Alternatives to Goodreads?
I appreciate Goodreads for its pretty extensive catalogue of books, the ability to see reviews from other readers, and the social aspect of following what my friends are reading. However, I find both the website and the app very slow and not very well designed. Plus, I liked to minimize my interactions with Amazon. Has anyone used or built any alternatives? While the features I listed above are nice, the only ones I would really want are:
- The ability to quickly look up and add a book to my "want to read", and to keep track of books I have read
- The ability to leave notes or reviews on books (not necessarily visible to others).
I've started to keep a reading log in Notion which satisfies the second point above, but there's no easy way to search through a data base of books and add a book to one of my lists. It would be nice to be able to do so on the fly as I browse books at the store. So Tildeños, what solutions have you all come up with to track your reading?
I saw someone recommend https://thestorygraph.com/ to a friend the other day. "Not Owned By Amazon" is part of its marketing, and I think you can migrate Goodreads data into it.
(I don't use Goodreads or Storygraph, so I can't comment much on either.)
I came to recommend Story Graph. I am a (happy) user and can recommend it :)
How are the book recommendations? Does it take into account whether you actually liked the book or is it just whether you marked it as read?
For example, I've read a lot of LitRPG books to the point that I pretty much will never read another one since they're all so similar to me now. Goodreads and Amazon won't stop recommending them, so I've considered making a new account where I only mark books that I actually liked as read so I can get better recommendations.
I prefer the recommendations on StoryGraph to goodreads. They are heavily weighted by "mood" (basically a bunch of attributes that are ascribed through a mix of user reviews and machine learning) in conjunction with your ratings of past books and books on your to-read list. But I think mood is their primary stat.
I’ve been using The StoryGraph for all of 2023 and really like it, especially the stats/charts you get as you track more books with it. I’m at 21 books/6k pages so far this year; not a lot for some, but way ahead of my usual pace. My goal is to hit 10k pages this year.
One of my favorite little things as someone with a giant to-read pile is that every time you look at the home screen, it randomly selects a handful of books from your to-read pile to display across the top. It helps things from falling off my radar without being too structured/rigid about it.
A little off topic, but CoRecursive has an episode on the creation of storygraph, and it’s really interesting. I highly recommend it.
I finally got a chance to circle back to this, many thanks for the episode (and podcast recommendation).
Hearing the founder's story was really interesting, and a sobering reminder that success often depends on working hard, getting "lucky", and then continuing to work hard to capitalize on that "luck".
I ended up listening to a couple more episodes, and ended up stumbling on a episode that verbalized some thoughts that had been brewing for a while.
I just now switched over from Goodreads, very easy to export and import data!
Another vote for storygraph here. I like it enough that I support it. I love the clean ui that loads fast unlike the overloaded slow nonsense Goodreads has become.
Thanks for the rec! I'm going to try it too.
Others have named most (maybe all?) of the main options. Here's my experience with a few of them:
Oku was nice and clean and polished. I really liked the feel of it, but when I joined you couldn't rate books outside of writing your own review for it (that might be changed now -- the site was still in development when I used it probably a year or so ago). That made it pretty much a non-starter for me.
Hardcover is really promising. I like the idea that they calculate a recommendation score for every book that you look at, as opposed to just having a recommendations list like other sites. It didn't have a lot of users when I looked into it though, so it felt more like a proof-of-concept than a fully-fledged site. Shows a lot of promise though.
The StoryGraph is really cool. Instead of the review option for a book being just a text box, it has users fill out a little survey on the book (if they want). How was the pacing? What was the mood of the book? Is it plot- or character-driven? Those questions all get aggregated and summarized, which makes it a really easy way to get a "feel" for a book at a glance. Here's Andy Weir's The Martian on the site, as an example. It also lets you customize the recommendations it pulls for you using a lot of the data it gathers from reviews, so you can see recommended lists by, say mood or pacing.
LibraryThing has the worst interface of all of the options. When I first used it I thought it was kinda neat in an old-web sort of way, but the longer I'm on there, the more I'm hoping it gets a refresh. Adding books is a little messy, as searching for titles will pull up lots of different editions and whatnot, but it also was the best of the sites about being able to find niche books that might not already have their own listing on the site. It also has the best recommendations. They were already good when I started using them, but the site recently updated their recommendation system, and it's great. This is the one I'm currently on in part because I took all the time a while back to manually import my books (from my own personal spreadsheet log, not Goodreads) and because its recommendations feel the best to me.
Part of me wants to jump ship to The StoryGraph, but I honestly didn't feel that its recommendations were that great for me (part of that could be because I only put a few years' worth of books in it and it needs more data on me though). I will say that The StoryGraph has replaced Goodreads for when I'm searching up information on books. I always used to just type "goodreads [title]" into my search, then look at the cover, rating, tags, and maybe a few reviews. I can do the same thing with The StoryGraph, but the additional data they give yields a way better overview for me.
I really dig the website design and UX. I like the ideas. I liked them so much I just signed up... and it was an instant letdown. :( Citing the creator's own words:
I was unable to find the very first book I tried ("The Son" by Philipp Meyer) because Hardcover doesn't recognize non-English book titles (Goodreads does). I tried using English with mixed results, I finally found it, but it had 0 reviews and there was nothing interesting about it.
I tried looking for another book ("The Kite Runner" by Khaled Hosseini) and failed. I had no idea what the English title was (I tried "A boy with a kite" because that's the direct translation from my language, but now I know it's "The Kite Runner", I had to look it up... on Goodreads!). It has 5 reviews.
I guess it's difficult to use a new service when it hasn't been fed with data yet. Another problem I have is that Hardcover is English-centric, while Goodreads' UI is in English, it has a notion of different languages and it's possible to filter the reviews by language they were written in. I think in the current state of affairs it's not going to work for me.
EDIT: I just signed up for The StoryGraph as well. I'm going to use all those websites for now and see which one I like best and decide whether I want to stay with any of them.
It's not pretty but I've seen some friends use librarything.com recently.
I've been kind of looking for something similar and stumbled upon Bookwyrm which I've been meaning to check out.
I was recently peer pressured into joining Bookwyrm. It wasn't useful to me, but I believe there is a way to import from goodreads and other similar sites.
I tried it out the other day since I really like the federated open source spirit. I deleted my account again after a little while since the goodreads import didn't work in my case. I had to import hundreds of books and the import status page at the end said something else than what actually happened which resulted in an incomplete import with no way of knowing what was actually missing.
I manually input like 130 books, so I totally get trying to avoid that pain lol
I've replaced my previous use of Goodreads with Bookwyrm. But I mostly use it for just tracking what I've read or am reading. I never used the recommendation stuff from Goodreads, so I can't really say how well Bookwyrm substitutes there.
Some newer ones are Hardcover & Oku
I think Openreads covers what you're looking for.
I've been using Bookshelf and Librarything on android. I use both to see where they are going, still room to improve but they are enough for my needs.
My current system consists of a list in https://checkvist.com/, which is a checklist management service and not a reading library management service, and its bookmarklet for saving web pages. When I come across a book that interests me on the web, I save whatever web page that has its info to the list. On mobile, I can 'share' a web page from within the browser to its app to save it to the list. When I'm in a physical book store or a library, I'd just add the book title to the list manually.
I'm working on making it a habit to write down notes on what I read, but when I do manage to write down notes, they go to a self-hosted tiddlywiki instance.
Every few years or so I go searching for an alternative, but I haven't found anything that matches Goodread's extensive library and support for books in non-English languages. And then its cluttered UI keeps turning me off, so I keep coming back to Checkvist.
Shout out for Fantastic Fiction which does a much better job of alerting me to new stuff I might like than Goodreads does. Which is the only reason I use Goodreads, FF might not hit the things you want though.
I use Google Drive (sheets) to track all my books I own and want to read. I feel like social media might be the downfall of modern society so I've been trying to distance myself from it. (comment made on a social site :/ )
i use one i havent seen mentioned yet, its called BookDigits - i only use it for tracking what i have read, although it does have recommendations and find me a book features, but i cant comment on how useful these are.
It also recently launched a companion site for tracking tv & films, if you dont already use Trakt, which i do, so havent used it.
I've recently gotten back into reading thanks to getting an eReader but I've found it really difficult to whittle down the YA, misery-bait, or supernatural romance that dominates modern Western readership.
So far none of the sites recommended (Goodreads included) allow for blacklisting tags or subjects as far as I can tell despite crowdsourcing that data for all titles. Is this a technical thing or is the exclusion of a filtering feature more of an expression of the literature community's disgust towards any type hiding of prose as an ethical matter?
When I generated recommendations at the StoryGraph it asked me what I didn't like in books. Have you tried that website?
I actually made an account when I first looked at this post. I guess I must have skipped my way through the onboarding process so I could look at the UI. It took some hunting around but I found the onboarding quiz again and it indeed has a place for blacklisting genres.
Thanks for making me give the site another chance!