This article has been imported from chorus.fm for discussion. All of the forum rules still apply. Sarah Manavis, writing at New Statesman: With the vast amount of books and user data that Goodreads holds, it has the potential to create an algorithm so exact that it would be unstoppable, and it is hard to imagine anyone objecting to their data being used for such a purpose. Instead, it has stagnated: Amazon holds on to an effective monopoly on the discussion of new books – Goodreads is almost 40 times the size of the next biggest community, LibraryThing, which is also 40 per cent owned by Amazon – and it appears to be doing very little with it. GoodReads is a really bad website and an even worse app. It could be awesome. It should be awesome. The difference between using it, and say Letterboxd for movies, is night and day. It just makes me sad. more Not all embedded content is displayed here. You can view the original to see embedded videos, tweets, etc.
My reading slowed right down to essentially nothing during the pandemic, but finally read a new book while on holiday this past week. Of course I went to log and review on Goodreads and in doing so referenced how long it had been since I read sci-fi. It occurred to me that if Goodreads was a halfway decent site I could have quickly looked up exactly what the last sci-fi book I read and when I read it. But the thought of navigating the site to get that info made it a total non-starter.
I'm not a GoodReads user and don't know much about its full feature-set, but I will recommend BookTrack for iOS/MacOS Catalina+ users. If you aren't looking for a social experience, but some tracking and stats (as well as personal library cataloging), this is a great little app.
The sad part is they've actually made the app UI slightly better this year, but it's been bad for years now.
The Overdrive Libby app is painfully terrible. So many UI blunders it makes me angry to use the app. I don't think the book space is all that competitive for good developers, unfortunately.