Monetizing such a site would be difficult unless you happen to be already the world's biggest bookseller. Thus, any person/organisation with skills and talent to undertake such a task would be better off promoting something with wider margins.
Discounting this reason, and supposing it happened, then amazon could just turn up the dial and throw some resources at it. As things stand, they don't need to.
I have been an amazon affiliate for 10 years or more and, to be fair, they behave much better than any other affiliate program I have been involved with.
both of these require very large audiences to make money, the amazon affiliate program pays very poorly and people hate & block ads. Not saying it's impossible but the days of slapping a few ads and affiliate links on your website and expecting to make decent revenue are long gone. Especially if you want to offer a good UX
I see a lot of sites grow to thousands in monthly revenue fairly quickly and sell quickly for a minimum of 40x monthly multiple. There are tons of resources and tools out there to build sites that will generate a lot of organic traffic.
It takes a lot of work but if you have the resources practically all of it can be outsourced. What I do is learn as much as I can about each role that is needed, then I hire virtual assistants and train them to do that role. That helps keep costs down since you aren't hiring an "expert".
I'm growing a couple sites right now that I haven't written a single word for or taken a single photograph because I have some awesome writers and a photographer. I've also never posted a single article to Wordpress because, you guessed it, I have an awesome VA that I trained to do that for me. I even have a content manager (the highest paid role) who manages the writers and tells them pretty specifically what to write.
They get paid immediately. It requires capital to run this business. There is always a risk I will lose everything I invested into it. Running this business requires several different roles.
Actually they aren't long gone at all. Go look at Empire Flippers, Flippa, etc. I build, buy, and operate affiliate and display advertising websites. Lots of sites can make $30 per 1000 visitors just on ads depending on the niche. Some affiliate sites make over $700 per 1000 visitors. Again it depends a lot on the niche.
Also the majority of people do not block ads. This also depends on the niche though. Gaming and tech niches are usually low RPM unless you get targeted affiliate traffic (like you show up on Google for "Best Gaming Laptops of 2021")
would you consider a book reviews website a profitable niche? seems like it'd be a gamble in terms of effort vs reward given that most books are pretty inexpensive
People looking for books online likely have more disposable income than the average population. So I would say ad revenue will probably look pretty good but this is just a guess. Sometimes this can be surprising for different niches. For example, you might not think recipe websites make much money but in fact they often make $30 per 1000 visitors (on ads alone) due to their audience profile. I got turned down offering $140k for a recipe website a few months ago. They were making around $3k per month.
As far as affiliate revenue, they are very likely to be making a purchase soon if they are looking at book reviews so if you can get them to click your Amazon affiliate link there will be fairly high conversion. The revenue per purchase probably is quite low due to the price and margins on a physical book (although I wonder what it looks like for Kindle books) but with enough traffic you can absolutely make it work. I can think of some interesting ways to get a lot of traffic with Pinterest as well in this niche.
This is a numbers game. Keep your costs low and your time involvement low and even if it is only making $2k/month that is good enough because you can have several sites at the same time.
Btw as far as needing a ton of traffic to make money well sometimes that is true to an extent. Recently I was looking at a website that was the most popular user-created website for a specific mobile game. It is generating $6k/month despite having the lowest RPM I've seen so far (only making around $2 per 1000 visitors). Despite this the hosting cost was only $50/mo and I bet I could get that down to $15/month with even better performance.
Side note - you get paid commissions on everything people buy for a certain time after clicking your affiliate link. People buy tons of stuff on Amazon so you'll get lots of revenue for non-book things too.
If you want more info on this type of business model go look at these site (I am not affiliated with them at all):
'...so you'll get lots of revenue for non-book things too.'
If you refer via a the books category and then someone buys from some other random category you get a much lower percentage. This has been a recent move and makes such tactics very unprofitable - for good reason too.
It's not really a "tactic" it's just a side effect of people buying everything on Amazon. You say tactic like it is some slimey technique. You are referring people to Amazon so you get paid for it.
Lack of an evident business model could be a reason that turns off smart founders from picking this problem. However, if the product adds enough value to enough number of users, one could figure ways to monetise it.
I assume the effort, time and money required to get to "enough value to enough number of users" will require you to answer the "ways to monetise" question for a VC or even yourself before you start.
No matter which book you search for, the top results will always have the Goodreads listing. In fact, Google surfaces the Goodreads rating in the Knowledge Panel. Goodreads is a monster at SEO.
Due to this some companies are literally undethronable.
It's hard because of this reason. But I'm certain alternate acquisition channels/go-to-market could exist. It's a matter of understanding the customer's journey and capturing them at a stage other than "discovery" or "search".
I'm mostly looking to share what I'm planning to read/am reading/have read with a small circle, and for that it's pretty much ideal. There's some basic collection functionality, but no complex library management, no discussions, no recommendation engine, and not very much metadata. It's probably not for everyone, but the minimal approach is refreshingly low-friction. Kudos to the creator(s) for the overall experience.
My only gripes so far have been that search is hit-or-miss (especially for non-fiction), all searches sometimes yield results in an unpredictable order (where an exact title match might be buried amongst partial or seemingly unrelated matches), and the cover they pick is sometimes less-common or downright obscure.
+1 for readng. But then, I'm not really fussed about other people's reviews or a recommendation engine. I just use it for logging what I've read and my own thoughts. I realise that's not everyone's goal though
I've never been into Goodreads or similar sites much, but my wife definitely has and reads a lot. She has switched over to The Story Graph and has really liked it (minus the lack of friends that are present).
Same here, never used Goodreads (though looked on there for book info sometimes), but have been trying out The Story Graph. Is pretty nice for tracking reading and seeing your books, even in a beta stage.
Have also looked a little into Library Thing (also mentioned in this discussion). Anyone use both and have useful comparisons, pros/cons for each?
If it's not broken, why fix it? I go to goodreads for the high-quality book reviews and community. I literally don't care about UX or fancy algorithms. I'd rather use an old algorithm called 'talking to someone I know' for book recommendations. Right now it feels like a clunky old site made for books reviews and I like that feel. I don't want some Amazon product manager who only cares about monetising (where can I smack ads?!) to touch it thank you very much. And god forbid some UX person gets hold of it and redesigns it in the boring/minimal feel (so it loads fast and we can smack lots of ads on it).
Since you call them "spam", I assume you do not want the emails you're getting, rather than saying you want the communication but they're lower quality than you want. If that's the case, I've been a GR member for years and only get emails from them when a particular author does something I've asked GR to notify me about. Implies to me that merely unsubscribing and managing your preferences seems to work.
I have a GR account due just to having a Kindle subscription and I don't use it and haven't configured anything (nor want to). Just for having the account I get emails like "the official adult site <some url> of Goodreads."
If there were some way I didn't have this goodreads account at all, that would be preferable.
Purchase a Kindle Fire. It comes with Goodreads preinstalled and cannot be removed. When you set up the device, it either asks you for your goodreads account or makes one for your amazon-linked email.
I hear you. It's not broken. It does serve the primal use cases like shelving, reviews/ratings, meta-information pretty well. But there is also so much more to the experience of reading. Is Goodreads really the best we deserve?
> But there is also so much more to the experience of reading
Like what? For me, most of the experience of reading is:
1 - actually reading the book
2- sharing my thoughts/recommending it
3 - seeing what other people recommend.
Goodreads, Youtube and Reddit cover all my needs for #2 and #3, and any attempt to cover the social aspect of it will pale in comparison to those 3, at least regarding #3.
For instance, there are things that I don't like about Twitter, and Mastodon has some things that I like, like being able to tag a specific post as NSFW, or add a spoiler tag to make part of the text hidden. But after a few months of using it in parallel to Twitter, I ended up abandoning it, because ''everyone''[0] is on Twitter.
[0] I mean: my real life friends, my online friends, bloggers, youtubers, cosplayers, illustratos, support profiles for online stores and services.
> And god forbid some UX person gets hold of it and redesigns it in the boring/minimal feel
It sounds like you care about UX a great deal, and the UX currently suits you fine!
I mostly agree with you; it has a few pain points, but I fear the day when it goes through the great Digg/Reddit redesign and becomes virtually unusable due to information density plummeting to zero.
I think it's not likely to go that route, though - since it's owned by Amazon, it doesn't have to be profitable by itself, it just needs to result in enough referrals to buy books on Amazon.
It actually is broken in a lot of ways, and I don't mean the complaints about stalkers or fake reviews or other community problems, just on the pure technical level. It's been slowly bitrotting, it feels like it somehow gets slower every year, and they've been removing features. I recently moved all of my stuff off GR and stopped using it because I asked myself why I was putting up with it when it clearly was only going to get worse over time.
For example: lists in reviews don't render, somehow they broke list markers, and this has been the case for like a decade now (?!); you can't add links to profiles anymore, and you can't edit your profile if it already has a link (because 'spam'); you can write book reviews which you can't then edit (because the edited, but somehow not the original, violates 'length limits' - which are shockingly easy to run into if you include any links); they disabled part of the export API recently, and I wouldn't be surprised if in a few years you can't even export your books...
So a new goodreads minus the technical problems comes along.
It gets popular. The community becomes a mess, it becomes costly to police, you have people upload an ID and the world hates you for invading their privacy, management shifts resources away since its stable-y making money regardless (given some Byzantine model that matters to ownership anyway) and then it falls victim to bit rot.
So a replacement to your goodreads replacement comes along...
Furthermore, is it really up to a book review site to solve the problem of identity and anonymity on the Internet? Seems like the wrong place in the stack to focus on that.
Yea, I think it's a good model for other type of companies and have thought of it before which is why I brought it up here, just felt like clarifying it is possible to do if desired.
You can actually do validation for completely anonymous accounts. The most common version is DDOS protection where even read only websites can still benefit.
An anonymous review website could similarly rate limit how quickly reviews change, so someone spamming 1,000 reviews accomplishes little.
Actually, a decent anonymous single login you could do today roughly is basically TouchID. You’d have to implement it yourself with ML, a webcam and some client side code that hashes it.
I'm defining "anonymous to the world" or "anonymous publicly", whereas you're defining it as "anonymous to everyone, even the company".
But in the scope of a book review website, and this thread about preventing spam by having ID enforced, my comment made sense as that. The company knows you, but you can have an anonymous handle to the world. I had clarified that with the line about trust.
I considered that, but most people who get annoyed about privacy are upset that private companies have any data at all. e.g. location data on Facebook.
It's good opsec to assume all private data at companies may get leaked, including links between your ID and your name.
Consider the scenario where somebody is reviewing books on dangerous subjects (politics, religion, LGBT+, etc...) and is suddenly outed to the whole world due to a data breach.
For some set of people it would be a problem, I think for book reviews that’s a tiny set, not to be dismissive of them, but still.
For other types of applications you’d want to have a better system, like a writing platform.
But still, there’s ways to do it. You can validate the high res copies of whatever you want to validate, then make a hash using a few key numbers, in partial. Stuff like that gets you close to ideal, even the worst case break would expose almost nothing, and you’d prevent duplicate accounts. Only risk is losing the documents during validation before they’re deleted.
I think what actually happens is a new Goodreads minus the technical problems and also minus the reviews and community comes along. Turns out people prefer having actual book reviews to faster page loads and more stable link structures, and everyone stays where they are...
Pinboard doesn't have near the traffic or complexity as goodreads. It's basically fetching text out of a database with a user-id lookup. No multiple databases for books, user profile, reviews, etc.
The whole page. The text is available almost immediately, so not tongue-in-cheek. Who the fuck leaves a page that they went to if the see text and a page don't see all the pictures in 2 seconds? We have a shorter attention span but not that short.
It is broken in certain aspects, Goodreads is one of the slowest sites around, if nothing else is done that alone needs fixing. And it has been in this state for years now.
I don't actually use good reads, but I clicked around - everything I clicked on loaded faster (less than 2 seconds, usually less than 1) than everything I clicked on in medium (always more than 2 seconds, where this blog post is hosted).
Neither site is fast, but "one of the slowest around" doesn't track either.
In my experience, Goodreads loads slower on a phone than on a desktop browser (and it's only the initial load that I notice being slow). I've long suspected (without evidence) that this is intentional because they nerf the mobile web experience in an attempt to get you to use their app.
I think it may be more so for logged in users. When logged in, and I go to the homepage, which is essentially an activity feed, it has 93 requests, 4.4MB of resources (1.5MB transferred), and took 7.66 seconds to finish.
How do you make a better goodreads that is sustainable when Amazon will always make it free as a way to sell more books on Amazon? It is pretty easy to make a X that is better than the status quo. How will you compete with the big guys financially? People want everything for free.
This is the billion dollar question, but having the right answer at the outset may not be necessary. In fact, most successful business go through multiple iterations on monetisation opportunities before they strike gold.
It is more important to build a product that solves problems that Goodreads doesn't solve right now, and find a way to acquire customers that doesn't rely on Google SEO.
Do you remember when people made websites to solve problems and build community, instead of to make a profit? You can always just shill for amazon using affiliate links, everyone wins.
The value of a social network is directly proportional to the number of edges in the network graph (I.e., SocialNetworkX might be better than Facebook, but if none of your friends are on it, it’s worthless). For Goodreads, couple that with the vast amount of book metadata they have + Kindle integration, and any startup would have a long way to go to even reach parity.
Scalability + data aggregation + user adoption == lots of funding + a clever business model + a significant reason to switch from $DOMINANT_COMPANY + a good bit of luck.
That requires huge financial resources, and thus, a solid monetization scheme.
Making money (and this site will take a lot of money to build, even if it's just to break even) via Amazon -- while competing with an Amazon property -- is not something that is going to work. I frankly think this is the central reason there's no goodreads competitor: how to make enough money to break even when Amazon becomes your enemy...
what bothers me even more is that all the data for those queries is user-generated, which means that users have essentially contributed value to the site but cannot get it back. that's the competition I would really like to see - a site that crowd sources book metadata in the form of tags and then makes the data freely available and searchable.
One things that is nice, is that if you have friends / follow people with similar tastes, when you see a book page, it'll feature their reviews first. For me, that's what matters. A review quality is very related to the taste of whoever is reading it in relation to you - although there are other things that matter.
But I would say that, in general, reviews are ok quality, and honest.
The review page and discussion thread is hideous and painful to navigate. If a site is to be able to recommend $nextbook it has to curate inputs, either as ratings or text reviews. There are huge bookclub memberships but hardly anybody write anything substantial because it's a quagmire to wade through (thus implying few review readers). Lapsed readers like me would love a place to talk books, obscure, trendy or not. r/books is a never-ending loop of "I've just finished Ender's Game and I ..." and "Why we do $something when we read", and similar dross. If there's any space that could use a boost in "user engagement" I wish it could be for readers. But, as we bookish lot aren't terribly argumentative, and unwilling to shiv anyone who opines that they loved DaVinci Code, it's an unknown with what to bait us. I log into Goodreads probably twice a month, avert my eyes and then close tab.
I think Steam is probably a decent model of what Goodreads could have looked like. Full of product reviews, with a carefully crafted recommendation engine that focuses in on genres/studios of interest based on a combination of what your friends are reading/reviewing/liking, your past purchases, new release, etc.
Video games have a similar problem to books in that there’s a lot of genre, and genre is also often a hazy line. And, too, some people really like stuff that I think is total crap (and vice versa).
These days I am almost exclusively shown content that I am at least somewhat interested in.
It's not at all broken for me, nor for my friends. As the article up top says, there are two ways to discover books: incidental discovery and intentional discovery. On Goodreads, incidental discovery largely flows from a daily email showing me what my friends (who are all real life friends) are reading. That daily email is the #1 reason why I won't leave Goodreads. Any site can manage my read/to-read list, but if I don't have any friends on that site, then I lose out on a big source of discovery. And I can see from the email that my friends also use that email to discover new books.
It's great that your tastes are similar enough to those of your friends' that that works for you. But I doubt that that is universal.
Recommendations could be so much more helpful if they were done by an algorithm similar to what Netflix used to have - Cinematch. Then even people without friends could get good recommendations.
My tastes are not necessarily similar to my friends. That's actually what makes the email feed cool. I am open to branching out and reading books that I normally wouldn't expect to read.
In terms of recommending what I am already likely interested in based on my previous reads, the "Readers also enjoyed" section seems decent to me. Is that what people think sucks? I've used that a fair amount and found it to be valuable. Or is it the whole "Browse" section that's bad? I never look under there.
I use goodreads every day, but that means spending 5 mins max on it (I hop in, add a book that I heard about somewhere to my to-read list, then I hop off). And, like I alluded to in my first reply, from what I can tell this behavior also holds true for my friends. I don't think I'm an outlier, though I totally understand that people use the site differently than me and they find it wanting.
That's the simplest and most naive implementation of a recommender. It doesn't take into account what I liked about a book and whether the one it's recommending is similar in that way or if I will dislike it for some other reason.
A better way to do recommendations is to find readers who have rated books similarly to me and tell me what books they've rated highly that I haven't already read. This is what Netflix's Cinematch once did and it was good. It used singular value decomposition and other linear algebra techniques on a giant matrix of raters.
> doesn't take into account what I liked about a book
I don't remember ever seeing a rating system (for books or tv) that let me do fine grain rating. And if it had it, most people[citation needed] might not use it anyway. Also, how would I say that what I liked the most about a fantasy book is the magic system, for example?
I don't care HOW the recommendation is implemented, but what shows on the recommendation. For me, 'Readers also enjoyed' shows things that are sufficiently similar, and which people that I follow - friends and bloggers - gave good ratings.
The 'lists with this book' section is also good for discovering books, as the lists are user curated, and the title helps me know what's the common theme. Ie: books with cool magic systems.
That's the beauty of this. You don't need a fine grained rating system. By comparing your preferences to those of others, the aspects of what you like and don't like become implicit.
A product has features in some high dimensional quality space. When you rate it, you provide information about your preference for those qualities without needing to explicitly rate them or even have a concept of what they are called.
I have no expectation of ever seeing useful recommendations from the sites I frequent. This might be heresy on HN, but by and large recommendation engines are pure trash. Have you ever been recommended a useful product on Amazon? One would think that a company with such large resources could occasionally point me to a product I might want.
The current Netflix algorithm is useless. Cinematch is what they used to have and they had a prize, which they awarded, for $1M to anyone who could improve it by 10%. They've apparently abandoned it.
You can say that goodreads stagnated, in a technical sense, but it's still way better than all options. It works well on desktop, the android app let's me add books by pointing my camera to the cover or barcode. All book bloggers/youtubers are there, all my friends that read are there.
When you factor in those 2 things - everyone is on goodreads, and there's no better alternative to goodreads - there's no reason to leave.
While the phrase "X is broken" is maybe the most overused in our society, GRs is functional but far from optimal. And there appears to be no incentives to get better.
I find goodreads has a bit of bias problem on their ratings. Most books are rated between 3 and 4. Its really hard to tell if that rating is accurate because most people who didn't finish the book (an indicator of low quality) will not leave a review.
Yeah, most review sites have the 5 or nothing problem. I look at the distribution and then find some medium to low starred reviews to see why I might not like a book that otherwise seems a good match for me.
In aggregate the star rating is pretty good for literature and non-fiction. For mass fiction it's fairly useless.
But that's a problem with people doing the ratings, not Goodreads. I see this problem with IMDB, trakt, myanimelist, anilist, etc... Because for many people, it's either 1, 4 or 5.
I think that's honestly how most people score. If you read the entire book and it was okay you give it a 3 if it was great a 4 best book ever a 5. If you hated the book you may not finish or review.
The opposite is uber where rating affects future service and puts a lot of power over others in your hand. Not giving 5 is socially unacceptable like not tipping vs tipping less and complaining.
It's all about framing though isn't it? If Uber were '1 (miserably below expectations) .. 3 (met expectations) .. 5 (above and beyond)', you wouldn't see that.
It doesn't really matter as long as everyone's on the same page I suppose. Sure, you clip stuff off the end.. but doesn't everyone just want a taxi that gets them A-B without problem? Who's actively seeking 'above and beyond'? Maybe 'would've scored >5 if I had them' is not a problem, because nobody cares?
(I should maybe say I've never actually used Uber!)
> Most books are rated between 3 and 4. Its really hard to tell if that rating is accurate
Sometimes I agree with you (because it's annoying to me too), but other times I feel like that's accurate. The difference in quality between a book that's in the 75th percentile quality-wise among the books I've read and a book that's in the 25th percentile is not very large! I'd say, by and large, most books that get published are pretty good. Few of them are completely flawless or life-changing, and that's okay. 3-4 seems about right for 50% of the books I read.
If you combine that basic fact with a range of people with differing tastes, you get even more reversion to the mean, so just about every book has a 3-4 rating.
The same goes with beer. If you check the major beer rating sites, you'll see most beers end up with a 3-4 rating. Personally I think movies have a much wider range in quality, but you still see this effect somewhat with IMDb: a huge proportion of movies is in the 6-8 range.
You might think that the ratings would be more useful if what we got was a percentile rather than an absolute rating, and that might be right... or it might disguise the fact that I really would get close to the same amount of enjoyment out of a 3.5 as a 3.9, even though they're separated by 30 percentiles or whatever.
It's strange to me that this is the pattern for things like books, movies, or beer but with Uber drivers the pattern seems to be "Give 5 stars unless something was wrong."
Before I learned this Uber etiquette I would rate drivers the same way. "Well, he got me from A to B without issue, but was there anything that set this ride apart and elevated it?"
One aspect of this problem might be that there's no incentive to have a wider dynamic range in your ratings. A naive recommendation system which just suggests highly rated books similar in some metric to ones I rated highly could be improved enormously if it took into account books I didn't like. In return for accurate ratings, I would get good recommendations.
I actually would like a better algorithm for suggestions. I can scroll fifty pages of their basic suggestions before I hit something I’m interested in and don’t already have. I would really like to fetch their catalogue and try the Netflix search improvement contest, but for books!
From reading the article, the answer seems to be something like "because Goodreads has optimised heavily for SEO and uses this to stay on top of search results".
The knowledge graph thing is something any site can opt into by using schema.org markup. So long as they don't get banned for supplying misleading info in their schema.org tags, it ought to just work.
Do you think a more "privacy-centric" Goodreads alternative could thrive? One that's mostly focused around tracking your book lists and less on the reviews?
I use LibraryThings to track what I've read, my collection, and what I want to read and I don't believe it's attempting to complete with GoodReads. It's in a different space of keeping track of your book collections and targeted at small libraries etc. I'm sure there is some community to it but I've never wandered into it and it's not the focal feature of the site
Reading List is mentioned in the article. It's in a list:
> There is a long list of startups that tried to unseat Goodreads, but they’re either in the graveyard or floating in limbo. Examples include BookClub, RocketReads, LibraryThing, ReadingList, Booknshelf, BookBrowse, Booklikes, Libib, BookSloth, Bookself.
I only use Goodreads because it is baked into the Kindle app on the Kindle Fire that I do most of my reading with. I don't remember if I ever set it up this way on purpose, but it is integrated so whenever I start reading a book, it marks it as "reading" on Goodreads, and when I finish, it marks it as "read".
One of my closest friends and his wife are on a mission to improve this space. They’ve founded a company called Italic Type: https://www.italictype.com/
1) assembling a usefully-large initial dataset to gain traction,
2) keeping it updated, and
3) content moderation & anti-spam
Seem super dull and tedious for project that's probably going to fail, and there's little about the rest of the process of building an improved Goodreads clone to offset that and make it enticing to work on. I'd say the only folks likely to try would be those who already have & maintain at least a partial dataset of books for other reasons, and/or existing name-recognition and a community around books and reading.
I haven't logged into Goodreads in ages, but their e-mail updates keep me updated on what my few friends on the platform are or want to be reading. I engage with those e-mails, and have conservations that they ignite.
This article focuses on "better" in the sense of being a successful business, rather than "better" in the sense of being a resource for book lovers. That's a really gross way to think, but he is correct in a sense, and it's why I always preferred Librarything with its wonky, book-nerd centric interface to Goodreads and its growth loops.
I'd say the interface is not one of the strong points, since it confuses a lot of people and turns them away from the site. But, it is powerful if you want to engage with it.
For example, I could compare my library to yours and get a list of the books we share, that we both liked, but aren't generally very popular. Or I could get a list of books I've read, sorted by their Lexile score. Or get a list of all the epigraph quotes printed in the books I've read.
Basically, it's a database approach rather than a social approach. You can do all the above stuff on the website, but their API is also really powerful, and free. In fact the whole site is completely free.
Another thing I really like is the Member Recommendations. They have an algorithm that recommends books you might like, based on other books. But, in addition to that, they have a list of books recommended by actual people who have read both books, explaining what it is about book B that might interest you if you liked book A. So, more like what an actual librarian would do. Here's an example of what I mean:
Lastly, I just think the vibe at Librarything is better than Goodreads. They're a tiny company made up of librarians and developers, and you feel the scrappy Web 1.0 charm from them and the community there in a way I never saw with Amazon-owned Goodreads.
I believe a better GoodReads can only be a a non-profit. Maybe something federated. Financial possibilities are almost done for. GR is too big. Event LibraryThing has Amazon money in it.
There was this reco.com (now shutdown) which was more like "recos by famous people". I didn't like that idea but I had anyway checked it out hoping it might become something better. It didn't.
Jinni kind of permanently dissuaded me from building a profile on recommendation sites feeding their recommendation engines only to see a shuttered gate after a while. Though it's actually better in cinema space right now. There are some academic options (or were; not sure what is something like Movie Lens right now)
As an avid reader who has been using Goodreads for years, my reason for not switching to an alternative has almost nothing to do with any of what the author mentions. That reason is purely the promise of stability provided by a site that's been around for longer (not to mention the big-name ownership) - the faith that Goodreads will stay running for years and years into the future.
When it comes to the list of books I've read, I want to set it and forget it - and with a small upstart, there's always the worry that the maintainer will run out of money (or interest) and shut the service down. Sure, most of these book sites have import/export functionality, but why bother with that when Goodreads will likely be around for a long time?
This is a very valid argument. You have implicitly invested effort (in form of lists) in Goodreads, and wouldn't want to lose them. It's another reason why a challenger can't rely on book tracking as the primary feature to drive adoption.
And now excuse me while I dream of a world where gifted creators can build a flourishing web gathering space where it can thrive and grow and not be then harvested by the borg that encapsulates viewers as nothing but breathing credit card tokens.
Curious, how is this different from paperbackswap.com, which has been in operation for over a decade, and has hundreds of users online at any given time? The UI of swapiverse is good, but you might have to overcome the same network effects that Goodreads has.
This feels like one of those things that will be ruined by bad actors. Finding cheap worthless books for free or next to free is quite easy. I could get my hands on 10K "books" right now for the cost of picking them up and storing them. If there is anything valuable on your site it will likely be quickly swapped out for garbage by some "entrepreneur" flipping them to a for sale site.
The project looks cool and I wish you the best of luck in designing solutions to avoid bad actors.
But the swap is for free (+cost of shipping). So of no value to one of those kinds of entrepreneurs (unless maybe they find a way to arbitrage shipping costs).
I've thought about this. I believe the cost of shipping will be paid for by the person shipping it out.
I am not an economist, but my idea is that even if someone is doing this, the economy works itself out because they still gave away a book that someone wanted.
And if the books are that garbage, nobody will request them.
Of course, this is all theory and I'll have to see/adjust as it happens.
This missed the biggest technical moat by a mile: data.
Book data is scarce and expensive. Goodreads gets it for free because of Amazon, Amazon gets it subsidized because of Amazon's chokehold on book publishing. Any Goodreads competitor needs to license paid data and sort through the duds and the duplicates, and struggle to match up book with only ASINs that are on Amazon Kindles and nowhere else.
And Kindle integration. When you finish a book on a Kindle, it asks you to review it on Goodreads. If you want to add an option to review it on $otherstartup website, your best bet is a supreme court antitrust case.
Which APIs? Worldcat, with decent data but paid licensing and lots of dirty data? Amazon’s, which they’ll shut down if you build a competitor? Try finding an API that gives you high-quality book cover images, too. And the ability to retain results.
I actually turned off the Kindle integration because it was horribly broken. Books would get marked read as soon as they were opened, and then it was a nightmare of navigating through the UI to try to edit the dates when you read a book.
Overall, I like Goodreads, but the Kindle integration is not a selling point in my experience.
Instead of reviews and recommendations from other bibliophiles, it's filled with mass-market Amazon-quality reviews.
The fantasy genre there became dominated by romance for a while, with no ability for me to filter down based on criteria like 'Ignore ratings and reviews from anyone who gave Twilight a 4+ star review'.
It is already doing what need to be done and you know what over innovation kill the simplicity of the product. Goodreads is pretty simple and great part is it is not suggesting me someone to follow based on books I've read. That is innovation for all the current social app and it sucks.
I did make a better Goodreads. But only for my very narrow use case.
Namely, I just wanted to keep track of what I read. I didn't care for the social aspects of it nor the discovery part of it. I did want certain statistics on my reading though, so a plain text file wasn't going to cut it.
Unfortunately, Goodreads was a huge pain to use UX-wise and didn't really provide the statistics I was looking for either. The one positive thing I can say for Goodreads is that the books I read were already there (I'm primarily reading Japanese light novels, so whether the titles are available on the service for tracking purposes or not is a real concern for me), which is probably a bigger problem than you might think for anyone who'd want to build a competitor? The friction to use an alternative service is obviously going to be much higher if you have to get the books you read added to the service first before you can actually track them on your list.
Anyway, with my sufficiently narrow use case, I just built my own book tracking with spreadsheets. I add new lines to a master read sheet and then I have some pivot tables that automatically compile statistics I care about from there.[1]
I'm quite happy with this setup for now and can definitely recommend doing something similar for everyone who just wants to keep track of your reading and doesn't care for the social features.
That said, I wouldn't mind switching to a "real" service again provided that a) it was sufficiently expedient to use when it comes to managing your list (this is especially important considering I'd obviously want to port over my existing hundreds-long read list to this new hypothetical service) b) it already had the books I've read catalogued in the service, because I sure as hell don't want to petition additions to their database for everything I read before I can actually keep track of it.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 253 ms ] threadDiscounting this reason, and supposing it happened, then amazon could just turn up the dial and throw some resources at it. As things stand, they don't need to.
I have been an amazon affiliate for 10 years or more and, to be fair, they behave much better than any other affiliate program I have been involved with.
It takes a lot of work but if you have the resources practically all of it can be outsourced. What I do is learn as much as I can about each role that is needed, then I hire virtual assistants and train them to do that role. That helps keep costs down since you aren't hiring an "expert".
I'm growing a couple sites right now that I haven't written a single word for or taken a single photograph because I have some awesome writers and a photographer. I've also never posted a single article to Wordpress because, you guessed it, I have an awesome VA that I trained to do that for me. I even have a content manager (the highest paid role) who manages the writers and tells them pretty specifically what to write.
Also the majority of people do not block ads. This also depends on the niche though. Gaming and tech niches are usually low RPM unless you get targeted affiliate traffic (like you show up on Google for "Best Gaming Laptops of 2021")
As far as affiliate revenue, they are very likely to be making a purchase soon if they are looking at book reviews so if you can get them to click your Amazon affiliate link there will be fairly high conversion. The revenue per purchase probably is quite low due to the price and margins on a physical book (although I wonder what it looks like for Kindle books) but with enough traffic you can absolutely make it work. I can think of some interesting ways to get a lot of traffic with Pinterest as well in this niche.
This is a numbers game. Keep your costs low and your time involvement low and even if it is only making $2k/month that is good enough because you can have several sites at the same time.
Btw as far as needing a ton of traffic to make money well sometimes that is true to an extent. Recently I was looking at a website that was the most popular user-created website for a specific mobile game. It is generating $6k/month despite having the lowest RPM I've seen so far (only making around $2 per 1000 visitors). Despite this the hosting cost was only $50/mo and I bet I could get that down to $15/month with even better performance.
Side note - you get paid commissions on everything people buy for a certain time after clicking your affiliate link. People buy tons of stuff on Amazon so you'll get lots of revenue for non-book things too.
If you want more info on this type of business model go look at these site (I am not affiliated with them at all):
https://thewebsiteflip.com/ https://fatstacksblog.com/
If you refer via a the books category and then someone buys from some other random category you get a much lower percentage. This has been a recent move and makes such tactics very unprofitable - for good reason too.
Due to this some companies are literally undethronable.
I'm mostly looking to share what I'm planning to read/am reading/have read with a small circle, and for that it's pretty much ideal. There's some basic collection functionality, but no complex library management, no discussions, no recommendation engine, and not very much metadata. It's probably not for everyone, but the minimal approach is refreshingly low-friction. Kudos to the creator(s) for the overall experience.
My only gripes so far have been that search is hit-or-miss (especially for non-fiction), all searches sometimes yield results in an unpredictable order (where an exact title match might be buried amongst partial or seemingly unrelated matches), and the cover they pick is sometimes less-common or downright obscure.
https://www.thestorygraph.com/
Have also looked a little into Library Thing (also mentioned in this discussion). Anyone use both and have useful comparisons, pros/cons for each?
If there were some way I didn't have this goodreads account at all, that would be preferable.
I didn't sign up for a goodreads account. I was given one. And it's sharing my email address with third parties by default.
That's scummy company behavior.
Huh?
Like what? For me, most of the experience of reading is:
1 - actually reading the book
2- sharing my thoughts/recommending it
3 - seeing what other people recommend.
Goodreads, Youtube and Reddit cover all my needs for #2 and #3, and any attempt to cover the social aspect of it will pale in comparison to those 3, at least regarding #3.
For instance, there are things that I don't like about Twitter, and Mastodon has some things that I like, like being able to tag a specific post as NSFW, or add a spoiler tag to make part of the text hidden. But after a few months of using it in parallel to Twitter, I ended up abandoning it, because ''everyone''[0] is on Twitter.
[0] I mean: my real life friends, my online friends, bloggers, youtubers, cosplayers, illustratos, support profiles for online stores and services.
It sounds like you care about UX a great deal, and the UX currently suits you fine!
I mostly agree with you; it has a few pain points, but I fear the day when it goes through the great Digg/Reddit redesign and becomes virtually unusable due to information density plummeting to zero.
I think it's not likely to go that route, though - since it's owned by Amazon, it doesn't have to be profitable by itself, it just needs to result in enough referrals to buy books on Amazon.
For example: lists in reviews don't render, somehow they broke list markers, and this has been the case for like a decade now (?!); you can't add links to profiles anymore, and you can't edit your profile if it already has a link (because 'spam'); you can write book reviews which you can't then edit (because the edited, but somehow not the original, violates 'length limits' - which are shockingly easy to run into if you include any links); they disabled part of the export API recently, and I wouldn't be surprised if in a few years you can't even export your books...
It gets popular. The community becomes a mess, it becomes costly to police, you have people upload an ID and the world hates you for invading their privacy, management shifts resources away since its stable-y making money regardless (given some Byzantine model that matters to ownership anyway) and then it falls victim to bit rot.
So a replacement to your goodreads replacement comes along...
Some would hate it, but if it actually improves the quality and the company has some security chops I’d see it as a selling point.
An anonymous review website could similarly rate limit how quickly reviews change, so someone spamming 1,000 reviews accomplishes little.
If it worked well, I’d use it in a snap.
I'm defining "anonymous to the world" or "anonymous publicly", whereas you're defining it as "anonymous to everyone, even the company".
But in the scope of a book review website, and this thread about preventing spam by having ID enforced, my comment made sense as that. The company knows you, but you can have an anonymous handle to the world. I had clarified that with the line about trust.
It's good opsec to assume all private data at companies may get leaked, including links between your ID and your name.
Consider the scenario where somebody is reviewing books on dangerous subjects (politics, religion, LGBT+, etc...) and is suddenly outed to the whole world due to a data breach.
For other types of applications you’d want to have a better system, like a writing platform.
But still, there’s ways to do it. You can validate the high res copies of whatever you want to validate, then make a hash using a few key numbers, in partial. Stuff like that gets you close to ideal, even the worst case break would expose almost nothing, and you’d prevent duplicate accounts. Only risk is losing the documents during validation before they’re deleted.
Neither site is fast, but "one of the slowest around" doesn't track either.
It is more important to build a product that solves problems that Goodreads doesn't solve right now, and find a way to acquire customers that doesn't rely on Google SEO.
Scalability + data aggregation + user adoption == lots of funding + a clever business model + a significant reason to switch from $DOMINANT_COMPANY + a good bit of luck.
That requires huge financial resources, and thus, a solid monetization scheme.
Now that I think about it, there probably are multiple projects already trying to do that.
What bothers me is that they clearly have the data to allow for very specific queries, but there's no way to make them.
But I would say that, in general, reviews are ok quality, and honest.
Video games have a similar problem to books in that there’s a lot of genre, and genre is also often a hazy line. And, too, some people really like stuff that I think is total crap (and vice versa).
These days I am almost exclusively shown content that I am at least somewhat interested in.
https://onezero.medium.com/almost-everything-about-goodreads...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20904549
It's not at all broken for me, nor for my friends. As the article up top says, there are two ways to discover books: incidental discovery and intentional discovery. On Goodreads, incidental discovery largely flows from a daily email showing me what my friends (who are all real life friends) are reading. That daily email is the #1 reason why I won't leave Goodreads. Any site can manage my read/to-read list, but if I don't have any friends on that site, then I lose out on a big source of discovery. And I can see from the email that my friends also use that email to discover new books.
Recommendations could be so much more helpful if they were done by an algorithm similar to what Netflix used to have - Cinematch. Then even people without friends could get good recommendations.
In terms of recommending what I am already likely interested in based on my previous reads, the "Readers also enjoyed" section seems decent to me. Is that what people think sucks? I've used that a fair amount and found it to be valuable. Or is it the whole "Browse" section that's bad? I never look under there.
I use goodreads every day, but that means spending 5 mins max on it (I hop in, add a book that I heard about somewhere to my to-read list, then I hop off). And, like I alluded to in my first reply, from what I can tell this behavior also holds true for my friends. I don't think I'm an outlier, though I totally understand that people use the site differently than me and they find it wanting.
A better way to do recommendations is to find readers who have rated books similarly to me and tell me what books they've rated highly that I haven't already read. This is what Netflix's Cinematch once did and it was good. It used singular value decomposition and other linear algebra techniques on a giant matrix of raters.
See: https://www.netflixprize.com/
I don't remember ever seeing a rating system (for books or tv) that let me do fine grain rating. And if it had it, most people[citation needed] might not use it anyway. Also, how would I say that what I liked the most about a fantasy book is the magic system, for example?
I don't care HOW the recommendation is implemented, but what shows on the recommendation. For me, 'Readers also enjoyed' shows things that are sufficiently similar, and which people that I follow - friends and bloggers - gave good ratings.
The 'lists with this book' section is also good for discovering books, as the lists are user curated, and the title helps me know what's the common theme. Ie: books with cool magic systems.
A product has features in some high dimensional quality space. When you rate it, you provide information about your preference for those qualities without needing to explicitly rate them or even have a concept of what they are called.
See: https://www.netflixprize.com/
I think it could be: you didn't 'dislike' many titles or; you are not browsing things that are too different from what you usually watch
When you factor in those 2 things - everyone is on goodreads, and there's no better alternative to goodreads - there's no reason to leave.
In aggregate the star rating is pretty good for literature and non-fiction. For mass fiction it's fairly useless.
The opposite is uber where rating affects future service and puts a lot of power over others in your hand. Not giving 5 is socially unacceptable like not tipping vs tipping less and complaining.
It doesn't really matter as long as everyone's on the same page I suppose. Sure, you clip stuff off the end.. but doesn't everyone just want a taxi that gets them A-B without problem? Who's actively seeking 'above and beyond'? Maybe 'would've scored >5 if I had them' is not a problem, because nobody cares?
(I should maybe say I've never actually used Uber!)
Sometimes I agree with you (because it's annoying to me too), but other times I feel like that's accurate. The difference in quality between a book that's in the 75th percentile quality-wise among the books I've read and a book that's in the 25th percentile is not very large! I'd say, by and large, most books that get published are pretty good. Few of them are completely flawless or life-changing, and that's okay. 3-4 seems about right for 50% of the books I read.
If you combine that basic fact with a range of people with differing tastes, you get even more reversion to the mean, so just about every book has a 3-4 rating.
The same goes with beer. If you check the major beer rating sites, you'll see most beers end up with a 3-4 rating. Personally I think movies have a much wider range in quality, but you still see this effect somewhat with IMDb: a huge proportion of movies is in the 6-8 range.
You might think that the ratings would be more useful if what we got was a percentile rather than an absolute rating, and that might be right... or it might disguise the fact that I really would get close to the same amount of enjoyment out of a 3.5 as a 3.9, even though they're separated by 30 percentiles or whatever.
Before I learned this Uber etiquette I would rate drivers the same way. "Well, he got me from A to B without issue, but was there anything that set this ride apart and elevated it?"
Swapping those links for a competitor would be damn near impossible, and it has not much to do with the SEO.
> There is a long list of startups that tried to unseat Goodreads, but they’re either in the graveyard or floating in limbo. Examples include BookClub, RocketReads, LibraryThing, ReadingList, Booknshelf, BookBrowse, Booklikes, Libib, BookSloth, Bookself.
1) assembling a usefully-large initial dataset to gain traction,
2) keeping it updated, and
3) content moderation & anti-spam
Seem super dull and tedious for project that's probably going to fail, and there's little about the rest of the process of building an improved Goodreads clone to offset that and make it enticing to work on. I'd say the only folks likely to try would be those who already have & maintain at least a partial dataset of books for other reasons, and/or existing name-recognition and a community around books and reading.
2) keeping it updated, and
3) content moderation & anti-spam
Seem super dull and tedious for project that's probably going to fail.
^i would say these are problems if you start off building a Goodreads clone. There are other go-to-market strategies to get to network effects.
For example, I could compare my library to yours and get a list of the books we share, that we both liked, but aren't generally very popular. Or I could get a list of books I've read, sorted by their Lexile score. Or get a list of all the epigraph quotes printed in the books I've read.
Basically, it's a database approach rather than a social approach. You can do all the above stuff on the website, but their API is also really powerful, and free. In fact the whole site is completely free.
Another thing I really like is the Member Recommendations. They have an algorithm that recommends books you might like, based on other books. But, in addition to that, they have a list of books recommended by actual people who have read both books, explaining what it is about book B that might interest you if you liked book A. So, more like what an actual librarian would do. Here's an example of what I mean:
https://www.librarything.com/work/1472#memberrecs
Lastly, I just think the vibe at Librarything is better than Goodreads. They're a tiny company made up of librarians and developers, and you feel the scrappy Web 1.0 charm from them and the community there in a way I never saw with Amazon-owned Goodreads.
Blog about this: https://blog.librarything.com/main/2020/03/librarything-goes...
There was this reco.com (now shutdown) which was more like "recos by famous people". I didn't like that idea but I had anyway checked it out hoping it might become something better. It didn't.
Jinni kind of permanently dissuaded me from building a profile on recommendation sites feeding their recommendation engines only to see a shuttered gate after a while. Though it's actually better in cinema space right now. There are some academic options (or were; not sure what is something like Movie Lens right now)
When it comes to the list of books I've read, I want to set it and forget it - and with a small upstart, there's always the worry that the maintainer will run out of money (or interest) and shut the service down. Sure, most of these book sites have import/export functionality, but why bother with that when Goodreads will likely be around for a long time?
And so sad.
And now excuse me while I dream of a world where gifted creators can build a flourishing web gathering space where it can thrive and grow and not be then harvested by the borg that encapsulates viewers as nothing but breathing credit card tokens.
https://swapiverse.com/
I'm making a decentralized book swapping platform. You give a book away and get the right to access any book that anyone has listed.
Reduces waste, and saves everyone money
Not sure if we will add in reviews for the MVP, but it's definitely looking like a cleaner version of goodreads.
Here are some screenshots:
https://twitter.com/_joshuafonseca/status/138028946914478489...
So, I believe the answer here is a better user experience, cheaper prices, and a modern approach.
Want to also swap video games? Pc parts? I just have to fill the database and add a filter option
The project looks cool and I wish you the best of luck in designing solutions to avoid bad actors.
I've thought about this. I believe the cost of shipping will be paid for by the person shipping it out.
I am not an economist, but my idea is that even if someone is doing this, the economy works itself out because they still gave away a book that someone wanted.
And if the books are that garbage, nobody will request them.
Of course, this is all theory and I'll have to see/adjust as it happens.
Book data is scarce and expensive. Goodreads gets it for free because of Amazon, Amazon gets it subsidized because of Amazon's chokehold on book publishing. Any Goodreads competitor needs to license paid data and sort through the duds and the duplicates, and struggle to match up book with only ASINs that are on Amazon Kindles and nowhere else.
And Kindle integration. When you finish a book on a Kindle, it asks you to review it on Goodreads. If you want to add an option to review it on $otherstartup website, your best bet is a supreme court antitrust case.
The social data that Goodreads aggregates is definitely a moat, because it powers their SEO efforts further.
Overall, I like Goodreads, but the Kindle integration is not a selling point in my experience.
[] https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths
Instead of reviews and recommendations from other bibliophiles, it's filled with mass-market Amazon-quality reviews.
The fantasy genre there became dominated by romance for a while, with no ability for me to filter down based on criteria like 'Ignore ratings and reviews from anyone who gave Twilight a 4+ star review'.
Namely, I just wanted to keep track of what I read. I didn't care for the social aspects of it nor the discovery part of it. I did want certain statistics on my reading though, so a plain text file wasn't going to cut it.
Unfortunately, Goodreads was a huge pain to use UX-wise and didn't really provide the statistics I was looking for either. The one positive thing I can say for Goodreads is that the books I read were already there (I'm primarily reading Japanese light novels, so whether the titles are available on the service for tracking purposes or not is a real concern for me), which is probably a bigger problem than you might think for anyone who'd want to build a competitor? The friction to use an alternative service is obviously going to be much higher if you have to get the books you read added to the service first before you can actually track them on your list.
Anyway, with my sufficiently narrow use case, I just built my own book tracking with spreadsheets. I add new lines to a master read sheet and then I have some pivot tables that automatically compile statistics I care about from there.[1]
I'm quite happy with this setup for now and can definitely recommend doing something similar for everyone who just wants to keep track of your reading and doesn't care for the social features.
That said, I wouldn't mind switching to a "real" service again provided that a) it was sufficiently expedient to use when it comes to managing your list (this is especially important considering I'd obviously want to port over my existing hundreds-long read list to this new hypothetical service) b) it already had the books I've read catalogued in the service, because I sure as hell don't want to petition additions to their database for everything I read before I can actually keep track of it.
[1] https://twitter.com/Daiz42/status/1158123020596240391