3 ms·

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 i

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.
- Mediterraneo10 6y ago
  > Having two or three people you know give a decent review to a book. I have a large amount of Goodreads friends, often IRL friends with whom I know I share hobbies and interests. And yet, when I use the Goodreads "See books in common" feature, we share almost no books. I think a real problem for media-rating websites today is this: the glut of readily accessible content on the internet makes it less and less likely that any two people will share any one item of content. The same problem can be found on Last.fm, where there are so many bands out there today, so much free listening to do, that even ardent lovers of a particular genre might not have very overlapping tastes. Last.fm appears to have been forced to change their compatibility algorithm, so that now you are "Super compatibility" with another user by just sharing a handful of bands in common, whereas in the past you would have had to share a lot more bands and listens in order to be ranked as Super.
sradman 6y ago
The API is good for general purpose book metadata. I found the Goodreads database a good source for series order; maybe I just didn’t look very hard.

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.

Mediterraneo10 6y ago
> Having two or three people you know give a decent review to a book. I have a large amount of Goodreads friends, often IRL friends with whom I know I share hobbies and interests. And yet, when I use the Goodreads "See books in common" feature, we share almost no books. I think a real problem for media-rating websites today is this: the glut of readily accessible content on the internet makes it less and less likely that any two people will share any one item of content. The same problem can be found on Last.fm, where there are so many bands out there today, so much free listening to do, that even ardent lovers of a particular genre might not have very overlapping tastes. Last.fm appears to have been forced to change their compatibility algorithm, so that now you are "Super compatibility" with another user by just sharing a handful of bands in common, whereas in the past you would have had to share a lot more bands and listens in order to be ranked as Super.

sradman 6y ago

The API is good for general purpose book metadata. I found the Goodreads database a good source for series order; maybe I just didn’t look very hard.