From Medium:
Goodreads, the largest literary social media network, should be a good gathering place for readers. It is one of the only online communities for people who like to read books, but the service’s apparent monopoly seems to have stopped it from innovating, based on complaints from users and, well, basic observation. As a result, readers don’t have a good, central online community where they can discuss favorite novels or dish about exciting new releases; authors and publishers don’t have a reliable, trustworthy way to promote their books and interact with fans; book clubs and literary publications don’t have a good way to use the site to gain members and foster discussions.
What Goodreads is good for is keeping your own list of books you want to read or have read this year. It’s a list-making app. And while that’s useful, it doesn’t live up to the company’s full promise of being a haven for readers. Readers and authors deserve a better online community. And while Amazon has at least some nominal interest in improving many of its other products — Alexa, for example, becomes more advanced with each passing year — Goodreads lingers in the dustbin of the early aughts, doomed to the hideous beige design and uninspiring organization of a strip mall doctor’s office.
“It’s just really clunky and slow,” says Dustin Martin, a reader, Goodreads user, and software engineer. “Even having the resources of Amazon behind it, the site feels like a relic, an early web 2.0 sort of deal. I don’t think I’ve seen real improvement or new features since I started using the site in 2014.”
Martin brings up the difficulty of searching for books, a feature that numerous other frustrated Goodreads users complained to me about: The search tool is not intuitive, and if the user makes any mistakes, the book may not come up in Goodreads search at all. Even when a book or author is accurately entered into the search bar, the correct result is often, inexplicably, at the bottom of a list following 10 irrelevant other books.
. . . .
My own biggest trouble — one that was echoed by several other Goodreads users I spoke to — is the opaqueness of the platform’s shelving system. If I want to read a book, I put it on my Want to Read shelf. If I’ve read it, it goes to my Read shelf, and books I’m currently reading appear, obviously, on my Currently Reading shelf.
But what if I ditched a book halfway through because I didn’t like it? I can create a DNF (Did Not Finish) shelf, but the way the site is currently designed, it seems as if a book must also appear on one of the shelves created by Goodreads. While it is, according to a Goodreads spokesperson, possible to create a custom shelf in which books added are exclusive to that shelf only, not a single person I interviewed was aware of this.
. . . .
Goodreads “posits itself as a platform for discovering and uplifting literature but requires publishers to pay so much money to have their books even remotely accessible,” says Allison Paller, a book publicist. She points out that much of the content in newsletters is sponsored, which can leave out independent book publishers with small marketing budgets, and giveaways — which aren’t clearly marked as sponsored — cost at least $119 for a “standard” print or e-book giveaway and $599 for a “premium” giveaway, “which is negligible for big companies but a big deal to small publishers.” (OneZero confirmed this by looking at Goodreads’ 2019 rate sheet for advertisements.)
Link to the rest at Medium
Oh, really? 😉
The infamous Goodreads, where Authors dare not tread for fear of Trolls and Harpies?
Sure, go there all the time…Not!
I stopped using Goodreads 2-3 years ago, and haven’t missed it.
I stopped using Goodreads about 3 years ago or so after getting fed up with numerous issues. I thought some of those would improve after Amazon took it over and it could thus pull books together straight from author pages and such. Nope. It was more work than it was worth just to keep things updated on it.
While I was considering abandoning it, another writer mentioned getting hit with a 1-star rating by a gal who had contacted her about getting a free copy of her book. When she refused to just hand out free copies to people she didn’t know and hadn’t offered them to, the gal posted the 1-star rating on her book. She noticed the gal had done a whole SLEW of 1-star ratings that day. I went to see what she was talking about. The 1-star gal posted literally HUNDREDS of 1-star ratings that day. I stopped tracking her after about four hours, and she’d done over 500 1-star ratings (just ratings, no reviews) in that time. I contacted Goodreads about it, asking if their policies really allowed someone to post literally HUNDREDS of 1-star ratings in a single day (I even provided a link to the gal’s page, so they could see for themselves what I was talking about). Yep. It’s not a violation in any way. That was the last straw for me.
As a reader, the fact the search is so unreliable discouraged me from using it after a while. Also, getting things OFF my bookshelf because I no longer wanted to read them, or had read them and thought they sucked, was a royal pain in the butt. It wasn’t worth the hassle.
” the way the site is currently designed, it seems as if a book must also appear on one of the shelves created by Goodreads. While it is, according to a Goodreads spokesperson, possible to create a custom shelf in which books added are exclusive to that shelf only, not a single person I interviewed was aware of this.”
I figured it out. All on my own. You go into “Edit” for shelves, and you click on “exclusive” for the shelf. Extremely useful. I can sort out the books that I want to read but aren’t published yet to the shelf for them so I can keep track of them and their publish dates.
I figured it out by myself too.
I use Goodreads as a way to record what I’ve read and review books, and for that, it works fine. (I like the feature whereby I can repost to my review blog with a single click.) Also as a way to check out books I’m thinking about reading, though I do agree with the OP that the search is a bit borked. Searching for an exact title (without author) often yields a list of books, presumably better-known ones, with one or two words from that title; the exact match is buried.
And there is a discovery mechanism: friends.
It is one of the only online communities for people who like to read books, but the service’s apparent monopoly seems to have stopped it from innovating, based on complaints from users and, well, basic observation.
Another author said, “Monopoly.” OK, on the count of three…everybody drink!
Can’t.
I ran out of buzzword booze reading the pieces on interactive pipe dreams.
Need to start avoiding those…
“…authors and publishers don’t have a reliable, trustworthy way to promote their books and interact with fans; book clubs and literary publications don’t have a good way to use the site to gain members and foster discussions.”
Might it be because it *isn’t* meant to serve those people?
It’s not a publishers’ site or a critics’ site or (at all) a literary site.
It’s a site for readers (of commercial fiction, mostly).
The great unwashed.
(While some authors use it to engage readers instead of their own website, the results have been less than satisfactory in many cases.)
https://www.salon.com/2013/10/09/goodreads_where_readers_and_authors_battle_it_out_in_an_online_lord_of_the_flies/
The place has been around long enough to have developed its own custims and expectations. And propagandizing for publishers isn’t one.
Anybody who wants something different is free to go create and support their own site.
Which is what one of the big publishers did, years ago. For a while. It was so blatant a (single publisher) promotion site hardly anybody went twice. Crickets and tumbleweeds followed.
Felix you and I are thinking alike with this article, but I was focusing on the last paragraph PG snipped.
The assumption is the only way you can ‘discover’ and ‘uplift’ books is via paid advertising. Word of mouth and readers being able to discuss what they like and don’t like is not an acceptable method of discovering books. ‘We paid money, we told you this book was good, and you will read it and like it!!!!’
“It’s just really clunky and slow,” says Dustin Martin, a reader, Goodreads user, and software engineer. “Even having the resources of Amazon behind it, the site feels like a relic, an early web 2.0 sort of deal. I don’t think I’ve seen real improvement or new features since I started using the site in 2014.”
Yes. I checked it out when I published my first book in 2010, and I couldn’t believe how many people used it. It reminded me of the original Yahoo directory and DMOZ. And it still does.
Someone mentioned how Goodreads ads for authors needed fixing. I replied that I didn’t know Goodreads had ads. I have six of my own books listed there and post completion of 60 or so a year that I’ve read and never noticed an ad.
“… many of the 18 or so people I spoke to for this story …”
Warned us that the OP didn’t go out of their way to do any actual research, they already knew what they wanted to say. It doesn’t do what they want the way they want it done. And no mention of anyone else that is doing things in an approved manner.
Just another whine piece Medium needed to fill in their ADS quota. 😉
And while Goodreads calls itself “the world’s largest site for readers and book recommendations,” many of the 18 or so people I spoke to for this story insisted that, in fact, Goodreads is nearly useless for finding recommendations. “For some reason, Goodreads seems to attract an audience of people with insanely bland and entry-level taste,” Martin says. He points to the site’s Best Books Ever list, which includes Harry Potter, high school curriculum novels, and copious YA.
GoodReads is popular and people are shocked that popular books are recommended? Umm, okay.
Beyond that, I have no idea what the author of this piece wants, in a positive sense. If GoodReads can do absolutely nothing right, presumably there’s an opportunity out there for somebody to build an alternative and profit thereby. “Endless” problems, really?
At least we’re past all the people saying they were leaving and never returning when Amazon acquired the site. As best I recall, I don’t think many people actually did.