
Goodreads’ reign over the world of book talk might be coming to an end - J253
https://www.newstatesman.com/science-tech/social-media/2020/08/better-goodreads-possible-bad-for-books-storygraph-amazon
======
prepend
I have used goodreads since soon after launch. It’s probably the worst site
that I use, but I prefer it’s benign neglect over the “improvements” made on
the main amazon site.

I just use it as a list of books of I’ve read and am reading, and to see books
that my friends are reading or have read.

It’s been funny to me that the search is horrible and seems to be something
worse than just regexing a list of book titles. But I eventually find what I’m
looking for. It’s sucked as long as I can remember.

The recommendations are also really bad, it has never recommended a book to me
that I thought was interesting or I ended up reading. This is despite having
over a thousand read and rated books from me. I’ve been waiting for them to be
able to search all the books I don’t know and find one that I will like.

I kind of like the site as it is quaint, but functional. It’s like a library
in that way.

~~~
Negitivefrags
I can’t think of a website in any domain where people don’t complain about
recommendations.

People complain about goodreads, Netflix, amazon, etc.

Even things like google ads whose business is ultimately showing ads for
products you might like to buy, a kind of recommendation algorithm, people
constantly complain about irrelevance. And they have billions of dollars on
the line for making that better, not to mention a dataset that is second to
none about the internet using population.

Maybe good recommendations is actually just super hard and nobody has really
solved it well.

~~~
thorum
Music recommendations seem to work OK. My Spotify discover playlists are
always decent.

~~~
brmgb
It's hit and miss.

Sometimes it's very decent. Most of the time my discover weekly playlist
contains 95% of music I find plain bad.

------
Hokusai
> Instead, it has stagnated: Amazon holds on to an effective monopoly on the
> discussion of new books

This is the main point.

It is the same thing that Oracle purchasing MySQL. What once was a promising
raising technology is nowadays stagnant. (Interest over time
[https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%...](https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%2Fm%2F05ynw,mysql))

GoodReads could help to find better books to read. But, Amazon likes the
current state where Amazon recommends the books that are good for their
business and not the best for the reader.

10 years ago, I would buy anything Amazon recommended on books. Nowadays, I do
not use Amazon anymore as it just promotes books that, I guess, have larger
profit margins or align better with Amazon strategy. It cannot be trusted as a
recommendation engine.

~~~
Mediterraneo10
Amazon was pretty much forced to buy Goodreads: the original business model of
Goodreads before the Amazon buyout was making money from referral links to
booksellers. While links were provided to several internet booksellers besides
Amazon, like Barnes & Noble, already the vast majority of internet users were
hooked on Amazon and only buying through Amazon links. Consequently, Amazon
was paying Goodreads a huge amount of money in referral fees each month, and
it made more sense for Amazon to simply buy the site and stop that.

I agree that Amazon is nefarious and destructive, but I think any company in
the same position would have bought Goodreads out.

~~~
prostoalex
> Consequently, Amazon was paying Goodreads a huge amount of money in referral
> fees each month, and it made more sense for Amazon to simply buy the site
> and stop that.

Does Amazon has a track record of buying major referral generators? I'd
imagine someone like SlickDeals generates higher revenue with affiliate links
to higher-ticket non-book items.

~~~
adventured
SlickDeals, as with most deal sites, is the equivalent of a B movie in
Hollywood. They're considered trashy, low quality sites. Buying SlickDeals is
close to bottom fishing if you're Amazon.

Goodreads was classy by comparison and was/is not primarily about deals or
referral links. Amazon considers itself to own the book category, period.
Books will always hold a special place in their heart as the origination of
the company. Amazon, as with all big companies, also considers its brand when
it purchases other things. (some of the tech echo chamber may laugh at that
notion, however that's nothing more than ignorance as Amazon has an
extraordinary brand among the general population)

------
Mediterraneo10
The linked article soon goes from criticizing Goodreads to hyping The
StoryGraph as a Goodreads competitor. However, all the great new features of
The StoryGraph seem targeted towards only one portion of the Goodreads
membership: people reading fiction or the most pop-sci-type nonfiction and who
want recommendations for new stuff to read.

My own bookish, nerdy Goodreads subculture is very different: we already have
more books on our to-read list than we could realistically get through, we
don’t really need auto-generated recommendations for more. We review a lot of
serious non-fiction, not just the mass-market stuff, and genre tags like
"dark" or "edgy" don't seem relevant, while being able to add "trigger
warnings" misses the point.

Yes, GR users like myself are probably a minority, but we’re a very
established and recognized minority. We're the sort that keeps some
independent booksellers alive, for example, so any new site that aims to
maintain a culture of books and reading ought to take us into account.

~~~
freddie_mercury
I agree that "I can't find any good books to read" is not really a problem
most readers I know have. Most have dozens, or hundreds, of books on their To
Be Read pile. Finding new books to read doesn't really strike me as a big
problem.

I've seen people looking for _extremely_ specific books get stuck. "I'm
looking for fantasy where the bad guy turns into a good guy but keeps working
on the bad guy side but actively undermines it and also I want some LBGTI+
romance but no smut/explicit scenes". But I'm doubtful TheStoryGraph is going
to help them either.

For almost any niche I've seen there's going to be someone somewhere on the
internet who puts together a listicle of books in that niche which is going to
provide months or years of reading for most normal people. And that's without
even looking into the authors' back catalogues or looking at other authors
from the same publishers.

~~~
jseliger
_I 've seen people looking for extremely specific books get stuck_

At least some number of writers seem to get started by wanting to read a book
that doesn't exist, so they decide to write it themselves.

------
freddie_mercury
The author complains that it is "impossible" to find books on Goodreads.
Simply adding the author's name to any query will always take you to the book
you are looking for. Don't just rely on a title. Which should be common sense
(if you were at a bookstore you would always tell the clerk the author's name
and not just say "Do you have Holiday Heart?") but apparently isn't.

The author complains that searching for 'holiday heart' didn't show Margarita
García Robayo's book in the top hits. But searching for 'holiday heart robayo'
does.

As for the rest of the piece...the belief that algorithmic recommendations are
going to be easy for some shoestring budget startup run by a single person in
their spare time is somehow going to do a good job simply isn't credible.

People _still_ complain about Netflix recommendations and they've spent tens
of millions of dollars, possibly over a hundred million dollars, on it and are
one of the most valuable companies on the planet with one of the best
engineering teams on the planet.

Why do people think algorithmic recommendations are easy? Or even desirable?

~~~
DarkCrusader2
I love Letterboxd's approach to movie recommendation wherein they don't
provide any. Users can create arbitrary lists for all kinds of stuff based
anything like genre, themes, feel, mood, cast/crew etc. There is probable a
high quality list for anything you can think of. I have found some of my
favorite movies on the site this way, no algorithms involved.

I wish more site would do this instead of collecting every single details
about my life and still recommend be garbage sponsored content (looking at you
Youtube).

~~~
henrikeh
Goodreads does have that. It is called lists:
[https://www.goodreads.com/list?ref=nav_brws_lists](https://www.goodreads.com/list?ref=nav_brws_lists)

~~~
noema
Funny enough, this is another obvious feature that they get completely wrong
-- lists are publicly editable, with no (apparent) way of restricting adds to
the original creator. So inevitably any niche curatorial effort slides back to
the lowest common denominator taste over time.

------
imglorp
Business opportunity here to replace this?

Start with some HN or Reddit style forum discussion code. Some income could
come from affiliate links to indie booksellers. (Is there even infra for such
a thing right now? Need to build that too?)

Edit, answering myself, this guy has some thoughts:
[https://tomcritchlow.com/2020/04/15/library-
json/](https://tomcritchlow.com/2020/04/15/library-json/)

Edit, as for the index corpus, the USLC does okay:
[https://catalog.loc.gov/vwebv/search?searchArg=0312937385&se...](https://catalog.loc.gov/vwebv/search?searchArg=0312937385&searchCode=GKEY%5E*&searchType=0&recCount=25)

~~~
doiwin
Is the USLC always updated with the latest books?

What would be the legal background of using their index?

~~~
freddie_mercury
Sure, if you only care about America. But people in other countries read books
too.

Here's the best selling book in Germany:

[https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/45006237-das-
geschenk](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/45006237-das-geschenk)

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

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

------
Aeolun
Honestly, I checked out the storygraph after reading the article, and the
first thing that came to mind when I saw the site was ‘amateur hour’ that I
read earlier today in some post about Apple.

I can’t really take it seriously while it still looks like some random
programmer’s side project.

That said, it’s readable and mobile friendly, so that’s a win.

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

~~~
freddie_mercury
I've never had a problem.

It doesn't do a great job with recommendations but I don't really care. There
are thousands of book recommendation blogs, lists, BookTube channels, etc.

I'm not sure why people think every site/app needs to evolve to engulf every
tangential aspect of a given ecosystem.

HN can never make up its mind whether it likes distributed systems or not.

HN also loves the benign neglect of HN itself (formatting on mobile still
broken after 20 years?)

~~~
garmaine
This right here. I actually think adding some sort of machine learning
recommendation system would be an anti-feature. I do use the site for
recommendations on what to read next, But I get that from reading the reviews
of other users. These reviews often say “the idea of this book is good, but
was done better by ______ in _______.” That context is critically important.
Just being told I might like this other book is not helpful.

------
matthewfelgate
Goodreads interface is terrible. I'm surprised Amazon hasn't shut Goodreads
down.

All I want from Goodreads is:

    
    
        * A nice way to see all the books I've read
        * Maintain a list of "Want to read books"
        * A decent recommendation system for my next read
    

(If you like Goodreads I recommend Readwise, which lets you upload Kindle book
highlights and helps you learn from them.)

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

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

------
ubermonkey
I’m seeing this piece around widely. I agree with the premise, and am willing
to give StoryGraph some time and attention.

I mostly stopped using GR because it just seemed like a noise platform — and,
I guess obviously, I didn’t want to give Amazon any more data about me.

------
sradman
TL;DR: social book metadata site Goodreads has stagnated since being bought by
Amazon.

This pattern has occurred repeatedly with metadata associated with digital
media; CDDB vs. iTunes, IMDB vs. Amazon DVD listings, Goodreads vs. Amazon
book listings.

Rather than assuming that Amazon is strategically hampering Goodreads
functionality, I assume that Amazon is a large company that misses
opportunities to delight its customers. Giggles ensue every time I come across
a "We don't have any cast information" message in Amazon Prime Video.

Hanlon's Razor [1] applies: "Never attribute to malice that which is
adequately explained by stupidity".

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor)

------
doiwin
What is the main feature of Goodreads?

Is it discussing new books?

If so, what is the reason people want to discuss new books? Anybody here who
does it?

If so: Why do you do it? And do you do it before or after you read it?

------
LockAndLol
That intro was waaaay too long. As someone who knows Goodreads in passing, I
just wanted the author to get to the point and make their recommendation.

As a TL;DR for Good read users: The StoryGraph. Check it out.

