Goodreads’ reign over the world of book talk might be coming to an end • Hacker News Board

Re: Goodreads’ reign over the world of book talk might be coming to an end

#21

Post by freddie_mercury » Sat, Sep 12, 2020, 12:45 PM UTC

Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #16

The linked article soon goes from criticizing Goodreads to hyping The StoryGraph as a Goodreads competitor. However, all the great new features of The StoryGraph seem targeted towards only one portion of the Goodreads membership: people reading fiction or the most pop-sci-type nonfiction and who want recommendations for new stuff to read. My own bookish, nerdy Goodreads subculture is very different: we already have m…

I agree that "I can't find any good books to read" is not really a problem most readers I know have. Most have dozens, or hundreds, of books on their To Be Read pile. Finding new books to read doesn't really strike me as a big problem.

I've seen people looking for extremely specific books get stuck. "I'm looking for fantasy where the bad guy turns into a good guy but keeps working on the bad guy side but actively undermines it and also I want some LBGTI+ romance but no smut/explicit scenes". But I'm doubtful TheStoryGraph is going to help them either.

For almost any niche I've seen there's going to be someone somewhere on the internet who puts together a listicle of books in that niche which is going to provide months or years of reading for most normal people. And that's without even looking into the authors' back catalogues or looking at other authors from the same publishers.

Re: Goodreads’ reign over the world of book talk might be coming to an end

#22

Post by thewhitetulip » Sat, Sep 12, 2020, 12:57 PM UTC

freddie_mercury wrote: post #15

The author complains that it is "impossible" to find books on Goodreads. Simply adding the author's name to any query will always take you to the book you are looking for. Don't just rely on a title. Which should be common sense (if you were at a bookstore you would always tell the clerk the author's name and not just say "Do you have Holiday Heart?") but apparently isn't. The author complains that searching for 'hol…

While the article focused on how someone might bring a better algo webapp against goodreads, you've got to agree that Goodreads is badly maintained. The app is atrocious as is the website from the reader's PoV.

The groups are so badly implemented that it takes multiple clicks to do ANYTHING and there is just no "timeline" like thing where you can post on a group. It won't take much time/resources for a social media to act like a 21st century social media right? Especially since it is owned by the company which created AWS?

from the author side:

I have a very common name and I've got an ebook up on Goodreads(I did not add it & I've not, for the life of me figured out how to submit the book)

But because Good reads thinks that because my name is what it is, they merged my profile with someone else with my exact same first name and last name.

I've done all I could to get them to change it, but they didn't bother to respond.

Re: Goodreads’ reign over the world of book talk might be coming to an end

#23

Post by thewhitetulip » Sat, Sep 12, 2020, 1:00 PM UTC

Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #13

Hokusai wrote: post #6

> Instead, it has stagnated: Amazon holds on to an effective monopoly on the discussion of new books This is the main point. It is the same thing that Oracle purchasing MySQL. What once was a promising raising technology is nowadays stagnant. (Interest over time https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%... ) GoodReads could help to find better books to read. But, Amazon likes the current state wher…

Amazon was pretty much forced to buy Goodreads: the original business model of Goodreads before the Amazon buyout was making money from referral links to booksellers. While links were provided to several internet booksellers besides Amazon, like Barnes & Noble, already the vast majority of internet users were hooked on Amazon and only buying through Amazon links. Consequently, Amazon was paying Goodreads a huge amoun…

It's alright if they bought it, and it is a very bad social media. You'd think that they'd improve the app right?

Facebook/Instagram should just add a books section to their main page as a challenger to goodreads, maybe that'll help?

Re: Goodreads’ reign over the world of book talk might be coming to an end

#24

Post by skytreader » Sat, Sep 12, 2020, 1:02 PM UTC

freddie_mercury wrote: post #15

The author complains that it is "impossible" to find books on Goodreads. Simply adding the author's name to any query will always take you to the book you are looking for. Don't just rely on a title. Which should be common sense (if you were at a bookstore you would always tell the clerk the author's name and not just say "Do you have Holiday Heart?") but apparently isn't. The author complains that searching for 'hol…

> Simply adding the author's name to any query will always take you to the book you are looking for. > ... searching for 'holiday heart robayo' does

Well, this already makes Goodreads worse than any local librarian/book seller. I could go up to the counter of my local library and ask for Inferno and the person at the counter would ask "Are you looking for the one by Dante or by Dan Brown?".

> if you were at a bookstore you would always tell the clerk the author's name and not just say "Do you have Holiday Heart?"

I find this disingenuous. Bookstore clerks don't hit a dead end just because of some missing parameter in the question posted to them. If they did they're losing a lot of potential sales. Plus, any decent inventory software could aide them.

There's any number of authentic reasons why a customer might know only partial info about a book and it's a clerk/librarian's job to help them. "Do you have Narnia books?", "Do you have Lion, Witch, and Wardrobe?", "Do you have this fairy tale from C. S. Lewis" are all questions I'd expect a clerk/librarian to be able to answer adequately.

Even worse, quoting from the article:

> the first five suggestions were books that didn't even contain both words in their titles, despite the site having an entry for the book.

What kind of search system ranks books that don't even have the query that high?

(Disclaimer: I tried searching for "holiday heart" on Goodreads while logged out as a matter of due diligence; I did not get these subpar results. While Robayo's book is nowhere in sight, the search results at least have the search query in their title. Reasonable enough.)

Re: Goodreads’ reign over the world of book talk might be coming to an end

#25

Post by sradman » Sat, Sep 12, 2020, 1:03 PM UTC

TL;DR: social book metadata site Goodreads has stagnated since being bought by Amazon.

This pattern has occurred repeatedly with metadata associated with digital media; CDDB vs. iTunes, IMDB vs. Amazon DVD listings, Goodreads vs. Amazon book listings.

Rather than assuming that Amazon is strategically hampering Goodreads functionality, I assume that Amazon is a large company that misses opportunities to delight its customers. Giggles ensue every time I come across a "We don't have any cast information" message in Amazon Prime Video.

Hanlon's Razor [1] applies: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor

Re: Goodreads’ reign over the world of book talk might be coming to an end

#26

Post by xtracto » Sat, Sep 12, 2020, 1:08 PM UTC

Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #16

The linked article soon goes from criticizing Goodreads to hyping The StoryGraph as a Goodreads competitor. However, all the great new features of The StoryGraph seem targeted towards only one portion of the Goodreads membership: people reading fiction or the most pop-sci-type nonfiction and who want recommendations for new stuff to read. My own bookish, nerdy Goodreads subculture is very different: we already have m…

Ooh so the "article" is really a marketing blurb for that other service!

Re: Goodreads’ reign over the world of book talk might be coming to an end

#27

Post by Mediterraneo10 » Sat, Sep 12, 2020, 1:08 PM UTC

garmaine wrote: post #2

Is this a hit piece? I’ve never once had a problem with goodreads. Am I alone?

There is a reason that most discussions of Goodreads here and on GR itself tend to bring up complaints. It’s not so much that Amazon hasn’t upgraded the site to a "modern" web design – plenty of people like the old-school aesthetic and we don’t want endless scrolling and an attempt to maximize the time the user spends on the site (because we’re supposed to be reading books most of the time, after all).

Rather, the problem is the long-standing bugs that Amazon has never bothered to fix, because it can’t see any financial incentive to develop Goodreads further. The book database is a mess and even those of us empowered as "Goodreads librarians" are unable to help much. For example, today many authors might have the same name, a problem only made worse with all the self-publishing going on. Yet the Goodreads librarian UI has no straightforward way to assign a new book to this or that author of the same name. Instead, you have to use a hack where for author X you have to type two spaces between the first name and surname, for author Y you have to type three spaces, etc. It is totally amateur, and when you have 20 authors all of the same name you have no reference for which author has how many spaces typed between the first name and surname.

Re: Goodreads’ reign over the world of book talk might be coming to an end

#28

Post by DarkCrusader2 » Sat, Sep 12, 2020, 1:10 PM UTC

freddie_mercury wrote: post #15

The author complains that it is "impossible" to find books on Goodreads. Simply adding the author's name to any query will always take you to the book you are looking for. Don't just rely on a title. Which should be common sense (if you were at a bookstore you would always tell the clerk the author's name and not just say "Do you have Holiday Heart?") but apparently isn't. The author complains that searching for 'hol…

I love Letterboxd's approach to movie recommendation wherein they don't provide any. Users can create arbitrary lists for all kinds of stuff based anything like genre, themes, feel, mood, cast/crew etc. There is probable a high quality list for anything you can think of. I have found some of my favorite movies on the site this way, no algorithms involved.

I wish more site would do this instead of collecting every single details about my life and still recommend be garbage sponsored content (looking at you Youtube).

Re: Goodreads’ reign over the world of book talk might be coming to an end

#29

Post by gravitas » Sat, Sep 12, 2020, 1:11 PM UTC

This reads and feels like a 33 paragraph thinly veiled marketing advertisement for StoryGraph, using the David vs. Goliath story model.

Re: Goodreads’ reign over the world of book talk might be coming to an end

#30

Post by freddie_mercury » Sat, Sep 12, 2020, 1:12 PM UTC

skytreader wrote: post #24

freddie_mercury wrote: post #15

The author complains that it is "impossible" to find books on Goodreads. Simply adding the author's name to any query will always take you to the book you are looking for. Don't just rely on a title. Which should be common sense (if you were at a bookstore you would always tell the clerk the author's name and not just say "Do you have Holiday Heart?") but apparently isn't. The author complains that searching for 'hol…

> Simply adding the author's name to any query will always take you to the book you are looking for. > ... searching for 'holiday heart robayo' does Well, this already makes Goodreads worse than any local librarian/book seller. I could go up to the counter of my local library and ask for Inferno and the person at the counter would ask "Are you looking for the one by Dante or by Dan Brown?". > if you were at a booksto…

> What kind of search system ranks books that don't even have the query that high?

The author is being disingenuous. The search terms aren't in the book title but they are in the name of the series the book is part of. Presumably because a lot of people search for "Jack Reacher" and expect to find something useful.

That's what they are complaining about.