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Goodreads plans to retire API access, disables existing API keys

• thrower123 6y ago
  Does anybody know what these Goodreads APIs that are being deprecated actually are? I'm struggling to imagine what they could be; Goodreads doesnt exactly have much data that's really useful.
  • sradman 6y ago
    https://www.goodreads.com/api https://www.goodreads.com/api
• dash2 6y ago
  Key para: The web has to mature beyond advertising as a business model. For this to happen people are going to have to open their wallets, pay for the services they use, and support independent businesses. That’s how we build a web where indies can thrive - one that’s more village centre than financial centre. I think the shift is underway. True/false?
  • pbronez 6y ago
    I’m certainly sympathetic to this idea. The marginal cost to serve an HTTP request is vanishingly small, but the fixed costs to develop the application itself (mostly labor) is pretty high. That means your cost per user is pretty high at first, since all that work supports a handful of people. You seek more users to amortize costs further, and it works until you start accumulating enough HTTP requests and user data that costs start to climb again. And of course more users means more use cases and user agents, which require ongoing maintenance investments. The whole process doesn’t have to be expensive, but it’s certainly not free. You can build very cool stuff and give it away for free, but sustainability and scalability ultimately require revenue. The magic thing about a successful business is the ability to cover execution costs, support the development team, and still leave value on the table for users. I think digital services have drastically different economics depending on (1) how adding a NEW user changes the value proposition for EXISTING users, and (2) something like the user’s start up/discovery cost relative to lifetime value A direct payment model makes sense when your users’ value is independent from the size of the user base (assuming performance scales at least linearly). These services can tolerate moderate startup/discovery costs. For critical enterprise services, startup costs can be high because the lifetime value is still much larger. If value scales with the user base, as in a social network like good reads, then startup/discovery cost must be pushed to zero to grow the user base as quickly as possible. A paywall slows user base growth and reduces value for those users that actually choose to pay. So far, advertising is the only known way to monetize (and thus sustain) a digital service while maintaining near-zero startup/discovery costs for individual users. Micropayments, even with good UX and low fees, increase joining costs relative to advertising. Thus they will reduce the value of the service to paying users if value scales with user base size, but would benefit services where value is independent of user base size. Federation is maybe the best way out of this dilemma IMHO. The value of the overall network grows with the user base, so adding new federation partners should be near-free. Each instance is small relative to the network as a whole, and thus can focus on individual user value rather than growing the network, which means it can charge users directly. This is why you’re willing to buy a great Twitter or Reddit client app, but would never pay for a Twitter or Reddit subscription. (Yes I know those are centralized services, but the model holds if you look at the business relationships).
    • BlueTemplar 6y ago
      Ideally, "book reviews" would be a semantic web category, which a search engine could fetch from personal websites. (Note that this already kind of works with current search engines.) But the incentives were never really aligned for that...
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • chordalkeyboard 6y ago
    I don't know if its true but I think its a valid perspective and so there's likely some truth there. People don't want to pay for content. If people pay for content and feel ripped off, they can ask for a refund. Then cheaters can pay to access the content then ask for their money back if they want to. This puts the content provider in a bad position. If people pay for content, then they want to have that content themselves forever. In some sense, this is fair. But then they want to share that content with others. Then the other person/people don't need to pay. Now you have a problem where everyone can just get the content when one person has paid for it. This is a bad dilemma where content providers and consumers both seem to have a good case. Since neither pay model seems to work, companies just show ads. Then people ignore ads, so the ad companies make them more attention-grabbing and intrusively targeted. So people use reader mode and ad blockers. Now no one is looking at the ads that pay for the content. I wish I knew the answer.
    • rowanG077 6y ago
      I'd say piracy like you are saying is not even a blib on the radar. Steam, Netflix and Spotify have proven this.
      • chordalkeyboard 6y ago
        I think it depends on the genre. Sci-Hub is hugely popular [0] among academics and the academic publishers allege that they are missing out on a lot of money because of it (Can't find the source now). [0] https://familyinequality.wordpress.com/2020/01/15/sci-hub-users-cost-asa-journals-hundreds-of-thousands-of-downloads-and-thats-ok/ https://familyinequality.wordpress.com/2020/01/15/sci-hub-us...
        • rowanG077 6y ago
          That's a completely different game. Academic publisher have little value add. They essentially steal and make money of the work of scientist while the scientist themselves have to pay them. This is not comparable to piracy in the consumer sense.
  • randomchars 6y ago
    Sadly I don't think the majority of the people are willing to pay. Getting things for "free" is so ingrained into how the web is, that it's too big of a paradigm shift now.
  • oefrha 6y ago
    The web was built to facilitate the exchange of knowledge. Ad-sponsored content, despite shortcomings, has so far kept textual content mostly free of charge (talking about content that wouldn’t exist by voluntary contribution here). I fear this push for paywalls is merely going to further disadvantage poor people and people in developing countries who can’t easily hook into whatever payment scheme that is required. No, I don’t have a great solution other than the status quo.
  • sdflhasjd 6y ago
    True, but I don't think the shift is underway. I think in order for this to happen, there's going to have to be better payment models than $4-9 a month subscriptions.
    • canofbars 6y ago
      Agreed. There are so many services I hardly use but would happily pay $5-10/year for but their paid services are targeted only at the power users who are happy to pay $10/month for.
  • jmnicolas 6y ago
    > For this to happen people are going to have to open their wallets, pay for the services they use, and support independent businesses. Yes but to be frank if I had to pay for everything I use I would go broke. We're not all on SV salaries here. I have about 100€ of disposable income per month. If I put it on online things, it means I would have to stay at home (I mean pre or post pandemic times).
    • phendrenad2 6y ago
      The problem is, companies overcharge in dollars and undercharge in ads. Your visit to a website may make that site, say, $0.1 in ads. Would you pay $0.1 per day? Of course you would. But when they add a paid ad-free option? It's more like $1 a day. They're greedy.
      • abdullahkhalids 6y ago
        Moreover, running a site with ads and tracking has higher hosting costs than a cleaner one that just serves contents to paying customers.
        • foota 6y ago
          I don't think it's much of a difference, given most of that will be third party and content can be (but isn't always) heavy.
        • est31 6y ago
          The part of the website that does payment processing and ensures only authorized users can view content isn't free either.
      • Cederfjard 6y ago
        In your scenario they need ten times the free users to get the same revenue as one paying customer yields. Presumably, for most services we’re talking about here the marginal cost of having one user versus ten is probably negligable. It doesn’t seem unlikely to me that if a sevice starts charging, 90% of the users drop off, and thus the revenue per user needs to increase commensurately in order to have the same profits. Of course this is totally made up, so it’s impossible to argue about, but my point is that what you described didn’t necessarily seem out of line to me.
  • bschne 6y ago
    It sometimes feels like ad-supported online offerings are a bit like cheap fossil fuels in a way. The negative consequences across the board are obvious. This goes for the short-term, immediate nuisances it creates, but people who think about the hard questions also see the long-term negative consequences way ahead. Unfortunately, advertising has also created an unsustainably high "standard of living", so to speak - you get so many services and applications for free these days that would realistically not exist or cost much more than you were willing to pay for them had it not been for advertising. Personally, I don't think there's a way out of it until someone comes up with an alternative that brings the benefits of advertising without all the downsides it has, because individual consumer incentives are just not aligned. I'll gladly pay a one-time fee for some productivity app, or a small subscription for something I use almost daily. But if e.g. goodreads wanted to charge a subscription, community size would probably dwindle, and personally I'd just start keeping a spreadsheet of my books again.
    • pbronez 6y ago
      I like Affiliate Links for this. It’s above-board, acknowledged, and aligns user, publisher and advertiser value. There’s still some privacy costs, but they’re focused on users that actually take action to engage with the promotion.
      • sokoloff 6y ago
        The alignment is imperfect at best. How many “review” sites do you see out there with reviews that are shallow (to put it politely) and consist primarily of gigantic “check price on Amazon” buttons? If you ban ads and monetize only via affiliate links, I think you’ll see a lot more poorly written, often algorithmically generated content shilling for affiliate clicks.
  • dsohn0 6y ago
    That’s how we build a web where indies can thrive - one that’s more village centre than financial centre. For this to happen people are going to have to open their wallets, pay for the services they use, and support independent businesses.
  • timwaagh 6y ago
    A web where everything needs a subscription is a closed web. I would only subscribe to the things i deem fun enough or necessary enough. So that would be perhaps fb, Whatsapp, Gmail, Tinder, Netflix and Amazon. The latter three i already subscribed to.
  • polote 6y ago
    Most people don't have money, and when I say most, I mean at least 90% of people. So free services powered by ads are the best thing for them, and those people are the large majority.
    • avian 6y ago
      I'm not sure it's that clear. The fact that free services with ads manage to thrive means that they somehow manage to extract money from those 99% of people. I'm pretty sure it's not only the richest 1% supporting the whole Internet ad eco-system. Ads convince people to spend money on some product they wouldn't buy otherwise. This in term finances those ads which finances the service. I'm not convinced this is better in the long run for many than paying services directly.
      • jlokier 6y ago
        > The fact that free services with ads manage to thrive means that they somehow manage to extract money from those 99% of people I think that doesn't hold logical water. If only 1% of people buy things of significant value based on ads, and 99% of people never buy what's advertised, it is still worth advertising while advertising is cheap. A related phenomenon is the way online games make their money. The vast majority of players never pay for anything. A few pay a little, and a tiny minority pay so much more than everyone else that it's the tiny minority that the game-maker depends on for their business.
      • inglor_cz 6y ago
        I am not sure why are you getting downvoted. If vast majority of Internet users were broke, there would be no sense in tracking them and showing them ads for paid products/services. Looking at the strain of our local delivery services right now, that cannot be just 10 per cent of people shopping.
    • dash2 6y ago
      I'm not sure what "don't have money" means here. Presumably 90% of users do have some money. I would think most of them pay money for internet access. The question is whether they can afford service X given the other things they would prefer to pay for.
  • Catsandkites 6y ago
    I would happily pay for all of the services I use. The problem is that that isn't enough for them and it would still be an capitalistic greed anti-consumer shit show. If I pay I want: No ads, no tracking, full access to my own data in sane export formats, schemas, no data mining, no data selling, no "sharing data with our partners", encryption options, no dumb hoops, no dark patterns, the ability to point a product at an API endpoint of my choosing, backup options that default to my infrastructure first and so on. Actually let's add more: The data generated by my use of my data in the product. Non-canned support responses that don't ask for information I literally put in the ticket three weeks ago. Prominent indication of where (geographically and legally) data is stored and used. If/how often you do backups. If/how often you practice disaster recovery. So really what I want to pay for is sanity and no bullshit. Yet if I do pay, many services and companies will still do all of this shit in the background until midnight the day it's finally made illegal, all the while gaslighting me about "how much they value me as a customer" and how they "respect" our "relationship". It's literally obscene.
    • mettamage 6y ago
      What would you consider to be a reasonable price?
    • est31 6y ago
      Yeah if you pay then they'll have strong identities linked to the accounts in addition to the tracking. Free services that can be accessed without a log in on the other hand have to correlate all the data. They are quite good at it, but not perfect.
      • jhrmnn 6y ago
        That’s not different from pre-Internet era, though. Subscriptions were never anonymous.
        • est31 6y ago
          Of course, the fact that you were subscribed was known to them, but which articles you read in your paper copy of the new york times they didn't know, unless you specifically told them. Nowadays the Reddit redesign tracks your mouse movements, Netflix when you pause a video, and Amazon which page of the book you are reading. I don't want any of this tracking for myself. I have no problem with people opting in, but don't make this tracking inescapable. A tracking free format would involve in you downloading the entire newspaper issue, then reading inside in ways of your own choosing.
  • lazyjones 6y ago
    There's already plenty of paid content available, but for now, the advertising model wins? Why? Because most paid content is simply too expensive. You can't charge $5-$10 or more for rarely used niche stuff when Netflix is $8.99 and when musicians get $0.01 per streamed view or less.
  • Ekaros 6y ago
    One wonders if there is even business model on web? Maybe it would be better to go back to passion projects. Ones where person making content also pays for the hosting. Probably leads to lot less content being around, but also removes money. Ofc, this could exist with actual paid services.
    • dan1234 6y ago
      I think a lot of these services could also be run more efficiently. I’ve not used GoodReads before but it appears to be a book recommendation service. I’m surprised they can’t run the main site & API on Amazon referral links for the recommended books.
      • pbronez 6y ago
        Well, they got bought by Amazon so basically the whole site is a feature of the Kindle Store at this point.
      • beowulfey 6y ago
        Believe it or not, Goodreads is actually owned by Amazon.
        • dan1234 6y ago
          Ah, I had no idea! Makes me think there’s a different reason for closing the API, because Amazon could run the service for close to nothing on AWS.
  • AltruisticGapHN 6y ago
    This is way, way beyond the web. Cue in "the century of the self". Advertising and self deception is too embedded in our culture and way of life. Also cue in "Ways of seeing". Iow, I believe advertising is symptomatic of our current state of consciousness as a collective, and so it is not a cause.
    • pbronez 6y ago
      Thanks for the reference to Ways Of Seeing by John Berger, looks interesting.
  • Zhyl 6y ago
    The model dictates the medium. Advertising as a model has forced a need for engagement, notifications, stickiness, attention grabbing. I'd argue the term 'pay for the services [they use]' is too vague here to be meaningful - there are too many options that would drastically change the incentives. Pay per API call? APIs start to need 5 calls to get all the info you'd need for one request. Subscription model? Consumers are going to have to juggle a different account for every provider they use. Subscription to aggregator who then pays content providers based on usage? We're back to the clickbait situation we were in in the early days of advertising and are arguable still in. For me the insane thing is that there are no options. I can't universally buy any song I want DRM free from a range of providers. I can't pay per article for news from an RSS feed. TV is an interesting one because the industry has convinced the user base to pay for content, but the subscription model is already showing some of the limitations shown above. I feel like the biggest innovations in this space aren't so much new ideas or 'just convincing people to pay for things', it's a case of making the payments as easy and understandable as their previous counterparts.
    • octoberfranklin 6y ago
      > it's a case of making the payments as easy and understandable as their previous counterparts. Blame AML/KYC. Frictionless, permissionless micropayments are illegal. On purpose. This is not a social or technological problem. It is a legal problem. AML/KYC does not scale.
      • rswail 6y ago
        Frictionless, permissionless large payments are illegal. The problem is that no one has worked out how to make micropayments costless, and that has nothing to do with AML/KYC and everything to do with the costs of running a payment system. Bitcoin has turned out to be expensive to mine. Most other distributed ledger "currencies" have been launched to make money for the creators of the artificial scarcity. Governments cannot give up control of the money supply but they are the only ones that can establish a form of electronic currency that works the same as cash does now. Whether they're willing to make it as anonymous as cash or allow it to be exchanged for other government's electronic currency is part of the problem that needs to be solved.
  • CaptArmchair 6y ago
    > The web has to mature beyond advertising as a business model. Is the Web a business model? The Web really is machines serving HTML, JSON, XML,... over HTTP/HTTPS across physical connections. There are several ways of looking at this, but often enough the debate gets reduced into a dichotomy. I'll put this into two simplified extremes. The Web is a shared infrastructure seen as a "public commons". You can access that infrastructure, request/receive bits and bytes from other machines for free and if you want to host content yourself, you connect your own machine to that infrastructure and you share content via your own machine for free. You carry the costs of the usage of the infrastructure yourself, regardless of the direction of data traffic across the network. The Web and it's infrastructure are commodities. Storage, maintenance, bandwidth,... are expenses that should be offloaded. The main goal of hosting and making information available on the Web is to, either directly or indirectly, make a marginal profit. You pay for the privilege of accessing someone else's machine to download data, and you get paid by those who want to gain access to information you host on your own machine. The problem with the statement above is that it implies that both extremes are mutually exclusive, and only the latter one is viable. This is false. The Web is ultimately a decentralized network which is build on top of intentions and goals of humans. And those intentions and goals can be wildly differing. There are parts of the Web that operate according to the former idea, and there are parts that operate according to the latter. Both exist, and there's a spectrum in between. In the analogue world, the same notion translates into private businesses, non-profits, cooperations, community initiatives, charities, public initiatives and so on. Goodreads choosing to close down it's public API is just one case choosing to move towards one side of the spectrum. It's by no means an indication that the entirety of the Web and - more specifically - it's denizens decide to move towards that side. That spectrum does emerge based on laws of economics, though. Goodreads has always been a private business. public API's of private businesses are never truly "Public". They are either a courtesy or a business investment. And they will step away from such courtesy if the costs outstrip the benefits. The Web isn't quite the same as public space though - parks, beaches, forests, streets, grasslands,... - because the vast amount of infrastructure is privately owned. In that regard, the notion of "The Web is a Commons" is only true to the extent that private people are willing to accept and support that idea, and are willing to carry a shared part of the costs. It's that last part which makes all the difference. Operating a basic website with a limited number of visitors comes at a low cost, and so one could operate a small Goodreads like website with a niche of books. There are plenty of examples of people keeping freely accessible blogs and the like with their own book reviews. Goodreads tries to turn that idea into a business model. The intention of generating a profit is very distinct in that regard. However, not only is it hard to sell the opinions of other people, it's even harder if costs generated by trying to cater to an audience of millions outstrip the revenue generated. The Web isn't financial centre. Just like London nor New York aren't representative as to the entirety of human society. Big businesses are - ultimately - only a part of the Web, just as much as they are only a part of society. And if their business models fail to keep them operational, the Web, and society, will, ultimately, churn on without them.
  • chippy 6y ago
    Isn't Goodreads primarily a community? Are there many pay-to-enter community websites?
    • iamben 6y ago
      Lots - you just have to figure that the value you get is worth the price of entry. Usually it's an "I'm going to learn something, or learn from people enough that will cover the cost of community" or an "I'm going to satisfy a personal need" (be that meditating, new recipes, or getting tied up and whipped).
  • idclip 6y ago
    True. Web “Advertising” is a poison that is shredding society apart.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • zozbot234 6y ago
    > For this to happen people are going to have to open their wallets, pay for the services they use, and support independent businesses. Crowdfunding is probably the best solution, if it can be made to work - it would allow for some kind of monetization on a voluntary basis, while preserving free access for most users. But I don't know of any site that really uses it successfully, aside from Wikipedia.
    • BlueTemplar 6y ago
      I used Flattr, but for some reason they have now discontinued their browser extension... :(
  • birdsbirdsbirds 6y ago
    True, it could work like pinboard or MetaFilter. In general, I doubt that the network effect can be overcome for consumer platforms. People want to share their book reviews. Why should they limit themselves to people who pay? Paying only works for those who want social filtering. To compete with Goodreads, the data would have to be free like Wikipedia, for other competitors to emerge so that it is not just a village but a country with many villages. But then, it's a rtf reader situation where it is difficult to survive as an app creating company.
  • wojciii 6y ago
    I want to pay for stuff that I want to read/consume. The problem is that no one implemented micro payments and wants me to pay some amount every month for crap that I don't want (Netflix, spotify, Disney, newspapers). This needs to end first.
    • BlueTemplar 6y ago
      I used Flattr, but they have now discontinued their browser extension... :(
      • wojciii 6y ago
        I think that the traditional card/banking companies who handle transactions are probable stopping any innovation in this area. They have a working model and no reason for innovation if it works. The newspapers and traditional banking are slowly bleeding/dying here in DK so perhaps they need to die off before something new can take their place.
  • Waterluvian 6y ago
    Where we are now is the best it's going to get. Switching away from ads will feel good until some do-nothing decides they'll hit their bonus targets by re-introducing ads in addition to the subscriptions. This has happened many times. It's obviously going to happen again. You do not want to normalize subscriptions for every old Web service, trust me.
  • mcintyre1994 6y ago
    It makes me really curious to know how they plan to monetise readng too. There’s no pricing or anything yet that I can see, but I wonder if that’s where they plan to go post-beta.
  • _Understated_ 6y ago
    > The web has to mature beyond advertising as a business model. I've said it many times before but it's worth repeating... The Internet survived just fine before all the ads and tracking and it will survive fine without it.
    • josteink 6y ago
      Back then the internet was created and run by enthusiasts which passionately wanted to share and build. Today it’s run by people, standing on their shoulders, whose dominant motivation is making money or how to “capitalise” on something, something which they have no fundamental interests or passion for. Obviously the outcome is going to be different.
  • tinus_hn 6y ago
    This kind of service is pretty trivial, you can run it for cents per user. If you allow the web to move to a model where you have to pay dollars for a service worth cents it turns into the same kind of market as the mobile phone operators market charging fees for sms messages: a total rip off. Why does this needs to be a business anyway? The only reason is because it can be.
  • snarf21 6y ago
    We need to start taxing digital advertising heavily. All it creates are dark patterns.
  • VoodooJuJu 6y ago
    Advertising is just too lucrative for them - they'll still do it even if we end up paying subscriptions. For example, look at the New York Times; you're still served ads with a paying subscription.
  • Privacy846 6y ago
    I choose the third value, “ridiculous premise”. People love to craw about how “you are the product” because they don’t pay for some service. Well, physical newspapers have been advertiser-funded for a long time now, even though people still pay for them. Chomsky writes in Necessary Illusions that newspapers sell the eyeballs of the readers to advertisers and that that in turn deeply affects what is printed. That book was published in 1989. As far as the media is concerned, everyone here under the age of sixty have always been the product. And it’s deeply naïve and idealistic to think that “paying for their services”—how will they do that? Oh well—will change something which is now completely fundamental to media as we know it.
  • door99 6y ago
    The Web needs the equivalent of public access television or public radio -- platforms that are sustained for public good via public money and/or donations
  • wpietri 6y ago
    I think it's a nice idea, and I love the spirit of it. That's certainly how I try to live. I have a lot of small subscriptions, and my Patreon bill is over $100/month. But I think individual action isn't sufficient to get us over the hump. There are just too many things we use on a daily basis, and often those things use things that use things. "Free" is an illusion, but it's an illusion with a very low cognitive load. Manually supporting each and every thing I appreciate at the right level is a complex and taxing process. In practice, I'm sure I miss a lot. In the physical world, we have some solutions for this. I don't have to subscribe to each park I use. I don't have to kick in for each sidewalk tree I walk by. I live in a neighborhood with a lot of street and alley murals, all community supported in various ways. I think the next step forward for the web involves finding ways for collective action with low individual cognitive load. It wouldn't be perfect, but it could be better than what we have now.
  • downrightmike 6y ago
    False, one of the big players will either rip them off(snapchat) or force them into a buyout by under cutting them (diapers.com)
  • ptman 6y ago
    https://webmonetization.org/ https://webmonetization.org/ / https://coil.com/ https://coil.com/
  • dexen 6y ago
    >people are going to have to open their wallets, pay for the services they use, and support independent businesses. Yes indeed. Right now news & opinion are largely limited to what is considered "advertiser friendly" - think short news cycle, and other problems. The perspective of paying pennies for everything introduces a lot of friction. Luckily an alternative model is making roadway, mostly in Youtube circles: pay a couple of your favorite creators, and watch the rest for free. The extension of the old "freemium" model, but this time based around stochastic balance between viewers who pay this or that creator. The paying subscribers often get access to additional material - one that's more geared towards fans or deeply interested viewers - while the regulars, free-to-watch, viewers get the general content just fine.
• asplake 6y ago
  What kind of API does/will Readng have? Bookseller integration? I have a use case: the bibliographies (recommended reading pages) for my own books. Could I send readers to their choice of bookseller?
  • Cenk 6y ago
    https://boook.link https://boook.link is a useful tool for offering people links to different stores
    • asplake 6y ago
      Thank you!
  • buttscicles 6y ago
    Hi, author here! Would love to have a public API for readng but don't want supporting it slowing us down when we need to change something. It's just the three of us in our spare time at the moment, so we need the agility! I really, really like that use case too! Right now all you could do would be to create a collection of books on your profile, but would be nice to have on the book page I think. > Could I send readers to their choice of bookseller? We would like to refer people to libraries and indies, but these are obviously fragmented so a bit difficult. I think allowing authors to set a preferred book seller probably makes sense.
    • smarx007 6y ago
      Could you please at least create an export button under https://beta.readng.co/settings https://beta.readng.co/settings so that we can migrate to readng.co without having similar concerns that made us to sign up for it today? And ofc it has to be machine-readable, e.g. JSON or XML but CSV should work too (for CSV ideally it would be in the same format as the one from GR to reduce fragmentation in this space). This is also a must under GDPR, so not going to be an effort wasted.
      • buttscicles 6y ago
• nefitty 6y ago
  The LibraryThing API might be an approximate replacement, although I’m not sure what the major differences are: http://www.librarything.com/services/ http://www.librarything.com/services/
  • hirako2000 6y ago
    Interesting. They could do a better UI, mobile responsive, but their db is pretty big.
• chrisweekly 6y ago
  Equal parts sad and unsurprising.
• eznzt 6y ago
  With time everybody learns if your time is worth something you will be scrapping, not using an API.
  • octoberfranklin 6y ago
    I dunno, maintaining a scraper across neverending site redesigns is a friggin' lot of work. Way more work than updating my code to use a new version of an API.
    • eznzt 6y ago
      When was the last time goodreads was redesigned?
    • genidoi 6y ago
      If all that’s changing on a site is the presentation/ordering of elements, then you just need to update some XPath selectors every now and then and have a notification system for knowing when those selectors aren’t working. You can even automate this process by having a known input (eg, URL to a book on goodreads + its known [and hopefully unchanging] book title) and have a script that periodically checks that the xpath string matches the known pages text / generates a new one to point to the title. This is harder for values that do change but there are always workarounds
      • octoberfranklin 6y ago
        I know. But it's like pager duty. When it breaks, I have to manually intervene to fix it, and in the meantime stuff is not working. And anything I build on top of that needs to take that into account. It turns fun projects into something like a job.
  • hiq 6y ago
    It depends on what you do with the content: if you're just using it for yourself and can afford it to break at random times, scrapping can be fine (although maybe still more time-consuming depending on the website). But if you need predictability and reliability (e.g. you're providing a service to other people) for whatever you implement using this 3rd party service you don't control, relying on their ui that they can break any time they feel like it will lead to more downtime than APIs for which you're usually given some notice before they're deprecated.
• captn3m0 6y ago
  >So this is an “announcement” much in the way a windshield announces its presence to bugs on a highway This is a very poetic way to describe API deprecation. I'm gonna steal this.
  • booleandilemma 6y ago
    And just like one must scrape bugs off one’s windshield, so people will have to scrape content off Goodreads, or something.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • chrismorgan 6y ago
    Except this isn’t so much deprecation as removal. Deprecation says “we don’t recommend this any more, and it’ll probably be removed in the future”. Deprecation would be quite unlike the windshield analogy, because it is an announcement. (It’s not quite cut and dried in this case because there may still be some people that still have access to the API—but those that have been cut off look to have no recourse.)
    • ignoramous 6y ago
      > Except this isn’t so much deprecation as removal. Deprecation says “we don’t recommend this any more, and it’ll probably be removed in the future”. At AWS, I was "put on a pedestal" for stating (in an internal forum) that X was deprecated (I meant it in a sense it was "not recommended anymore" and wasn't updated at all)... The management thought it sent the wrong message (that is, deprecation == removal). People often associate wrong meaning to deprecation (ironic in my case given Amazon is a Java shop).
      • jefftk 6y ago
        I would interpret an internal deprecation notice as saying that consumers of X should start planning to migrate away. If instead, X is in maintenance mode but with no plans to drop support, to me that is not deprecated? It sounds like perhaps X was in the earlier state of not being recommended for new projects?
• throwanem 6y ago
  Tangential, but I've always been curious. What's the use of a public "what I'm reading/have read/will read" in the first place? Goodreads has users so I guess it has some value, and I do occasionally look at reviews there, but I'd be interested to hear the perspective of someone who uses and likes this kind of thing on what's to like about it.
  • dan1234 6y ago
    I guess if you’re looking for something new to read, you can look for someone with similar taste and look at the books they’ve read that you haven’t (presumably the GoodReads algorithm could do this automatically). I actually use Last.fm to do this for musical taste.
    • thrower123 6y ago
      Goodreads recommendations are only really useful if you match the demographic mass of their membership. And since they've tied in with Kindle so heavily, that leans hard towards suggesting historical romances and Oprah's Book Club fodder.
      • dan1234 6y ago
        I wonder if there’s a gap in the market, or perhaps there’s no market for book recommendations?
  • rcarmo 6y ago
    I've been using Goodreads for years. Not so much for the tallies of what I've read, but to discover new things to read (either related books, random searches or just stuff my friends have read as well). Although there is always the risk of spiralling down an echo chamber, having two or three people you know give a decent review to a book is a strong signal that you might enjoy it (or not, once you know those peoples' tastes). So it saves me time and ensures a steady pipeline of "likely interesting stuff" to follow up on. Their e-mail newsletter is also likely to be the only one I let into my inbox willingly, just so I have an idea of what might be interesting to add to my queue. Of course, the API deprecation is just bad. I've always been frustrated with the way Goodreads was integrated with the Kindle (it hardly, if ever, worked) and now syncing between Calibre and Goodreads is likely to stop working as well, so I won't have a non-wetbrain list of what I've read over the last decade or so.
• banach 6y ago
  Time to support another reading community! Anyone got any suggestions?
  • soft_dev_person 6y ago
    I have been considering making one. Goodreads is so awful, and the alternatives I have found are all quite quirky or broken in one way or another. But having a database of "all books" is not necessarily trivial. Even though OpenLibrary really does provide a great start, the contents seem to come from Goodreads/Amazon in a lot of cases, and I'm concerned about the legality of making a commercial competitor based on it. Also, it would take a lot of time and data to get a good recommendation engine going. Amazon really is in the best position to do this. Just a shame that Goodreads get so little love from them.
    • BlueTemplar 6y ago
      Wouldn't Wikipedia have a database like that?
    • chucktorres 6y ago
      If you embark on such a project, I would help. Drawing inspiration from https://www.themoviedb.org/ https://www.themoviedb.org/
  • waylandsmithers 6y ago
    I've been working on a related product (never going to be a complete set of books, but you can read them through the site because they are public domain) that you can check out in my profile if interested
• aminozuur 6y ago
  Goodreads has not changed in 10 years. See comparison pic of 2010 vs 2020: https://twitter.com/aminozuur/status/1338037049941757953 https://twitter.com/aminozuur/status/1338037049941757953 It's sad that Goodreads way forward is to stifle competition, rather than innovate.
  • Mediterraneo10 6y ago
    I don't mind no changes to the UI at all. The Goodreads UI is information-dense and very powerful to use on a desktop/laptop. Alternatives, like the Readng site linked to in the posted article, are often examples of that annoying trend in web design UI where the limitations of mobile-phone touchscreens are forced on all users. Where Goodreads has really failed to change is something not easily visible in pithy screenshots: there are a lot of bugs and missing functionality with regard to book metadata, but these flaws are something you don't quite grasp unless you become a Goodreads Librarian.
    • scoot_718 6y ago
      Goodreads is complete garbage, they can't even sort a list of ratings properly.
  • lars512 6y ago
    I find their poor recommendations the most obvious issue here. They have so, so much reading data on me, even a massive list of books I'm interested in, but they are still so off.
    • mcintyre1994 6y ago
      They’re probably using Amazon’s recommendation system which - at least in my experience - is pretty terrible with books. It might just be because I’m in the category of people who constantly get recommendations to buy things I’ve just bought and whatever puts me in that category stops them being able to make interesting recommendations, but it’s always pretty naff. I think the only good book recommendations I get from Amazon are authors I’ve specifically followed, or the monthly free early read choices which I don’t think are actually targeted at all
• satyanash 6y ago
  Note that you can still export a CSV of your books, (although this is not all the data that is present). Here https://www.goodreads.com/review/import https://www.goodreads.com/review/import
  • gravitas 6y ago
    It's still a pretty good backup which I've imported to other services before, here's the CSV header row for those interested: Book Id,Title,Author,Author l-f,Additional Authors,ISBN,ISBN13,My Rating,Average Rating,Publisher,Binding,Number of Pages,Year Published,Original Publication Year,Date Read,Date Added,Bookshelves,Bookshelves with positions,Exclusive Shelf,My Review,Spoiler,Private Notes,Read Count,Recommended For,Recommended By,Owned Copies,Original Purchase Date,Original Purchase Location,Condition,Condition Description,BCID The CSV export uses both quoted and unquoted fields at the same time on the same record which is unfortunate, but it works.
    • a_bonobo 6y ago
      Yeah, the Python csv package hasn't had problems for me yet. One unfortunate bug that they seem to have put onto the 'wont-fix' pile is that for many recent-ish books, the 'date read' field isn't properly exported, so if you try to make reading stats you have to cheat a bit by approximating the 'finished date' with the 'book added' date.
      • gravitas 6y ago
        Because of this post I went looking at a backup of my LibraryThing data as well (it's "more fresh", been trying to convert) and it seems just as messy; community threads going back years. The LT JSON export looks well-formed however, the book records I see are quite vast in content/data/metadata and would probably be a nice python fit. I'm not sure if I could import this with the LT webUI, but it's a nice looking JSON backup nonetheless.
• numair 6y ago
  This makes absolutely no sense and has no relation to any economic variables. Goodreads isn’t some struggling self-funded startup — it’s owned by Amazon.com. The acquisition was a deal that should have never been approved, if the Obama administration had been anything beyond completely impotent at protecting us from monopoly games: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/apr/02/amazon-purchase-goodreads-stuns-book-industry https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/apr/02/amazon-purchas... I would like to understand the true strategic interest behind this. Is Amazon simply penny-pinching now that they’ve successfully obliterated the market for both new and used books online? There’s way more to this story than appears on the surface.
  • YetAnotherNick 6y ago
    > Goodreads isn’t some struggling self-funded startup — it’s owned by Amazon.com Not that I like Amazon, but it is not philanthropy. I assume goodreads take non trivial cost to run operations, moderations and the site and just because Amazon is doing well financially it doesn't mean they have free money. This move makes it easier for Amazon to monetize on goodreads, it is as simple as that.
    • mattmanser 6y ago
      You're missing his larger point by focusing on the first few sentences. Effectively the only reason it's not supporting itself is precisely because Amazon bought it.
      • YetAnotherNick 6y ago
        The only reason it was supporting itself previously is because investors are pouring money in it with the hope that some big company will buy it with the hope that they can have value to them.
        • wpietri 6y ago
          Nope. Per Crunchbase, Goodreads took only $2.8m in funding to cover the more than 6 years they were in operation.
• kashyapc 6y ago
  I recently discovered the https://openlibrary.org/ https://openlibrary.org/ by The Internet Archive. On the face of it, their "about" page[1] sounds appealing (not least because it resonates with my open source values): One web page for every book ever published. It's a lofty but achievable goal. To build Open Library, we need hundreds of millions of book records, a wiki interface, and lots of people who are willing to contribute their time and effort to building the site. To date, we have gathered over 20 million records from a variety of large catalogs as well as single contributions, with more on the way. Open Library is an open project: the software is open, the data are open, the documentation is open, and we welcome your contribution. Whether you fix a typo, add a book, or write a widget--it's all welcome. We have a small team of fantastic programmers who have accomplished a lot, but we can't do it alone! --- They also seem to provide an API[2]. [1] https://openlibrary.org/about https://openlibrary.org/about [2] https://openlibrary.org/developers/api https://openlibrary.org/developers/api
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • philipn 6y ago
    Aaron Swartz actually built the original version of the Open Library site.
    • neojumi 6y ago
      The regime responsible for his prosecution is back. Maybe they will pick up where they left off too.
  • gravitas 6y ago
    Sadly, the Goodreads importer appears broken - a fresh export just now of my Goodreads data (<100k) is failing to import with a generic "oops it failed" error almost immediately. :( [1] https://www.goodreads.com/review/import https://www.goodreads.com/review/import (export) [2] https://openlibrary.org/account/import/goodreads https://openlibrary.org/account/import/goodreads
• newbie578 6y ago
  This is such an interesting topic to discuss. The book industry by itself is somewhat in a state of limbo. Goodreads is basically the only major social network for bookworms, yet the majority of its users hate it (including me), but are forced to use it to their chagrin. You would think that would make the market ripe for a disruptor to arrive and topple the incumbent leader, yet each year nothing happens. I personally have also thought of making a new rival product, but when you do the math on the market potential and the financial benefits, I just don't see a viable way. People who read books, even if they read them every day, won't use your social network each day since books by themselves are the type of content which is consumed the longest (compared to a movie, tv show, song, or video game). So you have a social network where users come back on a whim, even if you read like a maniac and try to read one book per week (I tried it one year, it was crazy, you are basically spending all your free time reading), even then users wouldn't use your app each day, but perhaps once or twice a week, and who knows how much time would the average session last? To make things worse, you could maybe even get away with users using your app once a week if you have a big enough market (user base), but the number of book readers is not that great (especially compared to other media consumption)... The median American reads 4 books a year [1], or simply put, one book in three months. So you have a social network where users don't need to use it often and there aren't a lot of users, that already spells trouble, but there is another major issue. You could even succeed with those issues if you had a highly commoditized product to advertise, let's say a social network for yacht lovers, even if you have a small number of users and they do not use it much, you can still manage to succeed with it, since if you advertise yachts to potential yacht owners, you have a very valuable marketing channel which is worth quite an amount to the right people. You can see where I am going with this, just compare a 5% commission on a yacht, vs a 5% commission on a book... Unfortunately books are not so highly valued (in monetary terms) nor sought after. To sum up, you have a social network where users don't spend a lot of time, you don't have a lot of users and it is centered around a low profit product... Of course Goodreads has no competition, no sane person would touch that market with a ten foot pole. Yet, to quote George Bernard Shaw, "all progress depends on the unreasonable man". If someone manages to solve this problem and find a profitable way to survive, I would not be surprised to see Goodreads fall. I even thought of contacting Scribd to work with them, since I think they might have the best shot currently to position themselves as market leaders. They have an excellent product (Netflix for books) and already have a well sized user base. Would be interesting to see them expand and also became a social network for book lovers. [1] - https://www.bustle.com/p/how-many-books-did-the-average-american-read-in-the-last-year-this-new-study-may-surprise-you-8837851 https://www.bustle.com/p/how-many-books-did-the-average-amer... [2] - https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/536961-the-reasonable-man-adapts-himself-to-the-world-the-unreasonable https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/536961-the-reasonable-man-a...
• gravitas 6y ago
  LibraryThing has a Goodreads importer which I have used in the past with good success (nothing is perfect). https://www.librarything.com/more/importgoodreads https://www.librarything.com/more/importgoodreads The general LibraryThing UI is a bit scary at first, don't let that stop you. All "Pro" accounts were made free for everyone some years back.
  • milofeynman 6y ago
    I also use library things, and thanks to their change to their business model their free accounts work great for tracking my home library and what I read. I also like their app for scanning barcodes into my library.
  • mindracer 6y ago
    Amazon owns a 40% stake in LibraryThing which I only found out after moving to it
• user5994461 6y ago
  Let's say you have the whole database of books from Amazon/GoodReads, including title/authors/genres/publishingdate/userrating/sales. You'd like to make a recommendation engine, the idea is that the user could input 1-3 books they liked and it would suggest more books that are similar. What sort of algorithms should I look into to do that sort of things? Note that I don't have user profiles with what book they read, only have the database of books, can't do the recommendation engine based on two users liked the same book so they will also like other books either of them liked.
  • inoop 6y ago
    AWS has a service for that, it's called [personalize](https://aws.amazon.com/personalize/ https://aws.amazon.com/personalize/)
  • meekrohprocess 6y ago
    IMO, you could highlight the differences between similar titles. It's easy for recommendations to get stuck on a local maxima if they only look at one metric at a time, like "similarity" weights. But if you have a lot of metadata about each title, you can break out of those "loops" by sprinkling in metrics like ratings/genres/release date/popularity/etc. This doesn't have to hurt from a performance perspective, either; you can filter on the same single metric, but request more recommendations than you need and pluck out a pseudo-random set in the application logic. That also lets you provide context for the recommendation. "It's like this, but [older/more obscure/with vampires]."
  • hombre_fatal 6y ago
    fwiw you’re asking how to build a reco engine without any of the necessary data needed to build one. Finding good data is the hard part. That’s the part that stops every HNer from building a reco engine as a hello world weekend project.
• towelpluswater 6y ago
  If someone can manage to find a creative way to tap into the Kindle ecosystem and provide a similar service, I'd imagine they could do quite well.
• 67868018 6y ago
  Storygraph is the new hotness https://beta.thestorygraph.com/ https://beta.thestorygraph.com/
• justhw 6y ago
  Welp..If you just need the make a book list features, i made an alternative a while back. https://bookshulf.com/ https://bookshulf.com/
• miguelrochefort 6y ago
  I recently built an audiobook scrobbler for Android that automatically updates the status of books I read on GoodReads. I'm very disappointed to see that they're killing their API. I'll be looking for an alternative.
• miguelrochefort 6y ago
  Based on the quality of MusicBrainz [1], I thought that BookBrainz [2] could be a good alternative, but unfortunately it looks rather incomplete. [1] https://musicbrainz.org https://musicbrainz.org [2] https://bookbrainz.org/ https://bookbrainz.org/
• podviaznikov 6y ago
  I made a tool[1] a year ago to export Goodreads reviews into markdown and synced it Dropbox. Wanted to have two way sync, but I guess not anymore. [1] - https://borges.ai https://borges.ai
• deep_merge 6y ago
  Can anyone recommend a Goodreads alternative?
• billfruit 6y ago
  Goodreads really needs a solid competitor, the site seems to be stuck in a timewarp: It is load times are one of the longest of the sites I commonly visit, and it barely had any new functionality added in the last 10 years.
  • hombre_fatal 6y ago
    They exist, have you looked? Though none of them can compete with the Kindle’s dedicated Goodreads button.
• doublejay1999 6y ago
  > open their wallets, pay for the services they use, and support independent businesses Except these things began as hobbies before business became involved at all. It’s a message board for book lovers ffs, pre web people used to build things themselves, at their own expense, just for fun.
  • hombre_fatal 6y ago
    Yet all of my favorite early web places have died out unless they could pivot into a business. I don’t want someone’s precarious, eternal charity as the only thing keeping something alive. It’s in my best interest that they make a living from it if I care about the service at all.
• mikejethi 6y ago
  The web has to mature beyond advertising as a business model. For this to happen people are going to have to open their wallets, pay for the services they use, and support independent businesses. I hope it does! I'm banking on it too for my project.
• padraigf 6y ago
  I'd just started a hobby project to use the Goodreads API for book recommendations. That's not going to happen now. I feel bad for people who put more work than I did into using the API. It seems kind of short-sighted to me, I'd have thought anything promoting book-reading would be good for Amazon/goodreads. Hopefully it's the catalyst for a good alternative to appear. I know developers weren't happy with the API, or users with the site in general.
• hoyd 6y ago
  One of the very first programs I wrote, was a python script that used this API. I enjoyed the learning and what I could do with it. This is indeed very sad.
• _iyig 6y ago
  Sad but not surprising that Amazon let Goodreads moulder. They did the exact same thing with Shelfari [0], formerly Goodread's main competitor. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shelfari#Amazon_and_shutdown https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shelfari#Amazon_and_shutdown
• kopakabana 6y ago
  Not having an API is short-sighted. Those who will use your info legitimately will probably use an API, but those who only want your data can hide their IP across a number of cloud agents to extract all of the data from your site regardless of whether you offer an API or not unless you use CAPTCHA.
• mro_name 6y ago
  there seems to be no such thing as a reliable 3rd party.
• dpeck 6y ago
  Remember those few years from around 2008 to 2013 or so when open APIs were cool, mashups of different services were everywhere, the web felt just a bit younger and more carefree, and people didn’t immediately sneer when they learned that you were a software developer? Those were good times.
  • spideymans 6y ago
    >people didn’t immediately sneer when they learned that you were a software developer? People sneer now?
    • dpeck 6y ago
      There’s quite a bit of animosity directed at various tech companies from people all over the political spectrum. That is definitely bleeding over into the professional generally.
      • deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
• stakkur 6y ago
  Amazon owns Goodreads. Goodreads is nothing but a sales funnel, and Amazon doesn't like public APIs to their data.
• nfriedly 6y ago
  That's a real disappointment. I've gotten back into reading in the past few years, I've been tracking everything in goodreads, and I was just thinking about building something to display what I've been reading recently on my website that would pull from the goodreads API. There goes that idea...
• swilk001 6y ago
  My whole app depends on the Goodreads API so I have to shut it down. https://blog.stephanieawilkinson.com/posts/2020-12-10-yonderbook-and-goodreads/ https://blog.stephanieawilkinson.com/posts/2020-12-10-yonder...
  • vuciv1 6y ago
    I'm sorry. that's awful. if you plan to start a new one, let me know I'd love to check it out. i was just planning on making one, but that dream is dead now
    • swilk001 6y ago
      ok will do! do you have a twitter handle? i never use HN :-D I'm twitter.com/stephanieblack
  • judge2020 6y ago
    A lot of others in this thread have mentioned the API being neglected for a long time, did this impact your app?
    • swilk001 6y ago
      There was no support for devs, but the bones were good and they didn't make any changes, so I managed to make it work. I used both the OAuth and Shelves APIs.
• loosetypes 6y ago
  What’s a good way to group isbns for various versions of the same title? For example, searching Old Man and the Sea on isbndb returns (as you’d expect) many isbns: https://isbndb.com/search/books/Old%2Bman%2Band%2Bthe%2Bsea https://isbndb.com/search/books/Old%2Bman%2Band%2Bthe%2Bsea Do books have another identifier that logically consolidates editions, foreign language prints, etc.?
  • cdrini 6y ago
    Open Library has a notion of "Works" which group together editions across languages: https://openlibrary.org/works/OL63073W https://openlibrary.org/works/OL63073W (Note the work id is in the url: OL6307W) If you want to get the work id for a given ISBN: https://openlibrary.org/isbn/2070360075.json https://openlibrary.org/isbn/2070360075.json will redirect to the edition page, and there you can get "works[0].key". Or, you can search by the isbn: https://openlibrary.org/search.json?q=isbn:2070360075 https://openlibrary.org/search.json?q=isbn:2070360075
    • loosetypes 6y ago
      Thanks. So Open Library implemented that because there's no interoperable, universal concept for literary "works"? And then each of Goodreads, Amazon Retail, Ingram, et al. would likely have their own internal system for isbn identification and grouping accordingly? And I guess that means similarly, there's no isbn-analog for a series or interrelated set of "works"?
      • cdrini 6y ago
        Yep! They do. But the book-universe has largely landed on similar definitions for what a "work" is. E.g. here's GoodReads work id (in the url): https://www.goodreads.com/work/editions/69741-the-old-man-and-the-sea https://www.goodreads.com/work/editions/69741-the-old-man-an... Here's works/editions in schema.org: https://schema.org/CreativeWork https://schema.org/CreativeWork (work) ; https://schema.org/Book https://schema.org/Book (edition) Here's works/editions in Wikidata: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q47461344 https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q47461344 (work) ; https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q3331189 https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q3331189 (edition) (e.g.: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q19320911 https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q19320911 ) All of these are loosely based on the FRBR model in librarian science, where a work is a work, and an edition is called an "Expression": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_Requirements_for_Bibliographic_Records https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_Requirements_for_Bi... And yeah, there's no isbn-analog for series; each site has its own identifier. Also as a side-note, ISBNs are very inadequate as a unique identifier for an edition; there are frequent cases where an ISBN will be re-used for books with different covers (Dover classics does this a bunch); some modern books published in odd ways are not given an ISBN (e.g. all of these books: https://sorted.club/books/ https://sorted.club/books/ ); and, most importantly, books published before ISBNs went into effect (~1970) have _no way_ of being accessible when using ISBNs as a unique key.
• qwerty456127 6y ago
  Very sad. Good bye Goodreads.
• gjreda 6y ago
  Recently wrote some code to scrape a friend's reviews and ratings from Goodreads. Maybe it'll be useful to folks here: https://gregreda.com/2020/11/17/scraping-pages-behind-login-forms/ https://gregreda.com/2020/11/17/scraping-pages-behind-login-...
• vuciv1 6y ago
  damn, this is really disappointing. I use Goodreads, Letterboxd, and GG pretty frequently and wanted to use the three APIs to just have all these sites' functionalities in one place. Guess it won't be happening now...
• iou 6y ago
  That site they're building looks dope https://beta.readng.co https://beta.readng.co
• iou 6y ago
  Roadmap for that reading app is here https://readng.nolt.io/roadmap https://readng.nolt.io/roadmap Personally I'd like to see audible integration, which ironically goodreads does not provide :(
• gundmc 6y ago
  So much for the narrative that Amazon never kills any services.
• benibela 6y ago
  Guess, I am not going to add goodreads support to my reading-tracking library app
• BigBalli 6y ago
  Truly a bummer although Goodreads was never truly "happy" with third party. I created https://MyBookList.club https://MyBookList.club and messed around with many book providers, GR was always last.. only strength is its large user base.
• rdl 6y ago
  Goodreads has just generally been "sad" for a very long time. Even before the Amazon acquisition, the site has been slow, hasn't actually innovated in anything, and basically is the equivalent of a late-90s/early-00s craigslist -- a mediocre but "good enough" service which squats on a market preventing better competitors from existing.
  • Merman_Mike 6y ago
    It kills me to see because Amazon is the entity that could build the best book recommendation engine of all time. And it would help them sell more books!
    • Siira 6y ago
      What ideas do you have? I find Goodreads has the features, but its UX is rather old-fashioned.
      • Merman_Mike 6y ago
        I find Goodreads recommendations to be stale. I have ~200 books in my account, all with my personal ratings, but I never seem to get any new recommendations from Goodreads as I add new books. The recommendations I do get are usually just mainstream bestsellers too. I was thinking that with all the data Amazon has about folks (very detailed reading habits from Kindles, for example), they could find people with similar interests to me and recommend the books that those people liked most but that I haven't yet read.
        • Siira 6y ago
          I look at the recommendations for specific books, both on Goodreads and Amazon.com. Admittedly, this could work better if Goodreads just automated this, but I can still find the books that my “clique” enjoys.
• OOPMan 6y ago
  I used the Goodreads API a few years back. It was awful.
• jiggawatts 6y ago
  I'm curious: What were people using this API for exactly?
• loosetypes 6y ago
  What’s a good data source for book metadata and covers these days?
• strifey 6y ago
  I was super disappointed in this but not surprised, honestly. Started building features for a Discord bot to share book reading updates, etc. with friends, and the API was rough to say the least (especially their OAuth implementation). You could tell they hadn't dedicated any resources to it in a long time.
• kylebenzle 6y ago
  I've been building a GoodReads scraper for a long time that (I think) can do just about anything the API can. https://github.com/KyleBenzle/Good-Reads-Scraper https://github.com/KyleBenzle/Good-Reads-Scraper
• lkrubner 6y ago
  I think if the Justice department was more technically savvy, and in one of its strongly anti-trust eras, they would see this as Amazon extending its monopoly power, and the Justice department might stop this.
• postit 6y ago
  Your content is the only currency you have on the internet.
• leethargo 6y ago
  Is https://www.whatshouldireadnext.com/ https://www.whatshouldireadnext.com/ a viable alternative?
• jbaber 6y ago
  I'm really liking https://beta.thestorygraph.com/ https://beta.thestorygraph.com/ especially for suggestions so far. https://www.newstatesman.com/science-tech/social-media/2020/08/better-goodreads-possible-bad-for-books-storygraph-amazon https://www.newstatesman.com/science-tech/social-media/2020/...
• Jay7722 6y ago
  keep up !