I did make a better Goodreads. But only for my very narrow use case.
Namely, I just wanted to keep track of what I read. I didn't care for the social aspects of it nor the discovery part of it. I did want certain statistics on my reading though, so a plain text file wasn't going to cut it.
Unfortunately, Goodreads was a huge pain to use UX-wise and didn't really provide the statistics I was looking for either. The one positive thing I can say for Goodreads is that the books I read were already there (I'm primarily reading Japanese light novels, so whether the titles are available on the service for tracking purposes or not is a real concern for me), which is probably a bigger problem than you might think for anyone who'd want to build a competitor? The friction to use an alternative service is obviously going to be much higher if you have to get the books you read added to the service first before you can actually track them on your list.
Anyway, with my sufficiently narrow use case, I just built my own book tracking with spreadsheets. I add new lines to a master read sheet and then I have some pivot tables that automatically compile statistics I care about from there.[1]
I'm quite happy with this setup for now and can definitely recommend doing something similar for everyone who just wants to keep track of your reading and doesn't care for the social features.
That said, I wouldn't mind switching to a "real" service again provided that a) it was sufficiently expedient to use when it comes to managing your list (this is especially important considering I'd obviously want to port over my existing hundreds-long read list to this new hypothetical service) b) it already had the books I've read catalogued in the service, because I sure as hell don't want to petition additions to their database for everything I read before I can actually keep track of it.
Namely, I just wanted to keep track of what I read. I didn't care for the social aspects of it nor the discovery part of it. I did want certain statistics on my reading though, so a plain text file wasn't going to cut it.
Unfortunately, Goodreads was a huge pain to use UX-wise and didn't really provide the statistics I was looking for either. The one positive thing I can say for Goodreads is that the books I read were already there (I'm primarily reading Japanese light novels, so whether the titles are available on the service for tracking purposes or not is a real concern for me), which is probably a bigger problem than you might think for anyone who'd want to build a competitor? The friction to use an alternative service is obviously going to be much higher if you have to get the books you read added to the service first before you can actually track them on your list.
Anyway, with my sufficiently narrow use case, I just built my own book tracking with spreadsheets. I add new lines to a master read sheet and then I have some pivot tables that automatically compile statistics I care about from there.[1]
I'm quite happy with this setup for now and can definitely recommend doing something similar for everyone who just wants to keep track of your reading and doesn't care for the social features.
That said, I wouldn't mind switching to a "real" service again provided that a) it was sufficiently expedient to use when it comes to managing your list (this is especially important considering I'd obviously want to port over my existing hundreds-long read list to this new hypothetical service) b) it already had the books I've read catalogued in the service, because I sure as hell don't want to petition additions to their database for everything I read before I can actually keep track of it.
[1] https://twitter.com/Daiz42/status/1158123020596240391