on Spotify’s “Fans also like” section. And I can keep following one artist to another to another. Books are obviously different in that it takes quite a bit longer to learn whether or not you like a new author than it does to listen to a new artist’s top few tracks, but still...after trying a few new authors and books, I never found that magical recommendation engine I was hoping for.
- pasabagi 6y ago
  I wouldn't say I hate goodreads, but it is probably the worst-designed website (with some tough competition) that I semi-regularly use. The book categories are nonsensical, the books that take up most real estate are either random, or selections of books so famous you've definitely read/seen them before. More minor annoyances are that the reviews smell like astroturfing, and the 'quotes' thing is totally inane, and it's cluttered while remaining information-sparse.
- DeusExMachina 6y ago
  I don't find it a particularly usable or appealing website, but I have been using it for a long time and I never hated it as the article implies.
- deadwing0 6y ago
  I have never really been a fan. I use it mostly to discover new books and track my reading and goals, which seems to work just fine. However, the Android app, which I use the majority of the time, is pretty bad. The Home tab is blank, with only a search bar and a button to "find your friends." Seems odd for the app to start there. I guess they are trying to push the social media features of it? I'm not interested in that. On my previous phone (iPhone 6s), the app seemed to be much better designed, though it has been a while since I have used it. Honestly, my biggest gripe is that it's owned by Amazon. I generally try to support smaller retailers when making purchases, and would love to find another service that helps me track my reading and discover new books.
- freddie_mercury 6y ago
  I've never had a problem. It doesn't do a great job with recommendations but I don't really care. There are thousands of book recommendation blogs, lists, BookTube channels, etc. I'm not sure why people think every site/app needs to evolve to engulf every tangential aspect of a given ecosystem. HN can never make up its mind whether it likes distributed systems or not. HN also loves the benign neglect of HN itself (formatting on mobile still broken after 20 years?)
  - garmaine 6y ago
    This right here. I actually think adding some sort of machine learning recommendation system would be an anti-feature. I do use the site for recommendations on what to read next, But I get that from reading the reviews of other users. These reviews often say “the idea of this book is good, but was done better by ______ in _______.” That context is critically important. Just being told I might like this other book is not helpful.
- Mediterraneo10 6y ago
  There is a reason that most discussions of Goodreads here and on GR itself tend to bring up complaints. It’s not so much that Amazon hasn’t upgraded the site to a "modern" web design – plenty of people like the old-school aesthetic and we don’t want endless scrolling and an attempt to maximize the time the user spends on the site (because we’re supposed to be reading books most of the time, after all). Rather, the problem is the long-standing bugs that Amazon has never bothered to fix, because it can’t see any financial incentive to develop Goodreads further. The book database is a mess and even those of us empowered as "Goodreads librarians" are unable to help much. For example, today many authors might have the same name, a problem only made worse with all the self-publishing going on. Yet the Goodreads librarian UI has no straightforward way to assign a new book to this or that author of the same name. Instead, you have to use a hack where for author X you have to type two spaces between the first name and surname, for author Y you have to type three spaces, etc. It is totally amateur, and when you have 20 authors all of the same name you have no reference for which author has how many spaces typed between the first name and surname.
Hokusai 6y ago
> Instead, it has stagnated: Amazon holds on to an effective monopoly on the discussion of new books This is the main point. It is the same thing that Oracle purchasing MySQL. What once was a promising raising technology is nowadays stagnant. (Interest over time https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%2Fm%2F05ynw,mysql https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%...) GoodReads could help to find better books to read. But, Amazon likes the current state where Amazon recommends the books that are good for their business and not the best for the reader. 10 years ago, I would buy anything Amazon recommended on books. Nowadays, I do not use Amazon anymore as it just promotes books that, I guess, have larger profit margins or align better with Amazon strategy. It cannot be trusted as a recommendation engine.
- pizza234 6y ago
  > It is the same thing that Oracle purchasing MySQL. What once was a promising raising technology is nowadays stagnant. (Interest over time https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=% https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%...) Connecting Oracle's purchase with the MySQL's market share is a long stretch. Even based on that diagram, the decline started earlier than the time Oracle came into play. The quality and pace of development of MySQL/InnoDB hasn't meaningfully changed (although one may subtly observe that with v8, they radically changed the release philosophy - patch versions now can introduce new features or break old ones). There have been low and high quality features developed, but that happens with any software. In order to get an idea of how MySQL was around 10 years ago, notice how by that time, MyISAM was (unfortunately) still something. A simple interpretation of the shift in market share is that PGSQL hasn't been ready for wide adoption (historically speaking, it's been considered for a long time the slow and cumbersome RDBMS), until, after a certain functional threshold, it entered a virtuous circle of improving and getting traction. Of course, it's also possible that people is taking distance from MySQL "because Oracle", but that doesn't constitute a technical ground.
- Mediterraneo10 6y ago
  Amazon was pretty much forced to buy Goodreads: the original business model of Goodreads before the Amazon buyout was making money from referral links to booksellers. While links were provided to several internet booksellers besides Amazon, like Barnes & Noble, already the vast majority of internet users were hooked on Amazon and only buying through Amazon links. Consequently, Amazon was paying Goodreads a huge amount of money in referral fees each month, and it made more sense for Amazon to simply buy the site and stop that. I agree that Amazon is nefarious and destructive, but I think any company in the same position would have bought Goodreads out.
prepend 6y ago
I have used goodreads since soon after launch. It’s probably the worst site that I use, but I prefer it’s benign neglect over the “improvements” made on the main amazon site. I just use it as a list of books of I’ve read and am reading, and to see books that my friends are reading or have read. It’s been funny to me that the search is horrible and seems to be something worse than just regexing a list of book titles. But I eventually find what I’m looking for. It’s sucked as long as I can remember. The recommendations are also really bad, it has never recommended a book to me that I thought was interesting or I ended up reading. This is despite having over a thousand read and rated books from me. I’ve been waiting for them to be able to search all the books I don’t know and find one that I will like. I kind of like the site as it is quaint, but functional. It’s like a library in that way.
- a_bonobo 6y ago
  For me, recommendations got remarkably better once I used 5-10 tags ('shelves') per book for about 50 books I read - after that, the per-shelf recommendations got very good.
  - prepend 6y ago
    I never thought of that. Thanks, I’ll try it. I currently just use “read,” “want to read,” and “abandoned.”
    - dorchadas 6y ago
      The problem is if it's some obscure topic with a specific shelf, you can get some pretty bad books, as it seems to pull them based on other people's tags of books. Or, I can be reading academic works on Buddhism and then get recommended Alan Watts, who wasn't an academic and wasn't a Buddhist, but others tagged as 'Buddhism'. So there are still plenty of issues with it.
  - matthewfelgate 6y ago
    What does this mean?
imglorp 6y ago
Business opportunity here to replace this? Start with some HN or Reddit style forum discussion code. Some income could come from affiliate links to indie booksellers. (Is there even infra for such a thing right now? Need to build that too?) Edit, answering myself, this guy has some thoughts: https://tomcritchlow.com/2020/04/15/library-json/ https://tomcritchlow.com/2020/04/15/library-json/ Edit, as for the index corpus, the USLC does okay: https://catalog.loc.gov/vwebv/search?searchArg=0312937385&searchCode=GKEY%5E*&searchType=0&recCount=25 https://catalog.loc.gov/vwebv/search?searchArg=0312937385&se...
- doiwin 6y ago
  Is the USLC always updated with the latest books? What would be the legal background of using their index?
  - imglorp 6y ago
    Oh, hm, ISBN is probably better? These guys seem to have a DB, wonder how they get it? https://isbnsearch.org/ https://isbnsearch.org/ It used to be that authors needed to deposit a copy of every new book at USLC, that's probably an old thing.
  - freddie_mercury 6y ago
    Sure, if you only care about America. But people in other countries read books too. Here's the best selling book in Germany: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/45006237-das-geschenk https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/45006237-das-geschenk
- foxdev 6y ago
  Here's an attempt at making a Goodreads-like that runs on ActivityPub: https://github.com/mouse-reeve/bookwyrm https://github.com/mouse-reeve/bookwyrm
doiwin 6y ago
What is the main feature of Goodreads? Is it discussing new books? If so, what is the reason people want to discuss new books? Anybody here who does it? If so: Why do you do it? And do you do it before or after you read it?
freddie_mercury 6y ago
The author complains that it is "impossible" to find books on Goodreads. Simply adding the author's name to any query will always take you to the book you are looking for. Don't just rely on a title. Which should be common sense (if you were at a bookstore you would always tell the clerk the author's name and not just say "Do you have Holiday Heart?") but apparently isn't. The author complains that searching for 'holiday heart' didn't show Margarita García Robayo's book in the top hits. But searching for 'holiday heart robayo' does. As for the rest of the piece...the belief that algorithmic recommendations are going to be easy for some shoestring budget startup run by a single person in their spare time is somehow going to do a good job simply isn't credible. People still complain about Netflix recommendations and they've spent tens of millions of dollars, possibly over a hundred million dollars, on it and are one of the most valuable companies on the planet with one of the best engineering teams on the planet. Why do people think algorithmic recommendations are easy? Or even desirable?
- jbob2000 6y ago
  Why is nobody asking how a recommendation engine is supposed to work if there’s nothing to recommend? Is it possible that even computers recognize 90% of media as garbage?
  - foxdev 6y ago
    Recommendation systems are built on k-Nearest Neighbors (KNN) algorithms. Subjective measure of quality is not a factor. A computer can see that two people like the same thing, but also that those two people like similar things each is not aware of, and bridge that awareness gap. It works the same whether the set of options is Star Wars (original), Star Wars (prequels), and/or Star Wars (sequels).
- thewhitetulip 6y ago
  While the article focused on how someone might bring a better algo webapp against goodreads, you've got to agree that Goodreads is badly maintained. The app is atrocious as is the website from the reader's PoV. The groups are so badly implemented that it takes multiple clicks to do ANYTHING and there is just no "timeline" like thing where you can post on a group. It won't take much time/resources for a social media to act like a 21st century social media right? Especially since it is owned by the company which created AWS? from the author side: I have a very common name and I've got an ebook up on Goodreads(I did not add it & I've not, for the life of me figured out how to submit the book) But because Good reads thinks that because my name is what it is, they merged my profile with someone else with my exact same first name and last name. I've done all I could to get them to change it, but they didn't bother to respond.
Mediterraneo10 6y ago
The linked article soon goes from criticizing Goodreads to hyping The StoryGraph as a Goodreads competitor. However, all the great new features of The StoryGraph seem targeted towards only one portion of the Goodreads membership: people reading fiction or the most pop-sci-type nonfiction and who want recommendations for new stuff to read. My own bookish, nerdy Goodreads subculture is very different: we already have more books on our to-read list than we could realistically get through, we don’t really need auto-generated recommendations for more. We review a lot of serious non-fiction, not just the mass-market stuff, and genre tags like "dark" or "edgy" don't seem relevant, while being able to add "trigger warnings" misses the point. Yes, GR users like myself are probably a minority, but we’re a very established and recognized minority. We're the sort that keeps some independent booksellers alive, for example, so any new site that aims to maintain a culture of books and reading ought to take us into account.
- xtracto 6y ago
  Ooh so the "article" is really a marketing blurb for that other service!
- freddie_mercury 6y ago
  I agree that "I can't find any good books to read" is not really a problem most readers I know have. Most have dozens, or hundreds, of books on their To Be Read pile. Finding new books to read doesn't really strike me as a big problem. I've seen people looking for extremely specific books get stuck. "I'm looking for fantasy where the bad guy turns into a good guy but keeps working on the bad guy side but actively undermines it and also I want some LBGTI+ romance but no smut/explicit scenes". But I'm doubtful TheStoryGraph is going to help them either. For almost any niche I've seen there's going to be someone somewhere on the internet who puts together a listicle of books in that niche which is going to provide months or years of reading for most normal people. And that's without even looking into the authors' back catalogues or looking at other authors from the same publishers.
  - jseliger 6y ago
    I've seen people looking for extremely specific books get stuck At least some number of writers seem to get started by wanting to read a book that doesn't exist, so they decide to write it themselves.
Aeolun 6y ago
Honestly, I checked out the storygraph after reading the article, and the first thing that came to mind when I saw the site was ‘amateur hour’ that I read earlier today in some post about Apple. I can’t really take it seriously while it still looks like some random programmer’s side project. That said, it’s readable and mobile friendly, so that’s a win.
ubermonkey 6y ago
I’m seeing this piece around widely. I agree with the premise, and am willing to give StoryGraph some time and attention. I mostly stopped using GR because it just seemed like a noise platform — and, I guess obviously, I didn’t want to give Amazon any more data about me.
sradman 6y ago
TL;DR: social book metadata site Goodreads has stagnated since being bought by Amazon. This pattern has occurred repeatedly with metadata associated with digital media; CDDB vs. iTunes, IMDB vs. Amazon DVD listings, Goodreads vs. Amazon book listings. Rather than assuming that Amazon is strategically hampering Goodreads functionality, I assume that Amazon is a large company that misses opportunities to delight its customers. Giggles ensue every time I come across a "We don't have any cast information" message in Amazon Prime Video. Hanlon's Razor [1] applies: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity". [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor
gravitas 6y ago
This reads and feels like a 33 paragraph thinly veiled marketing advertisement for StoryGraph, using the David vs. Goliath story model.
- gravitas 6y ago
  It's bugging me enough to reply to myself - the author is also throwing shade at LibraryThing passive-agressively by using the association fallacy. AbeBooks owned 40% of LT and Amazon acquired AbeBooks - but that's all the author had to say, no critical comparison of LT on it's merits as a book website. I find this to be disingenuous.
LockAndLol 6y ago
That intro was waaaay too long. As someone who knows Goodreads in passing, I just wanted the author to get to the point and make their recommendation. As a TL;DR for Good read users: The StoryGraph. Check it out.
BigBalli 6y ago
I started https://MyBookList.club https://MyBookList.club over a decade ago and always stayed away from recommendations. They're never going to satisfy everyone. The closest thing is "similar books".
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
matthewfelgate 6y ago
Goodreads interface is terrible. I'm surprised Amazon hasn't shut Goodreads down. All I want from Goodreads is: * A nice way to see all the books I've read * Maintain a list of "Want to read books" * A decent recommendation system for my next read (If you like Goodreads I recommend Readwise, which lets you upload Kindle book highlights and helps you learn from them.)
vhpoet 6y ago
A shameless plug here, I've been working on a web app to tackle a small part of the issue here. Showing contextual recommendations from 1300+ leaders with verified quotes https://www.readthistwice.com https://www.readthistwice.com

123 points by J253 6y ago

garmaine 6y ago

Is this a hit piece? I’ve never once had a problem with goodreads. Am I alone?

dontremeber 6y ago
Not sure but I do know that when I first found out Goodreads was owned by Amazon I was very surprised and began to look at Goodreads (perhaps unfairly?) under a very different light. I was suddenly underwhelmed with what it was. I remember thinking surely someone like Amazon could build something better than this. Not sure what I suddenly expected it to be, exactly, but it just felt like the whole UX was something from a decade ago. Sure it’s great for keeping track of books I’ve read and whatnot but I’ve tried to use it to dig deep and find new authors and books similar to my tastes but didn’t find a lot of success. In the music world I’ve had a ton of success finding new artists on Spotify’s “Fans also like” section. And I can keep following one artist to another to another. Books are obviously different in that it takes quite a bit longer to learn whether or not you like a new author than it does to listen to a new artist’s top few tracks, but still...after trying a few new authors and books, I never found that magical recommendation engine I was hoping for.
pasabagi 6y ago
I wouldn't say I hate goodreads, but it is probably the worst-designed website (with some tough competition) that I semi-regularly use. The book categories are nonsensical, the books that take up most real estate are either random, or selections of books so famous you've definitely read/seen them before. More minor annoyances are that the reviews smell like astroturfing, and the 'quotes' thing is totally inane, and it's cluttered while remaining information-sparse.
DeusExMachina 6y ago
I don't find it a particularly usable or appealing website, but I have been using it for a long time and I never hated it as the article implies.
deadwing0 6y ago
I have never really been a fan. I use it mostly to discover new books and track my reading and goals, which seems to work just fine. However, the Android app, which I use the majority of the time, is pretty bad. The Home tab is blank, with only a search bar and a button to "find your friends." Seems odd for the app to start there. I guess they are trying to push the social media features of it? I'm not interested in that. On my previous phone (iPhone 6s), the app seemed to be much better designed, though it has been a while since I have used it. Honestly, my biggest gripe is that it's owned by Amazon. I generally try to support smaller retailers when making purchases, and would love to find another service that helps me track my reading and discover new books.
freddie_mercury 6y ago
I've never had a problem. It doesn't do a great job with recommendations but I don't really care. There are thousands of book recommendation blogs, lists, BookTube channels, etc. I'm not sure why people think every site/app needs to evolve to engulf every tangential aspect of a given ecosystem. HN can never make up its mind whether it likes distributed systems or not. HN also loves the benign neglect of HN itself (formatting on mobile still broken after 20 years?)
- garmaine 6y ago
  This right here. I actually think adding some sort of machine learning recommendation system would be an anti-feature. I do use the site for recommendations on what to read next, But I get that from reading the reviews of other users. These reviews often say “the idea of this book is good, but was done better by ______ in _______.” That context is critically important. Just being told I might like this other book is not helpful.
Mediterraneo10 6y ago
There is a reason that most discussions of Goodreads here and on GR itself tend to bring up complaints. It’s not so much that Amazon hasn’t upgraded the site to a "modern" web design – plenty of people like the old-school aesthetic and we don’t want endless scrolling and an attempt to maximize the time the user spends on the site (because we’re supposed to be reading books most of the time, after all). Rather, the problem is the long-standing bugs that Amazon has never bothered to fix, because it can’t see any financial incentive to develop Goodreads further. The book database is a mess and even those of us empowered as "Goodreads librarians" are unable to help much. For example, today many authors might have the same name, a problem only made worse with all the self-publishing going on. Yet the Goodreads librarian UI has no straightforward way to assign a new book to this or that author of the same name. Instead, you have to use a hack where for author X you have to type two spaces between the first name and surname, for author Y you have to type three spaces, etc. It is totally amateur, and when you have 20 authors all of the same name you have no reference for which author has how many spaces typed between the first name and surname.

Hokusai 6y ago

> Instead, it has stagnated: Amazon holds on to an effective monopoly on the discussion of new books This is the main point. It is the same thing that Oracle purchasing MySQL. What once was a promising raising technology is nowadays stagnant. (Interest over time https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%2Fm%2F05ynw,mysql https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%...) GoodReads could help to find better books to read. But, Amazon likes the current state where Amazon recommends the books that are good for their business and not the best for the reader. 10 years ago, I would buy anything Amazon recommended on books. Nowadays, I do not use Amazon anymore as it just promotes books that, I guess, have larger profit margins or align better with Amazon strategy. It cannot be trusted as a recommendation engine.

pizza234 6y ago
> It is the same thing that Oracle purchasing MySQL. What once was a promising raising technology is nowadays stagnant. (Interest over time https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=% https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%...) Connecting Oracle's purchase with the MySQL's market share is a long stretch. Even based on that diagram, the decline started earlier than the time Oracle came into play. The quality and pace of development of MySQL/InnoDB hasn't meaningfully changed (although one may subtly observe that with v8, they radically changed the release philosophy - patch versions now can introduce new features or break old ones). There have been low and high quality features developed, but that happens with any software. In order to get an idea of how MySQL was around 10 years ago, notice how by that time, MyISAM was (unfortunately) still something. A simple interpretation of the shift in market share is that PGSQL hasn't been ready for wide adoption (historically speaking, it's been considered for a long time the slow and cumbersome RDBMS), until, after a certain functional threshold, it entered a virtuous circle of improving and getting traction. Of course, it's also possible that people is taking distance from MySQL "because Oracle", but that doesn't constitute a technical ground.
Mediterraneo10 6y ago
Amazon was pretty much forced to buy Goodreads: the original business model of Goodreads before the Amazon buyout was making money from referral links to booksellers. While links were provided to several internet booksellers besides Amazon, like Barnes & Noble, already the vast majority of internet users were hooked on Amazon and only buying through Amazon links. Consequently, Amazon was paying Goodreads a huge amount of money in referral fees each month, and it made more sense for Amazon to simply buy the site and stop that. I agree that Amazon is nefarious and destructive, but I think any company in the same position would have bought Goodreads out.

prepend 6y ago

I have used goodreads since soon after launch. It’s probably the worst site that I use, but I prefer it’s benign neglect over the “improvements” made on the main amazon site. I just use it as a list of books of I’ve read and am reading, and to see books that my friends are reading or have read. It’s been funny to me that the search is horrible and seems to be something worse than just regexing a list of book titles. But I eventually find what I’m looking for. It’s sucked as long as I can remember. The recommendations are also really bad, it has never recommended a book to me that I thought was interesting or I ended up reading. This is despite having over a thousand read and rated books from me. I’ve been waiting for them to be able to search all the books I don’t know and find one that I will like. I kind of like the site as it is quaint, but functional. It’s like a library in that way.

a_bonobo 6y ago
For me, recommendations got remarkably better once I used 5-10 tags ('shelves') per book for about 50 books I read - after that, the per-shelf recommendations got very good.
- prepend 6y ago
  I never thought of that. Thanks, I’ll try it. I currently just use “read,” “want to read,” and “abandoned.”
  - dorchadas 6y ago
    The problem is if it's some obscure topic with a specific shelf, you can get some pretty bad books, as it seems to pull them based on other people's tags of books. Or, I can be reading academic works on Buddhism and then get recommended Alan Watts, who wasn't an academic and wasn't a Buddhist, but others tagged as 'Buddhism'. So there are still plenty of issues with it.
- matthewfelgate 6y ago
  What does this mean?

imglorp 6y ago

Business opportunity here to replace this? Start with some HN or Reddit style forum discussion code. Some income could come from affiliate links to indie booksellers. (Is there even infra for such a thing right now? Need to build that too?) Edit, answering myself, this guy has some thoughts: https://tomcritchlow.com/2020/04/15/library-json/ https://tomcritchlow.com/2020/04/15/library-json/ Edit, as for the index corpus, the USLC does okay: https://catalog.loc.gov/vwebv/search?searchArg=0312937385&searchCode=GKEY%5E*&searchType=0&recCount=25 https://catalog.loc.gov/vwebv/search?searchArg=0312937385&se...

doiwin 6y ago
Is the USLC always updated with the latest books? What would be the legal background of using their index?
- imglorp 6y ago
  Oh, hm, ISBN is probably better? These guys seem to have a DB, wonder how they get it? https://isbnsearch.org/ https://isbnsearch.org/ It used to be that authors needed to deposit a copy of every new book at USLC, that's probably an old thing.
- freddie_mercury 6y ago
  Sure, if you only care about America. But people in other countries read books too. Here's the best selling book in Germany: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/45006237-das-geschenk https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/45006237-das-geschenk
foxdev 6y ago
Here's an attempt at making a Goodreads-like that runs on ActivityPub: https://github.com/mouse-reeve/bookwyrm https://github.com/mouse-reeve/bookwyrm

doiwin 6y ago

What is the main feature of Goodreads? Is it discussing new books? If so, what is the reason people want to discuss new books? Anybody here who does it? If so: Why do you do it? And do you do it before or after you read it?

freddie_mercury 6y ago

The author complains that it is "impossible" to find books on Goodreads. Simply adding the author's name to any query will always take you to the book you are looking for. Don't just rely on a title. Which should be common sense (if you were at a bookstore you would always tell the clerk the author's name and not just say "Do you have Holiday Heart?") but apparently isn't. The author complains that searching for 'holiday heart' didn't show Margarita García Robayo's book in the top hits. But searching for 'holiday heart robayo' does. As for the rest of the piece...the belief that algorithmic recommendations are going to be easy for some shoestring budget startup run by a single person in their spare time is somehow going to do a good job simply isn't credible. People still complain about Netflix recommendations and they've spent tens of millions of dollars, possibly over a hundred million dollars, on it and are one of the most valuable companies on the planet with one of the best engineering teams on the planet. Why do people think algorithmic recommendations are easy? Or even desirable?

jbob2000 6y ago
Why is nobody asking how a recommendation engine is supposed to work if there’s nothing to recommend? Is it possible that even computers recognize 90% of media as garbage?
- foxdev 6y ago
  Recommendation systems are built on k-Nearest Neighbors (KNN) algorithms. Subjective measure of quality is not a factor. A computer can see that two people like the same thing, but also that those two people like similar things each is not aware of, and bridge that awareness gap. It works the same whether the set of options is Star Wars (original), Star Wars (prequels), and/or Star Wars (sequels).
thewhitetulip 6y ago
While the article focused on how someone might bring a better algo webapp against goodreads, you've got to agree that Goodreads is badly maintained. The app is atrocious as is the website from the reader's PoV. The groups are so badly implemented that it takes multiple clicks to do ANYTHING and there is just no "timeline" like thing where you can post on a group. It won't take much time/resources for a social media to act like a 21st century social media right? Especially since it is owned by the company which created AWS? from the author side: I have a very common name and I've got an ebook up on Goodreads(I did not add it & I've not, for the life of me figured out how to submit the book) But because Good reads thinks that because my name is what it is, they merged my profile with someone else with my exact same first name and last name. I've done all I could to get them to change it, but they didn't bother to respond.

Mediterraneo10 6y ago

The linked article soon goes from criticizing Goodreads to hyping The StoryGraph as a Goodreads competitor. However, all the great new features of The StoryGraph seem targeted towards only one portion of the Goodreads membership: people reading fiction or the most pop-sci-type nonfiction and who want recommendations for new stuff to read. My own bookish, nerdy Goodreads subculture is very different: we already have more books on our to-read list than we could realistically get through, we don’t really need auto-generated recommendations for more. We review a lot of serious non-fiction, not just the mass-market stuff, and genre tags like "dark" or "edgy" don't seem relevant, while being able to add "trigger warnings" misses the point. Yes, GR users like myself are probably a minority, but we’re a very established and recognized minority. We're the sort that keeps some independent booksellers alive, for example, so any new site that aims to maintain a culture of books and reading ought to take us into account.

xtracto 6y ago
Ooh so the "article" is really a marketing blurb for that other service!
freddie_mercury 6y ago
I agree that "I can't find any good books to read" is not really a problem most readers I know have. Most have dozens, or hundreds, of books on their To Be Read pile. Finding new books to read doesn't really strike me as a big problem. I've seen people looking for extremely specific books get stuck. "I'm looking for fantasy where the bad guy turns into a good guy but keeps working on the bad guy side but actively undermines it and also I want some LBGTI+ romance but no smut/explicit scenes". But I'm doubtful TheStoryGraph is going to help them either. For almost any niche I've seen there's going to be someone somewhere on the internet who puts together a listicle of books in that niche which is going to provide months or years of reading for most normal people. And that's without even looking into the authors' back catalogues or looking at other authors from the same publishers.
- jseliger 6y ago
  I've seen people looking for extremely specific books get stuck At least some number of writers seem to get started by wanting to read a book that doesn't exist, so they decide to write it themselves.

Aeolun 6y ago

Honestly, I checked out the storygraph after reading the article, and the first thing that came to mind when I saw the site was ‘amateur hour’ that I read earlier today in some post about Apple. I can’t really take it seriously while it still looks like some random programmer’s side project. That said, it’s readable and mobile friendly, so that’s a win.

ubermonkey 6y ago

I’m seeing this piece around widely. I agree with the premise, and am willing to give StoryGraph some time and attention. I mostly stopped using GR because it just seemed like a noise platform — and, I guess obviously, I didn’t want to give Amazon any more data about me.

sradman 6y ago

TL;DR: social book metadata site Goodreads has stagnated since being bought by Amazon. This pattern has occurred repeatedly with metadata associated with digital media; CDDB vs. iTunes, IMDB vs. Amazon DVD listings, Goodreads vs. Amazon book listings. Rather than assuming that Amazon is strategically hampering Goodreads functionality, I assume that Amazon is a large company that misses opportunities to delight its customers. Giggles ensue every time I come across a "We don't have any cast information" message in Amazon Prime Video. Hanlon's Razor [1] applies: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity". [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor

gravitas 6y ago

This reads and feels like a 33 paragraph thinly veiled marketing advertisement for StoryGraph, using the David vs. Goliath story model.

gravitas 6y ago
It's bugging me enough to reply to myself - the author is also throwing shade at LibraryThing passive-agressively by using the association fallacy. AbeBooks owned 40% of LT and Amazon acquired AbeBooks - but that's all the author had to say, no critical comparison of LT on it's merits as a book website. I find this to be disingenuous.

LockAndLol 6y ago

That intro was waaaay too long. As someone who knows Goodreads in passing, I just wanted the author to get to the point and make their recommendation. As a TL;DR for Good read users: The StoryGraph. Check it out.

BigBalli 6y ago

I started https://MyBookList.club https://MyBookList.club over a decade ago and always stayed away from recommendations. They're never going to satisfy everyone. The closest thing is "similar books".

deleted 6y ago
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matthewfelgate 6y ago

Goodreads interface is terrible. I'm surprised Amazon hasn't shut Goodreads down. All I want from Goodreads is: * A nice way to see all the books I've read * Maintain a list of "Want to read books" * A decent recommendation system for my next read (If you like Goodreads I recommend Readwise, which lets you upload Kindle book highlights and helps you learn from them.)

vhpoet 6y ago

A shameless plug here, I've been working on a web app to tackle a small part of the issue here. Showing contextual recommendations from 1300+ leaders with verified quotes https://www.readthistwice.com https://www.readthistwice.com