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Let's talk about Goodreads: Publishing obsesses over Goodreads, but does Goodreads actually sell books?
(misshelved.substack.com)
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this post was submitted on 19 Feb 2024
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Literature
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I have no idea.
I do know that I'm not super enthusiastic about Amazon being the one controlling my reading history, but I've tried migrating to several of the alternatives and it's just too much.
Goodreads has a nice page where you can see 50 books at a time, skim down the list, and checkbox to make bulk changes. I'm willing to painstakingly reconstruct lists like that with an alternative, even though it will still be kind of a pain. But I'm not willing to manually search every title to add it to a list, or go through my reading history and need multiple clicks and backwards navigations for every book I want to add to a list, and that's the state of anything I tried a couple months ago. Bookwyrm specifically sounds really nice, as a way to use federated tools to find people with similar interest and follow their reading and share. But the transfer is a lot.
I’m in the same boat. I tried Storygraph and the error rate importing from Goodreads was too high for me and it was missing some features I use to keep my books organized.
I’d love to move away from an Amazon-owned company, but all the alternatives are lackluster, at least for me.
I think what I'm eventually going to have to do is roll my own. I don't need crazy complexity, but I do want some features nothing seems to have. I want the bulk editing that's only on goodreads, and I really want series to be first class citizens. That means series nesting in other series and being able to have a blurb/rating for a series instead of each individual entry, mostly. I just haven't got to it yet.
I don't necessarily have to have the metadata all the public social network style tools use to combine everyone's input to one book object, though I definitely understand how it's frustrating for services to lose information when you import your lists. But organization tools are critical to me.
Bookwyrm was missing a lot of books, and I couldn’t quickly figure out a way to add them. I am pretty invested in Storygraph already so it wasn’t a big priority to figure it out.
I had like 1200 books when I tried it, and the number missing wasn't too bad.
But I'm not doing a list of 100 books searching one at a time. It's bad enough to have to do big chunks to add to my reading history because I don't keep that up. Re-doing organization without bulk editing just isn't going to happen.
@Bitrot Just search for the book you want, and if it isn't on your instance, it will give you the option to import it from other instances, Inventaire or OpenLibrary. Then you'll be able to edit the details. If none of these options are the right ones, you can manually add the book by clicking the last option.
But indeed, it does have a lot of missing books and editions of books. If you do not have the patience to add them, then it is clearly not for you.
Inventaire is also AP enabled, despite being centralized, tho.
@conciselyverbose
I don't use their reviews to decide what to read, but I have checked after the fact on books I like and I think the quality of what they surface tends to be pretty bad.
A lot of mindless criticism, especially. It's perfectly OK to be critical when a book has flaws, but so many of the top reviews were people who just weren't the target audience criticizing it for being targeted at something different than they wanted. Whether that's rigorous academic nonfiction with reviews complaining that it cites its sources, kid/YA books with people complaining that there isn't enough depth, someone like Janet Evanovich or Jana Deleon writing deliberately nonsensical stuff for light humor getting complaints about not being realistic, romantic suspense getting criticism because characters are emotionally connected too fast when that's part of what the genre is, etc.
It's perfectly fine to be disinterested in a book because you're not interested in that genre, but it seems like way too many of the higher visibility reviews are people who just aren't interested in what the book is trying to do.