And once again, as with any social media related site, the technical aspect is the smallest problem or hurdle to overcome rather than who's going to curate, who's going to moderate, etc. etc.
Everyone builds alternatives thinking it's like the freaking field of dreams...
I have switched to StoryGraph, and I don't look back.
I read books in five languages, and I read a lot of old ones, too, that are from pre-ISBN era. Not finding them on Goodreads and not being able to add them was a serious drawback. GR demands an online book webpage to add a book, which don't exist for a lot of niche books I read.
StoryGraph totally solved it.
And I also use Bookmory [0] for regular tracking and sharing pretty visuals. You should give Bookmory a try.
I don't really care for the social aspect of goodreads, I just like to find other people's reviews and have a meta-data rich way to track what I've read and my TBR, and for that OpenReads is incredible. Pretty damn featureful, fetches metadata and reviews from various sources really well, beautiful modern Material You UI. Highly recommended
I’ve been using StoryGraph for a long time, since it was a PWA. It’s come a long way and the developer is great at listening to feedback and taking suggestion. Highly recommend it
I’m a little bit embarrassed to share it at this point, but I’m developing an application, called Biblish, that is meant to offer small utilities that augment the process of reading, writing, publishing, and distributing literature. One piece of that is a note taking software, called Papertrail, that allows you to take notes for books you are reading in print, and other users can subscribe to these notes and see them on a page by page basis as they read the book themselves.
I am a writer of literary fiction first and foremost, and I never really understood the interest in tracking or reviewing books. I can see its usefulness for a certain segment of the market, but what I come to read is mostly the result of following the map of influences of the authors who inspire my writing. The quality of these works is thoroughly vetted by their centuries of survival. Little reviews do not seem like a useful mechanism for finding the best in contemporary literature either.
In any event, little reviews and social features are a much better way to develop a user base for your platform. Papertrail works fairly well as intended, and I use it extensively, but we found pretty early on that asking users to take extensive notes on books was too large a barrier of entry for people to cross and start producing the content the site needs to grow. My lead developer, who really functioned, perhaps a little too well, as cofounder, found a good job opportunity elsewhere, and I have not been able to replace him. Me and another developer are still working on it, but it looks to be on the road of another application that did not quite find a market.
Hey, author here. First of all, thank you for sharing my post on Hacker News, and secondly, thank you for all the comments. Based on them, I updated the post and added StoryGraph and BookWyrm to the post, both lovely recommendations and alternatives.
I really love my Bookwyrm instance bookrastinating. I've moved off of other social media entirely to mastodon, lemmy and bookwyrm. it's just enough with nice people without the horror show of the commercial ones. I donate to my instances. It's a good time.
> There is room for a platform that not only allows people to track their reading progress and books, but also connect with fellow readers. At the same time, I would like to take one step further and state that the very same platform could allow readers to connect with authors, and allow authors through unique social features to interact with their readers. And to go another step further, why not use the same platform to highlight independent book stores in the regions of the users whenever they discover a new book
Doesn't Goodreads do all of this (except the last), just hidden behind a poor UI?
My main interaction with Goodreads is to take part in a discussion group called "Evolution of Science Fiction". They read and discuss a scifi novel and a short story every month, cycling through the decads from old to new. It's very social and I've had a tonne of recommendations through it.
The author of this article should give Hardcover a fair shake, rather than admitting "I felt a bit of a social reading fatigue from Goodreads, Oku, and Literal, and since Hardcover also has a dedicated focus on connecting with others and explore their bookshelves, it was not the alternative I was looking for."
Yes, Hardcover has some degree of social component - but it also isn't a component that is in your face or that you have to use. Indeed, it isn't as dedicated to the social component (yet) as TheStoryGraph is... and yet the author highly praises TSG.
Full disclosure: I've been a paying Supporter of both TSG and Hardcover for a couple of years now, and I'm a Librarian in both systems. I'm also the staff-level Head Librarian at Hardcover. :)
The line you just cited from the article were my personal feelings/emotions while giving it a try, published in a personal post, on my personal publication, and if I decide after that, that it is not the alternative I was looking for, it is simply a personal decision.
Also, I am not *praising* StoryGraph but simply add an overview of it after it got suggested by a couple of readers.
Readit News
Everyone builds alternatives thinking it's like the freaking field of dreams...
I read books in five languages, and I read a lot of old ones, too, that are from pre-ISBN era. Not finding them on Goodreads and not being able to add them was a serious drawback. GR demands an online book webpage to add a book, which don't exist for a lot of niche books I read.
StoryGraph totally solved it.
And I also use Bookmory [0] for regular tracking and sharing pretty visuals. You should give Bookmory a try.
[0]: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.tonysoft.b...
https://papertrail.biblish.com
I am a writer of literary fiction first and foremost, and I never really understood the interest in tracking or reviewing books. I can see its usefulness for a certain segment of the market, but what I come to read is mostly the result of following the map of influences of the authors who inspire my writing. The quality of these works is thoroughly vetted by their centuries of survival. Little reviews do not seem like a useful mechanism for finding the best in contemporary literature either.
In any event, little reviews and social features are a much better way to develop a user base for your platform. Papertrail works fairly well as intended, and I use it extensively, but we found pretty early on that asking users to take extensive notes on books was too large a barrier of entry for people to cross and start producing the content the site needs to grow. My lead developer, who really functioned, perhaps a little too well, as cofounder, found a good job opportunity elsewhere, and I have not been able to replace him. Me and another developer are still working on it, but it looks to be on the road of another application that did not quite find a market.
My profile on Papertrail can be found below.
https://papertrail.biblish.com/russell
I'll give biblish a go!
Doesn't Goodreads do all of this (except the last), just hidden behind a poor UI?
My main interaction with Goodreads is to take part in a discussion group called "Evolution of Science Fiction". They read and discuss a scifi novel and a short story every month, cycling through the decads from old to new. It's very social and I've had a tonne of recommendations through it.
Yes, Hardcover has some degree of social component - but it also isn't a component that is in your face or that you have to use. Indeed, it isn't as dedicated to the social component (yet) as TheStoryGraph is... and yet the author highly praises TSG.
Full disclosure: I've been a paying Supporter of both TSG and Hardcover for a couple of years now, and I'm a Librarian in both systems. I'm also the staff-level Head Librarian at Hardcover. :)
Also, I am not *praising* StoryGraph but simply add an overview of it after it got suggested by a couple of readers.