Goodreads and Its Competitors
The Best and the Rest for Tracking Your Reading
I’ve talked before about how one thing that is mandatory for every writer to do—as far as I can tell, anyway—is read. Most writers read. Reading is how you learn to be a good writer. Absorbing the writing of others and taking the lessons you learn through observation to apply to your own stories. This is the way.
I’ve also talked before about how in another universe I am probably a librarian. I have all the qualifications except, you know, the master’s degree in library science. Every now and then I think I will get one but time keeps on ticking and I don’t have enough of it to devote to something like that. Instead, I practice amateur librarianship. Organize and categorize everything. All things at all times. Create order from chaos.
Listen, time makes fuels of us all.
A lot of folks use Goodreads as their one-stop online spot for cataloging the books they read, rating and reviewing them, learning what their friends are reading, and finding new books to read. I was surprised to learn that people aren’t universally aware of all the competitors out there to Goodreads. It’s far from the only game in town for this purpose. There are a number of alternatives to Goodreads, each with its own strengths and weaknesses.
Today’s article covers Goodreads, the most popular book tracking and reading-related social media app; what I consider its cardinal weaknesses and few strengths; and some apps you may prefer to use instead depending on your requirements and goals. If anything you read here gets you curious about making a switch, I even have some guidance on how to leave Goodreads behind for . . . good.
I have been using Goodreads since 2007 and I have more than six hundred books shelved. Goodreads launched in 2006, and even then it was not the first of its kind (more on that later). It was better marketed and had more features than the other offerings at that time and quickly became the predominant site of its type and an early example of a social cataloging app.
Goodreads makes it very simple to indicate the books you have read in the past, the books you are currently reading, and the books you would like to read in the future. The database of books you can pull from is absolutely vast and draws from a number of sources, Amazon and the Library of Congress among them. I’ve never searched for a book in Goodreads, however obscure, and not had it come up.
Next, Goodreads features a helpful customizable shelving system. All users start with three default shelves but can create as many custom shelves as they would like to have to organize their books to any level of granularity they desire. I think I am fairly extra when it comes to organizing my books, with dozens of virtual shelves, but some users have hundreds. A book can be added to multiple shelves—it’s a terrible limitation of real-world physics, if you ask me, that a book can only be placed on one shelf at a time—allowing for a very useful tagging system.
Then, finally, Goodreads incorporates a social aspect. Users can see what their friends are reading and reviewing, as their friends can see them. There’s a system for making and receiving recommendations and a personalizable annual challenge to gamify reading. Goodreads also has a follow function to see the ratings and reviews of users who are not your friends—personally, I use this feature to see content from people with similar taste in books to me.
In 2013, Amazon purchased Goodreads. Amazon had previously acquired Goodreads’ competitor Shelfari and then later shut it down, funneling users to Goodreads. There’s a lot to say on the acquisition of Goodreads by Amazon, specifically related to Amazon’s stranglehold on the book publishing industry, and perhaps I’ll say discuss that in another article.
For the purpose of today’s article, though, the acquisition did cause some problems that still endure today. Since Amazon took over Goodreads, there has been little (if any) new development on the site. The site has grown clunky and slow and I experience login issues fairly often when trying to access my account. It’s not terribly unusual for Amazon to purchase a related business just to keep that business from competing with them, but Goodreads remains the market leader in book-related social media. While Amazon isn’t doing anything to develop or improve it, they’re not doing anything to crush it, either.
Without any development for nearly the last decade, there are some competitors out there that have surpassed Goodreads—but, as they’re not affiliated with Amazon, they don’t have nearly the same visibility. Lucky for you, your book-oriented friend Catherine knows all about these apps.
LibraryThing
LibraryThing has been around since 2005—even longer than Goodreads. The main drawback to LibraryThing versus Goodreads is that fewer people use it by a large margin. LibraryThing boasts “a community of 2,550,000 book lovers,” which is a lot of book lovers, but Goodreads has 90 million users. If you’re into Goodreads for the social aspect, unfortunately, you’re going to have a hard time migrating to LibraryThing—odds are, your friends aren’t on there.
In its favor, LibraryThing is totally free and independent. In fact, it’s still majority owned by its founder. It doesn’t show you ads—instead, it funds itself by using its technology and data to improve libraries. Using LibraryThing enriches the field of library science instead of a giant megacorporation.
LibraryThing’s BookSuggester handles their recommendation process, which takes the title of a book you like (it won’t utilize an author’s name) and suggests books that you might enjoy based on what other users who liked the same book as you also liked. In a very brief experiment, I plugged a favorite book title into the Suggester and reviewed the recommendations I got and compared them with the “Readers Also Enjoyed” section for the same book on Goodreads. Many of the same titles popped up, but LibraryThing showed me more options, and more of the options I saw were books I have enjoyed or want to read.
LibraryThing could really use a website overhaul at this point. The site gives you a tremendous amount of information but it looks dated and and it’s not terribly user friendly. LibraryThing has an app but, again, it’s pretty barebones and not very useful or intuitive.
LibraryThing is great for someone who wants to create a deep and meaningful digital catalog of their books, but doesn’t need a flashy, feature-rich website or mobile experience and isn’t heavily invested in the social aspect.
BookSniffer
If discoverability is your big need, BookSniffer might be a good fit. BookSniffer has none of the social media aspects that Goodreads excels at and LibraryThing kinda halfheartedly tries to do. There’s no “friending.” You don’t have any friends in BookSniffer. It’s friendless environment. Or friend-free, depending on how you look at it.
BookSniffer has a cataloging feature where you can add books to your library (those you have read) or your “TBR pile” (those you want to read). The main function of BookSniffer, though, is to alert you to deals on books. You can quickly sift through what’s selling well right now, or you can review deals and sales to find low prices on books you already want to read or books you’d check out if the price was right. BookSniffer will show you the best available deal on the books you search for, or you can filter deals by genre—for instance, you can quickly browse everything that’s under $3 in science fiction and BookSniffer will show you what’s available and where you can snag it.
Personally, I don’t shop for books this way but a lot of book consumers do. A huge, huge group of book consumers out there choose their reading material based on genre and price. This is a big component in how low-cost and free self-published books in the Kindle marketplace find their audience. If you are someone who likes to read in a specific genre and you are willing to take a chance on an interesting-looking but unknown book if the price is right, you should definitely check out BookSniffer. BookSniffer courts indie authors and small indie presses as clients for their marketing offerings, so it’s also a great way to find out about books that aren’t getting a big advertising push from a major trad publisher.
While the site and app are much more modern and useful than the ones from LibraryThing or Goodreads, the BookSniffer app will only take you so far before routing you to the mobile BookSniffer website for more information, which is very annoying.
The StoryGraph
A while back, I spent some time talking about readers’ advisory, which is the science and skill of helping readers find books they will enjoy. The StoryGraph (recently out of beta) is dedicated to helping you find books you will really enjoy, based on what you have enjoyed in the past or what you’re in the mood for right now.
I’m pretty impressed by The StoryGraph’s recommendation algorithm. This site takes a number of criteria directly from readers’ advisory—things like pacing and mood in addition to genre—and finds you books similar to those. Instead of comparing user data, The StoryGraph compares user-generated book data.
When you add a book on The StoryGraph, you will have the option to rate and review the book on a number of criterion questions—What was the pacing like? Was it plot-driven or character-driven? Were the characters likeable or not? Your responses to these questions join other user-generated data to create an aggregate profile of the book. So if you enjoyed a book that was, for instance, a medium-paced, adventurous YA fantasy with LGBTQIA+ elements, The StoryGraph will look for other books that users have rated as medium-paced, adventurous YA fantasies with LGBTQIA+ elements instead of simply showing you books that other users who liked this book have liked. This provides a deeper and more meaningful book-matching process.
You can also simply tell The StoryGraph what you feel like reading right now. If you’re hankering for an adventurous and funny, short, fast-paced science fiction title that is not targeted at young adults, you can ask the site to show you books exactly like that and it will provide you with dozens of titles that match what you asked for.
Like LibraryThing, The StoryGraph does not have a user base anything like Goodreads, so you probably won’t find your friends on here. It’s also not great for finding other users’ reviews—they’re buried a couple of clicks deep, so you really have to go looking for them (on Goodreads, they’re prominently displayed right in front of your face). The strength of The StoryGraph is in the high quality of the recommendations it makes. It works a bit like What Should I Read Next?, but better, and with a robust catalog functionality for tracking your library.
Thinking about moving away from Goodreads, if you’re already a user, probably sounds overwhelming and not worth the time or trouble. If you’ve spent years adding books to Goodreads, rating them, writing thoughtful reviews—there’s no way you want to give up and start all over.
The good news is that Goodreads makes it incredibly simple to export your entire library with a single button click—you just go to My Books, scroll down to the Tools section in the left-hand column, and click on “Import and export.” The first thing on there is a button to click if you want to export your entire Goodreads library to a .CSV file. All of your user-generated content about each book comes in to the CSV—including your star rating and review—as well as a decent amount of the book’s metadata.
You don’t have to painstakingly copy it over to a new app, either. Both LibraryThing and The StoryGraph will ingest your Goodreads CSV and map your data to their system. I’ve tried the ingestion process on both sites: It was easy to do and it worked very well. (It helps that all three sites use a congruent five-star rating system.) BookSniffer is the odd site out, and doesn’t have a process to ingest data from the Goodreads—probably because its focus is so different from the other offerings, relying less on your past reading to generate suggestions than it does on showing you great deals.
If you’re a Goodreads user by default but it’s not serving your book-cataloging and book-finding needs, a change could be in order. If you didn’t know there was more out there, now you do. Transferring your data is a simple process, so I encourage you to check out some of these other book tracking sites to see if they can meet your needs better than the same old site.
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