
I Want to Fix Goodreads - prepend
http://prepend.com/culture/2020/09/fixing_goodreads.html
======
dang
The earlier related thread:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24451428](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24451428)

------
mekarpeles
Howdy, Mek here -- I run [https://openlibrary.org](https://openlibrary.org)
over at the non-profit Internet Archive (the folks that bring you the Wayback
Machine).

Open Library is an free, online California Library with millions of digital
books to read and borrow. It's additionally an open catalog of millions of
books which you may track like goodreads.

Best part? If it's not to your liking, the whole project is open source!
[https://github.com/internetarchive/openlibrary](https://github.com/internetarchive/openlibrary)

Open Library has a very strong volunteer tribe of book-loving librarians,
developers, and designers working to make the project better for our
community.

We meet once a week at 11:30am PT. Ask me for the link: mek+ol@archive.org

RIGOROUS BOOK RECOMMENDATIONS: We're also cultivating a 2nd non-profit open
source experiment called TheBestBookOn.com (it leverages Open Library's
catalog) which allows book-lovers to ask for or make rigorous book
recommendations:

[https://github.com/Open-Book-Genome-
Project/TheBestBookOn.co...](https://github.com/Open-Book-Genome-
Project/TheBestBookOn.com)

It's a very early prototype (we discuss development during our weekly Open
Library call). It's being organized by Lauren Milliken, Aasif Khan, and myself
and we'd love more contributors to join the discussion: mek+bbo@archive.org

~~~
olah_1
It seems like there is a strong desire to _not_ make OpenLibrary an
alternative to Goodreads.

See discussions here[1] and here[2].

[1]:
[https://github.com/internetarchive/openlibrary/issues/3103](https://github.com/internetarchive/openlibrary/issues/3103)

[2]:
[https://github.com/internetarchive/openlibrary/issues/1964](https://github.com/internetarchive/openlibrary/issues/1964)

~~~
electriclove
And for good reason.. many of those requests involve a much higher level of
maintenance (moderating content like reviews, building a social network, etc)

I like that OpenLibrary is trying to be a source of open book data. But I am a
bit concerned about the quality of the data (just a feeling as I am still
digging into it but there are open questions on how to handle things like
multiple authors, etc)

~~~
mekarpeles
We have a small network of librarians on a slack channel who have merged more
than 10,000 duplicate works.

Librarians (which is a permission role) also have the ability to merge
Authors, so data improves over time.

Furthermore, members of our community coordinate with Wikidata, VIAF, etc --
we match up identifiers and sync data (and in this way, bots are able to make
meaningful changes in bulk on a rolling basis).

See: [http://github.com/internetarchive/openlibrary-
bots](http://github.com/internetarchive/openlibrary-bots) (most of which are
built using the OL client: [http://github.com/internetarchive/openlibrary-
client](http://github.com/internetarchive/openlibrary-client))

e.g. [https://github.com/cdrini/openlibrary-wikidata-
bot](https://github.com/cdrini/openlibrary-wikidata-bot)

------
Jemaclus
My problem with Goodreads isn't the recommendations engine. The
recommendations are fine. I'm actually skeptical that any ML recommendation
engine is going to recommend _better_ books than my friends will. The only
thing I expect from a recommendation engine is _discovery_ , by which I mean
finding new things that neither I nor my friends have read that look
interesting. Whether they're good is another story altogether...

My problem with Goodreads is actually the site performance. It's one of the
most abysmally slow sites I've ever had the displeasure of using. Loading from
page to page takes so long, I wonder if they're running on 486 machines in the
background. It's unfathomable to me how something that has such a monopoly on
the domain can have such terrible performance.

It's so bad, that I often don't even bother going to Goodreads except when my
TBR pile empties out, and then I spend as little time as I can (which is a
long time because it's OH MY GOD SO SLOW) so I won't have to visit it again
for a while.

I wish it was open source, or something, so I could contribute to improve
response times...

~~~
onlyrealcuzzo
Really? GoodReads reviews have devolved to complete garbage. The first few
pages of reviews are always from the same people trying to be GoodReads
famous.

Everyone gives everything 5-star reviews because they get more likes for
positive reviews. The user reviews mean nothing. I'd like to have a way to see
what people actually think about books. But on GoodReads that's almost
impossible to find.

I'm surprised there isn't a rotten tomatoes for books. I've considered
starting it myself, but I don't see much money to be made from it. Maybe
that's why...

~~~
Zanni
Interesting point about reviewers skewing positive for popularity. My big
issue with most recommendation engines is that they're biased towards false
positives rather than false negatives. The other way would lead to fewer, more
focused recommendations.

In particular, I'd like to see an engine take a reviewer's dislikes into
account more. If someone likes (switching to film for an accessible example)
Cinderella, The Little Mermaid and Mulan, their opinion on Brave isn't going
to carry much information as they're pretty indiscriminate about Disney films.
But if they love Mulan, dislike Little Mermaid and hate Cinderella, their
opinion on Brave is more likely to line up with my own.

~~~
prepend
I would think that the challenge is to find good recommenders rather than
specific recommendations.

If I can find similar tastes, maybe a little bit different, then that will
result in good recommendations.

So I would want to find people who both like similar things but also dislike
similar things. It will be interesting to find people my similarity and see
which are best at finding books I like.

~~~
Jemaclus
I follow my friends, and my friends tend to have good taste! This is
essentially my strategy. I do have a few friends who have recommended books
that I didn't like, so I just don't listen to their recs anymore. Solved
problem!

That's one of the problems I have with ML-based recommenders. I can't identify
any particular ML algorithm, and therefore I can't say "This one has
consistently given me bad recommendations, so I'll ignore it. But I do like
this one over here." Whereas with my friends, I know that Lori and Nicole
gives good recs and Brad doesn't, so I'll ignore Brad's and read recs from the
other two.

------
johnfn
Good lord what I wouldn’t give for a better goodreads. Never has so much
useful and actionable data been squandered. For example, I could write pages
about how bad the “top books” lists are. The Goodreads Choice Awards are
purely and literally popularity contests, for example. Why would this be the
case - you have millions of user ratings, you should be using those to surface
exciting and unknown books rather than throwing people back at the same few
authors they already know. The lists work exactly the same way - they discard
ratings entirely and only take into account the quantity of books. It would be
as if you said that the top 40 is the best music because everyone listens to
it.

So you don’t think I’m all talk, a while back I got so fed up with this that I
wrote my own script to scrape goodreads and find the actual best books, not
just the most popular, and I found a wealth of really good and unknown books,
including two books that are now my favorite books of all time. It was a side
project that took me an hour. Why goodreads can’t do this is utterly beyond
me.

Aaaargh!!!

~~~
taeric
I'm confused. What you describe is really just another form of popularity
contest, no? Unless you have a set of reviewers that you value over others.
One might call them the critical reviewers. (No, I'm not trying to be subtle)

So, what books did you find? Why not make a post on your method?

~~~
johnfn
Not exactly. Goodreads will value a million people giving a book 1 star higher
than 20k giving it 5 stars. I just sorted by average score.

I posted the books in this thread (sorry, on mobile right now).

~~~
taeric
But that is still a popularity contest, of sorts. In general, any ranking
system is a popularity system. Which is logical, as there is no objective
ranking of books. That is, it isn't an ordered set.

That said, I can see value in providing a score not just in the items, but on
the ranking system used. Could even be adaptive based on genre. (Indeed, I
would love a system to see if any books have factual errors and such. But,
that is just trying to reinvent the citation systems of academia.)

And understood on the mobile. Same boat for me.

~~~
johnfn
I don’t understand. A book with a single review could place higher than a book
with millions. How is that a popularity contest?

~~~
taeric
Depends on who reviewed it.

Easier to think of this from the other side. I have a few friends that, if
they tell me to avoid something, it can typically override however popular
something may be.

------
anonreader123
I am a Goodreads employee. this is a burner account. i could be fired for
posting.

we love Goodreads and we know it is bad today. we are working to fix it. there
are very few of us. we are trying. we are making big changes soon.

~~~
rexpop
> i could be fired for posting.

Yikes, that's rather dramatic! Especially since all you've said is "we're
working to fix it. changes soon." That's a pretty harmless statement, I would
think.

What gives you the idea that such statements put your employment at risk?

~~~
sillysaurusx
I downvoted you but I feel bad for not explaining why.

One of my memories: Being pulled into a side office and grilled for a half
hour for posting a similarly harmless statement to HN.

So your comment triggered mild PTSD.

It's not your place as an individual employee to post about your employer. You
work in a team setting. If the team decides it's appropriate to post to HN,
then that's fine. But you alone do not get to decide that.

~~~
sam_lynx
What? You are suggesting that a person is unable to share his personal
experiences and opinions unless their employer agrees? Obviously this may
damage the company, but personally I have no sympathy for a company worth
billions of dollars who is not known for their fair treatment of workers at
all. I see nothing immoral in the original commenter releasing this
information.

~~~
sillysaurusx
It doesn't matter whether you see something immoral about it. Employers do
punish employees for doing so.

~~~
sam_lynx
Yes, that is why he used a burner account.

------
jtth
Everyone's talking about recommendations. I don't use GoodReads
recommendations at all. It's a social network with a focus on books where
people will actually read and discuss books and book reviews. It's also a good
way of chronicling what books you read. I wish they'd focus more on that part.

~~~
therealdrag0
ditto. There's already too many books to read and recommendations everywhere.

~~~
hombre_fatal
Yeah, it's hard for me to take the complaint too seriously. The problem with
books isn't that it's hard to find the good ones. It's that you get this
tremendous backlog because you're short on time.

------
munificent
_> They recommend different versions of books I’ve read. They recommend two
different versions of Lord of the Rings (one of my favorite books), but I
guess they don’t know these are the same book._

This is failure mode of recommendations is so common and so catastrophically
useless that I do not understand how it has not been solved.

I'm into photography, so every now and then I buy a lens from Amazon.
Immediately after I do, every Amazon ad banner on every website in the world
switches to advertising that specific lens, for like the next month (I guess
until I buy something else).

Lenses are very specific, expensive, and singular. There is almost no reason
to ever have two of the same lens. The day after I buy a lens, it is
practically the least likely product _in the world_ that I will buy.

Show me anything but that. I mean, actually, don't. I like this failure mode
because it makes it easy to tune out the ads. If they showed me related gear
(perhaps filters that fit the lens), I might get suckered into spending more.

But, seriously, how is this not fixed?

~~~
prepend
I think this is because the ad networks don’t have insight to your purchase
data. So they don’t know if you’ve bought and converted or not, but know that
people who searched for something are more likely to buy if advertised the
dickens out of for the next few weeks.

That’s my theory at least, but even Amazon will show ads for stuff I bought on
amazon. Not sure if that’s just them being stupid.

------
newbie578
The status quo regarding Goodreads and it's position in the industry is really
interesting.

There is not a single competent alternative to Goodreads, yet Goodreads just
sucks! As simple as that, the UI is horrible, the UX is disgusting, the
perfomance is that of toaster and still people are using it.

I personally am using it for the last 5 years while continuously searching
unsuccessfully for alternatives. If you think the website is bad, you should
check out the Android app, never in my life have I seen a worse app by a
popular company.

I got so frustrated by Goodreads that on multiple occasions I thought of
starting a competing product just to challenge the status quo, but as soon as
I started dwelling deeper into it, I realized that there is just no real
viable business model for it to be worth it.

I guess that explains the current status of Goodreads and why there are so few
competitors.

How do you monetize a social network about reading books? I have spent way too
much time thinking about it, yet failing to achieve a result.

1)You can't really sell books, since Amazon is already so well entrenched and
honestly books aren't a really hot commodity.

2)Subscription for audiobooks? Again there is Audible, and Scribd is also
doing a phenomenal business doing it, you pay $9 and listen to as many as you
want audiobooks.

3)Affiliate marketing? Goodreads already does it, and it isn't really a
business model with a good foundation.

4)Customized ads? This might be the "least" worst solution, although what
could you advertise to people who read books? Their LTV (lifetime value of
customers) isn't really high.

5)A paid social network? Good luck trying to grow a social network which asks
it's users to pay $1 monthly.

6)The latest and craziest idea I had regarding it, was to make it a hybrid of
Goodreads and LinkedIn. Where employers can see what types of books are their
applicants reading. I.e. if I am looking to hire a backend intern, I am sooner
going to hire the intern who read in his free time Effective Java, Clean Code,
etc. since you can pretty much gain a good overall picture about a person by
looking at the books he reads.

I spent way too much time obsessing over this...

~~~
freddie_mercury
> I realized that there is just no real viable business model for it to be
> worth it

I think this is key. It is kind of amazing that on a site all about startups
and finding "product/market fit" every single thread about goodreads
completely ignores any aspect of viability and expects someone else to just
spend money for purely aesthetic reasons like it is a charity project.

Is goodreads perfect? Good lord no. If _I_ owned it, would I spend money
trying to improve the search or the mobile app? Hell no. Hire 5 developers at
$1 million/year to...what exactly? Is a better mobile app going to translate
to tens of millions of dollars of revenue somehow?

It isn't like LibraryThing or StoryGraph or BookSloth or Riffle are actually
any good and they have 5+ years of development to solve all the alleged
issues. Yet everyone in this thread complaining about Goodreads is still using
Goodreads instead of them.

~~~
rammy1234
Money is where ideas thrive. I would build something based on recommendation
based on users who you like. I like someone and I want to know the books they
like and more and more of this. so essentially Facebook for Book
recommendation. I know someone and so I know what books they read. User can
choose to publicize the recommendation or to certain group of people or
private.

------
esquire_900
After reading and heavily agreeing with this post, I came to the conclusion
that either goodreads is not really trying, or -more likely- the data is just
not good enough to make decent recommendations. There are so many biases in
the review data that are impossible to fix in any kind of sparse matrix
recommendation algorithm. For those who want to try anyway, it might be worth
downloading an existing dataset (1) (104 million reviews) and try, before
worrying about scraping and api limits.

The only solution (in my experience) is to get some other way of quantifying
content, like Spotify does by manually labelling tracks. After some ddg I
found storygraph (2), which does this. Its search engine is quite impressive,
might be worth trying.

[1]
[https://sites.google.com/eng.ucsd.edu/ucsdbookgraph/home](https://sites.google.com/eng.ucsd.edu/ucsdbookgraph/home)
[2] [https://beta.thestorygraph.com](https://beta.thestorygraph.com)

~~~
kobe_bryant
the problem is that when you step out of genre fiction, you cant just
recommend a book with a similar plot or setting, it needs to have a similar
style of writing and sensibility and thats very hard to determine.

the best way is friending/following people and learning their tastes compared
to yours

e: if you go to a specific book and look up similar books, goodreads actually
does a pretty good job
[https://www.goodreads.com/book/similar/1994351-j-r](https://www.goodreads.com/book/similar/1994351-j-r)

~~~
sfjailbird
> the best way is friending/following people and learning their tastes
> compared to yours

If only goodreads could somehow find others who like the same things you do
and use it for recommendations!

Joking aside, they might already be doing that, but if so, they suck at it.
They have enormous datasets of people and their tastes, yet their
recommendations always seem to be simply matching genres that you happened to
like a book from. You liked _Watership Down_? Here are 10 other books with
talking animals!

If you and I can successfully identify people we share tastes with, then
goodreads should be able to, too, they have even more data to base this on.

------
paxys
Book rating and recommendations are an impossible problem to begin with. If
you browse through Goodreads, you will see that _everything_ is rated 4 stars.
People only finish and rate books they like, and it's impossible to compare
books of different genres, lengths, time periods, complexity etc. on the same
objective scale like it is for movies or TV shows.

~~~
lkbm
So look at which books I finished and rated highly, find people who overlap
strongly with that, and recommend the set of {their books - my books}.

As I recall, this is basically what won the Netflix recommendation engine
contest. There's going to be a lot of computation in crunching the numbers,
but it's not hard to come up with something better than "recommend what has
the highest average star rating".

------
nonbirithm
How do people build recommendation engines?

Like, even when you have access to the site's entire API and can write your
own client for it, there's still the fact that their recommendations are
generally better.

It sounds like an extremely important value-add. There are many sites that I
will only use the app for because that is where the recommendations are shown.
But to me taking a user profile and an article and spitting out a list of
articles seems like magic.

I also find it weird that in 2020 Goodreads is the status quo for book
recommendations.

~~~
krrishd
I get the sense that part of the problem with book recs vs. YouTube video recs
is that you can evaluate the quality of a video recommendation super quickly
(click in, find out like 10 seconds in that you don't care for it, click out).

With books, actioning a recommendation involves

1) getting a copy of the book (digital or physical, both cost money or at
minimum the time required to pirate),

2) starting to read it (with the sunken cost of time and/or money + the drive
to "give it a chance" both looming over your shoulder, costing you more time),

3) eventually either getting to the end or swallowing your pride and bailing.

I think you'd start to see actually useful systems here if you could even
eliminate step 1; make it easy as clicking in from a recommendation directly
into reading mode.

Also solves a critical issue for the engine: gauge recommendation quality by
how soon people click out of the rec, as opposed to waiting for the user to go
through steps 1-3, and care enough to come back and provide a rating. Way more
data to work with.

Of course, this all skirts the Actual Problem: the amount of IP law you'd have
to trudge through in making enough books this accessible.

~~~
krrishd
I also recently googled a quote, found it in a specific page in a book hosted
on [https://www.pagebypagebooks.com/](https://www.pagebypagebooks.com/), and
just impulsively clicked through the whole book because it happened to capture
my interest, and only "demanded" that I commit to a single page at a time.
Hard to explain, but it felt more natural in that every-page-is-a-URL format
to trivially bail at any page, without the weird apprehension I get from the
same action in an e-reader / physical book.

The website is super old/limited, but if all books were that trivial to access
+ click through, I think we'd see something more interesting here. Made me
wonder how hard it'd be to convert the entirety of Project Gutenberg into that
sort of Web 1.0 format automatically.

------
Paradigma11
The most important feature of goodreads for me is:
[https://www.goodreads.com/new_releases/2020/9](https://www.goodreads.com/new_releases/2020/9)
This shows you new releases of authors whose books you have read.

The recommendations basically crapped out on me after a few hundred books. It
seems there are a few cliques (graph) of recommendations that are pretty
independent and if you have read these cliques in a genre recommendations just
suck.

But plz give me some query syntax like [https://docs.microsoft.com/en-
us/windows/win32/lwef/-search-...](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-
us/windows/win32/lwef/-search-2x-wds-aqsreference) and most importantly the
ability to filter out certain tags.

~~~
wosc
Seconded. The "new releases of authors I've read books from" is one of the
things that would give me the most value -- if it actually worked properly,
which for me it doesn't, since it only seems to show _some_ random new books
from _some_ of "my" authors. Sigh.

------
manigandham
I don't create about recommendations as much. I get those from other sources
and already have enough of a backlist to last a life time.

Goodreads for me is for storing my history and ratings. Same with IMDB for
movies. Both sites are terrible (and owned by Amazon), but I don't see much
value in clones that don't do anything completely new.

------
awaxman11
Has anybody ever used stack ranking to power book recommendations? Instead of
rating books on a scale of 1-5 star you instead rate each book relative to
every other book you’ve ever read.

Some other factors that I think could be used to create a high quality book
recommendation engine on top of stack ranking: number of books read (the top 5
books from someone who has read 200+ books is a stronger signal than someone
who has read 10 books) and release date (give extra weight to older books to
reduce recency bias).

What do you think? Am I onto something or just spewing some sat night
nonsense?

~~~
achileas
Are all books comparable linearly like this though? I could see separate stack
ranks for different genres (practical books, sci-fi, relationships, whatever),
attributes (readability, teachability if applicable, subject matter interest),
or more.

I also can't help but think in graphs, so I could also see horizontal-ish
linkages between the stacks as well. Each book, then, could have a number of
attributes that get an independent stack ranking for each one, leaving you
with a constellation score as well as a focused look at _what_ the book is
good at or focused on. I could see it getting unwieldy though.

Thinking through this, maybe genre stacks based on some collapse of attribute
ranking scores.

------
monksy
Honestly, I feel that most tech goes this way when you have a monoply.
Everything has a nature lifecycle, theres new life, interest, peak, and
death/replacement. However, with some of these large corps (i.e. Amazon in
this case), they can choose to hamper the growth and avoid competition.

A lot of our tech can/should be a lot better than what it is. Use the tech to
help people collaborate/get together/share. That was the great thing about
reddit in it's hayday.

------
mmanfrin
My wish: show me all the books my friends have reviewed, and allow me to sort
by number of reviews. I want to see what a _plurality_ of my friend recommend.

------
cpsempek
I'm skeptical of this person's ability to "know" what they don't want to read.
E.g., they are recommended Shoe Dog and a King novel, which they claim they
don't want to read. However, if other people have read similar books and rated
them similarly to this person _and_ have read Shoe Dog and that King novel and
rated those well, then this person may like those books. It seems they are
assuming they won't like them, but not for particularly strong reasons. One of
my favorite authors is Haruki Murakami and I would have rated Colorless
Tsukuru a 2 or 3. If that were the only Murakami novel I had read and I made
the same assumptions this person made, I would have missed out on some of my
favorite books.

~~~
lazyasciiart
Huh, I get recommended Murakami a lot but really didn't enjoy Colorless -
maybe I'll try a different one.

~~~
pilsetnieks
Try something pre-2010. The 2010s aren't really representative of his other
work nor, to be honest, quite as good as his earlier books.

------
alan_n
I love goodreads, but I've wished for so long for two things way more basic
than good recommendations which I don't really care about (except the finding
people with similar ratings, I would kill for that):

\- Proper search engine (all books with x+ ratings, rated y+ start, in genre
z). From what I've heard one has to scrape the site to get any useful
information. \- Forbidding rated reviews before release dates. This seriously
skews ratings for some genres and is insanely annoying.

Okay maybe three... managing shelves is super slow. I want to be able to drag
and drop and have things instantly re-ordered without a reload.

------
hganesan
I’ve been building a prototype over at
[https://longtweetsapp.com](https://longtweetsapp.com) because I’ve had the
same problems. It’s hard to find books so I took a more personalized, data-
driven approach, starting with Twitter networks, because I was tired of
bestseller and most popular lists.

It’s still early goings, but I’d love feedback - I’m dogfooding it with
interesting results. Send me a note: hareesh.ganesan+longtweets@gmail.com

------
lmarcos
Hi HN. I come from a parallel universe in which book recommendation systems
are not based on genre, ratings or communities. Book recommendations are based
on their content.

(A silly idea I have been thinking about:
[https://www.lessmarcos.com/posts/2020/09/content-based-
recom...](https://www.lessmarcos.com/posts/2020/09/content-based-
recommendation-systems/))

------
hellified
You should check out:
[https://beta.thestorygraph.com/](https://beta.thestorygraph.com/) It's still
in beta but I've tried it and like it a lot. One thing that it's missing that
is holding me back from a full jump over to it is an android app. The mobile
site looks good, but I think an app would substantially improve usability.

------
Nemo_bis
There are many Goodreads competitors. To the others already mentioned, I'll
add [https://inventaire.io/](https://inventaire.io/) , which is fully free
software and based on open data (Wikidata).

It's useful if you want to have full control on your own book catalogue while
not having to produce all the data yourself.

------
moomin
Everyone wants to fix Goodreads except Amazon.

------
jacobobryant
> Why would they recommend this book?

If they're using collaborative filtering, there probably isn't a simple
explanation. Basically, you feed in a list of "<user id>, <book id>, <rating>"
and the algorithm generates a feature vector for each book and each user. So
the reason some book gets recommended is because... the dot product of that
book's vector with your vector was high. You can do this easily with off-the-
shelf libraries, like Surprise[1] (I'm using that lib in my startup[2]).

At least this is what happens in matrix factorization methods. Recommendations
from k-nearest neighbor methods can be explained more easily, but knn doesn't
scale as well.

This is a minor drawback of matrix factorization--people have been shown to
trust recommendations more if they understand how the recommendations were
generated. Twitter recently published a super interesting paper[3] about how
they generate recommendations at scale, and as a bonus their method is
explainable. They create a model that describes the communities in Twitter--
groups of people who follow the same set of influencers. Users and items are
represented by vectors, where each element of a vector describes to what
degree a user/item fits in a certain community. When generating
recommendations, you can get the user's top communities and then fetch items
for those communities. If you generated a text description for each community,
you could include that with each recommendation.

[1]
[https://github.com/NicolasHug/Surprise](https://github.com/NicolasHug/Surprise)

[2] [https://findka.com/](https://findka.com/)

[3] [https://www.kdd.org/kdd2020/accepted-
papers/view/simclusters...](https://www.kdd.org/kdd2020/accepted-
papers/view/simclusters-community-based-representations-for-heterogeneous-
recommendatio)

------
buovjaga
There is at least
[https://gitlab.com/Alamantus/Readlebee](https://gitlab.com/Alamantus/Readlebee)
"An attempt at a viable alternative to Goodreads", in active development.

Blog post from yesterday: [https://robbie.antenesse.net/2020/09/11/one-year-
of-readlebe...](https://robbie.antenesse.net/2020/09/11/one-year-of-
readlebee.html)

Edit: oh, there is also Bookwyrm, as mentioned in this megalist:
[https://git.feneas.org/feneas/fediverse/-/wikis/watchlist-
fo...](https://git.feneas.org/feneas/fediverse/-/wikis/watchlist-for-
activitypub-apps#reviewing)

------
giberson
> My idea for an 11-star experience 1 in finding new books is that Goodreads
> knows me even better than I know myself and constantly recommends the
> perfect book.

> goodreads shows me five books that I don’t want to read.

I wonder if these two ideas are at odds with each other. Imagine for a moment
that recommendation engines were solved problems, and definitely worked given
the above statement. They know you better than you know yourself. Would it’s
recommendations likely only include books that you obviously wanted to read?
Or would they include books you didn’t know you wanted or needed to read? I
mean this in terms of judging the books by their cover rather knowing about
their existence. Isn’t it likely or even probable that the majority of books
recommended would be based on the value they contribute to something deeper
than the pure enjoyment purposes?

As an aside, I remember in a college literature class I took the instructor
told us that it’s up to the reader to derive value or meaning from stories.
This was a class that studied short stories of early American authors. Most of
which were slice of life narratives that didn’t have any apparent meaning, or
commentary from the authors themselves. The exercise was to study the
characters, scenery and tone and try derive what might either lie beneath the
words or story themselves. Whether the ideas we deduced from the stories were
accurate (and in most cases probably were not) the value Of the process was of
critical thinking about the stories that made us consider and express ideas
and beliefs we normally don’t.

Back on topic, would a working recommendation engine likely suggest things
that on the surface seemed either boring or blatantly unappealing that would
provide tremendous value if we put work in to reading and studying?

That being said, is it possible that current recommendation engines are
already working? Most are at least driven by reading behaviors of the masses,
so it seems like it might be feasible that that Steven king book that is
unappealing to you is something you should actually read.

(This is not including recommendations for books you have already read in
different languages which seems like an obvious bug, but then again reading
books you’ve already read in different languages might be an excellent way to
become more fluent in a new language or gain a deeper understanding of
translation of ideas between languages....)

So, maybe the tech isn’t something that needs to be fixed. Maybe we just need
to be open to what the tech is telling us?

~~~
matsemann
I think you are right. Being recommended a book I've never heard about by some
author I'v never heard of by some computer system, I'm probably gonna dismiss
it. However, if I've seen it in a bookstore, read about it in a paper, heard a
friend talk about it etc. _then_ I might act on the recommendation.

Basically being exposed to something enough times. First time and a cursory
look, most things don't look to exciting. This goes for everything. Movies,
restaurants, gadgets..

------
Minor49er
One thing I'd add about the UX is that the search bar is buried below the fold
on the homepage of the desktop version. Everywhere else, even on mobile, it's
at the very top. It makes it a little more difficult to just jump to their
site and start searching.

------
ericmcer
One interesting facet of all these recommendation and ratings systems online
(Yelp, Goodreads, Rotten Tomatoes, etc.) is that they don't provide a key
value that in person recommendations do.

When a person recommends a restaurant they are attaching blame for the
restaurants performance to themselves. Its performance is a reflection on them
and their credibility. It is very hard to replicate this on the internet, a
place where people can suggest things with very little responsibility.

If I strongly suggest a movie to someone and the movie sucks, I can be blamed
for that. I don't know how to replicate that comfortable eschewing of
responsibility that in person recommendations provide.

------
dwighttk
I don’t care about reviews or recommendations. I have a to-read list that will
last me the rest of my life easily.

The thing I hate about goodreads is there are two search fields one to search
books you’ve read and one to search every book.

I’ve wanted to search books I’ve read like 5 times in my life but for some
reason I always end up using the only search books I’ve read search bar and I
get no results. Just make it a checkbox or return two lists or something.

------
vhpoet
I'm trying to tackle a small part of this by building
[https://www.readthistwice.com](https://www.readthistwice.com) which gives
contextual recommendations from 1300+ leaders. What I mean by contextual in
this case is every recommendation comes with a verified quote from the
recommender on why they recommend the book.

------
50
Haven't used it myself since it's in beta but I have been keeping my eyes on
this for a while: [https://beta.readng.co/](https://beta.readng.co/),
[https://twitter.com/readngco](https://twitter.com/readngco)

~~~
buttscicles
Hi, I'm building this! Thanks for sharing.

It's pretty basic right at the moment and we've a lot left to build (largely a
reading list only, we've got more in the works) – but here's my profile as a
preview, since our marketing site & messaging needs a bit of work:
[https://beta.readng.co/user/joe](https://beta.readng.co/user/joe)

~~~
greggh
One of the things I always wished was built into goodreads was a good system
for running a book club. They have groups, and those are close. But it just
seems like they took Facebook groups and tried to make it work for a book
club. It doesn't feel right to me.

Is that something thats on your roadmap?

------
armSixtyFour
Goodreads doesn't get enough love from Amazon, It always seemed really odd to
me that the recommended books in the kindle store were better than goodreads
even though it's all the same company. It seems like a wasted opportunity.
There are also numerous bugs I've ran into on the app that I just work around.

------
viiralvx
A buddy of mine has started on a better designed alternative to Goodreads.
It's in early access right now but it has potential and I'm looking forward to
seeing what else he adds to it: [https://readng.co](https://readng.co)

------
alehul
> I wish there was some way to note books that I don’t want to read.

Minor point but there is a "Not interested" button in the screenshot shown
above this paragraph. While Goodreads' initial suggestions were off-the-mark,
I wonder if using that would help?

------
YetAnotherNick
Isn't it the same problem with Amazon? It shows me different versions of the 5
products I last viewed. And unlike, goodreads it seems like there is clear
monetary value for amazon in fixing product recommendations but somehow it is
the same for years.

------
ryzvonusef
make it like myanimelist or mydramalist, one of those sort of websites....

such websites were created by fans can cater to what fans care for:

1- Finding out what's coming next, in an easy to view format

2- Finding out what's related to the item I'm currently checking, and it's
place in the overall verse's sequence

3- Damn simple tracker for the item I consume

4- Simple rating and genre system

In other words, you want to fix goodreads? create a mybooklist.

Because MAN it is SO hard to find out when my favorite author is having a new
book coming out, or if I discover a new author, wtf is their flow of their
book series, often ending in me accidentally reading the book out of order.

------
noisy_boy
For all the AI and machine learning being thrown in the pot of every dish
being made, they still haven't figured out that if I just bought a flashlight,
I'm not likely to get a double-pack to save $2 anytime soon.

------
disposekinetics
I just checked my Goodreads recommendations. It is very good at recommending
books by authors I really do not care for in genres I really enjoy. I wonder
if these kinds of systems fall over for that situation.

------
DavideNL
Fun fact: for like 2 years long, every time i opened Goodreads.com i saw the
exact same sentence: _" Because Deborah liked.... she discovered...."_

The exact same books/text for about 2 years. Torture...

------
shostack
One of the best parts of Goodreads for me is the Listopia search. Regular
search doesn't get me much, but this search is fantastic for going really
niche on certain topics.

------
theodorewiles
Instead of jumping to a recommendation engine, I would think about the analog
solution (e.g. nybooks.com, newcriterion.com).

Pretty much has solved my book recommendation pain point.

------
compscistd
I saw “amazon book clubs” today as a preview and wondered how indiebound
integration could help make a third party book club a reality

------
b0rsuk
Does anyone know a (ML-based) recommendation system for video games? I've
never heard of one, except perhaps Steam?

------
ilolu
If one has to build a Goodreads competition, How can one go about getting
books data, book cover images etc ?

~~~
marcusverus
The Google Books API might be a good starting place.

[https://developers.google.com/books/](https://developers.google.com/books/)

~~~
SXX
I think building project around such obscure Google API is too much of risk.
It's can be discontinued literally any moment.

------
nazgulnarsil
I just want to be able to find people who like the same obscure books I do.

------
michaelmrose
Is the recommendation engine bad on average or bad for you?

------
aasasd
I'd like to propose a different thing to fix first: when I open that page, I
can't scroll with the keyboard unless I first click in the main content area.
I.e. the focus is initially somewhere else.

------
Donckele
Nice write up and great Jeff Bezos story!

------
switch11
3 of the things most people miss is

A) The intersection between people who love books and love technology is
rather small

B) There is no 'monetization ramp up' when producing products for books and
publishing

Monetization if you are a startup in books and publishing is via either

Amazon Associate - However, Amazon will kick you out if they want to enter the
same business

Example: [https://the-digital-reader.com/2016/06/15/amazon-brings-
the-...](https://the-digital-reader.com/2016/06/15/amazon-brings-the-hammer-
down-on-discount-ebook-sites/)

Selling Ads to Authors & Publishers - However Amazon will manipulate results

Example: [https://the-digital-reader.com/2017/11/22/amazon-now-
punishi...](https://the-digital-reader.com/2017/11/22/amazon-now-punishing-
authors-running-bookbub-promotions/)

so there is no easy path

Contrast that with something like Apps or Shopping where you can use affiliate
networks and monetize right from the start. And a competitor like Google
doesn't have control over the Affiliate networks (which in books, Amazon has)

C) Most authors are not tech savvy and keep doing crazy things like giving
exclusivity to one store and create monopolies. They then get screwed by these
monopolies

Why would you step into a market where

A) The competitors are monopolists who have no compulsion against doing
illegal things

B) The participants (authors and Publishers) are in the 1950s technology wise

C) The participants (authors and publishers) keep doing strange stuff like
give one ebook store exclusivity

CONTRAST what happened with Apps versus what happened with Books

Apps

Amazon wanted pricing control of apps and exclusivity. Developers gave them
the middle finger

Amazon tried unlimited apps (including unlimited IAP purchases if you are on
subscription) and developers didn't play along. They had to close down the
service

Books

There were FIVE major stores - Kindle, Sony, Apple, B&N, Kobo

Amazon offered exclusivity to authors in return for (the comically bad
incentive) - allowed to make book free for 5 days every 90 days, allowed to
discount book as a special Kindle Countdown Deal for 7 days every 90 days

Authors gave Amazon exclusivity. Helped it get from 30-40% market share to
60-70% market share

Now completely dependent on Amazon

Kindle Unlimited - Amazon won't give authors and publishers data on how many
people borrow, etc. Only 'total number of pages read'

Authors play along and now many are completely dependent on income from this
'subscription service' where they don't even know how many readers downloaded
their book, how many read X% etc. Just one vague metric of 'total pages read
by all readers'

 __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __

So, to do well in this market you are suited for it IF

A) Your default is to take advantage of authors and publishers

OR

treat them like naive sheep who don't understand the basics of business

B) You are willing to go up against a large monopoly that will also do illegal
things without remorse

Amazon just hired Keith Alexander - head of NSA during warrantless
surveillance

Do you really want to compete against that?

C) somehow bridge the gap between books and publishing and technology

while keeping in mind that most of the top quality supply is controlled by 5
large companies (the Big 5 very big publishers)

 __ __

You would be hard pressed to find ANY business to go into that is worse

The saying - An intelligent enemy is better than a stupid friend

This is an ecosystem where - your friends are naive (in effect, clueless), and
your enemies are stupid (doing all sorts of illegal things because they are a
monopoly and know the US does @#$$-all to monopoly power abusing companies

------
rexpop
Is this a good thread under which to have a more general discussion about data
ownership and access? Goodreads is a Schelling point for book reviews, reading
lists, and personal catalogs, but the API leaves something to be desired, not
to mention the UI. Why shouldn't the Goodreads database be accessible to other
applications? Why shouldn't the data be stored locally, or on our "own cloud"?

Why can't we fix what's wrong with it? It's maddening that sites' UI is locked
down, unfixable.

