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

newstatesman.com

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

#51

Post by prepend »

LockAndLol wrote: post #34
thewhitetulip wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

That's one of the best jokes I've read all day. Instagram and book reading. That cracked me up. Thank you

Imagine all the great pictures of yoga models holding Dune covers.

I can’t imagine a more vapid collection of reading signaling posts.

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

#52

Post by prepend »

chrisseaton wrote: post #37
dageshi wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're saying that goodreads became an alternate front end to amazon for finding books but users used amazon (via affiliate links) to actually buy the book. Goodreads was better at helping users find new books they wanted than amazon themselves and so it made sense for amazon to buy them.

> Goodreads was better at helping users find new books they wanted than amazon themselves and so it made sense for amazon to buy them. I still don’t get it - people were already finding books on Goodreads and buying them on Amazon... so why did Amazon need to buy them? Why pay for it if it’s already working for you? And why pay a referral fee if people already want to ignore other options and go to Amazon to buy afte…

I think the book reading data was good for amazon to use to sell more books.

Goodreads’ privacy policy prevented them from selling the data to Amazon, but if Amazon pwned Goodreads then they could use the data in compliance.

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

#53

Post by chrisseaton »

frosted-flakes wrote: post #49
chrisseaton wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Goodreads was better at helping users find new books they wanted than amazon themselves and so it made sense for amazon to buy them. I still don’t get it - people were already finding books on Goodreads and buying them on Amazon... so why did Amazon need to buy them? Why pay for it if it’s already working for you? And why pay a referral fee if people already want to ignore other options and go to Amazon to buy afte…

Amazon's referral program is open to everybody to use. How could Amazon restrict GoodReads from being a part of it?

> How could Amazon restrict GoodReads from being a part of it?

By just kicking them off the programme?

You don't have a legal right to be part of a referral programme.

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

#54

Post by foxdev »

jbob2000 wrote: post #19
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…

Why is nobody asking how a recommendation engine is supposed to work if there’s nothing to recommend? Is it possible that even computers recognize 90% of media as garbage?

Recommendation systems are built on k-Nearest Neighbors (KNN) algorithms. Subjective measure of quality is not a factor. A computer can see that two people like the same thing, but also that those two people like similar things each is not aware of, and bridge that awareness gap. It works the same whether the set of options is Star Wars (original), Star Wars (prequels), and/or Star Wars (sequels).

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

#55

Post by michaelt »

freddie_mercury wrote: post #30
skytreader wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

If I run the google query "holiday heart" site:goodreads.com I get the Margarita García Robayo translation on the first page of 10 results.

On the other hand, when I use the search on goodreads itself, the Robayo book - with 298 ratings - is not among the first 20 results.

Ahead of it are books like:

"Home for the Holidays (Heart of the Wolf #28; Silver Town Wolf #9)" - no phrase match, pluralises holidays, splits the query between the book title and series, and has 178 ratings.

"The Pastry Queen Christmas: Big-Hearted Holiday Entertaining, Texas Style" - again no phrase match, heart becomes big-hearted, and it's a subtitle, and the book has 122 ratings

"Holiday of the Heart (Heart, #4)" - finally a book with both words in the title! But no phrase match, and this book has.... 2 ratings.

If the search doesn't support phrase matches, doesn't rank precise matches higher, and doesn't rank more popular books higher - how the hell is it ranking things?

Of course, goodreads is hardly the first site to have a shitty search that causes users to google things instead. The ranking could well be "whatever order elasticsearch produces"

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

#56

Post by dageshi »

chrisseaton wrote: post #53
frosted-flakes wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon's referral program is open to everybody to use. How could Amazon restrict GoodReads from being a part of it?

> How could Amazon restrict GoodReads from being a part of it? By just kicking them off the programme? You don't have a legal right to be part of a referral programme.

Amazon would be moronic to do such a thing.

Goodreads could've turned around and begun selling books direct, they had the customers buying intent, not amazon.

Other sites would've seen this move and begun to pivot away from amazon's affiliate system for fear of the rug being pulled out from underneath them.

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

#57

Post by prostoalex »

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…

> Consequently, Amazon was paying Goodreads a huge amount of money in referral fees each month, and it made more sense for Amazon to simply buy the site and stop that.

Does Amazon has a track record of buying major referral generators? I'd imagine someone like SlickDeals generates higher revenue with affiliate links to higher-ticket non-book items.

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

#58

Post by dorchadas »

prepend wrote: post #46
a_bonobo wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me, recommendations got remarkably better once I used 5-10 tags ('shelves') per book for about 50 books I read - after that, the per-shelf recommendations got very good.

I never thought of that. Thanks, I’ll try it. I currently just use “read,” “want to read,” and “abandoned.”

The problem is if it's some obscure topic with a specific shelf, you can get some pretty bad books, as it seems to pull them based on other people's tags of books. Or, I can be reading academic works on Buddhism and then get recommended Alan Watts, who wasn't an academic and wasn't a Buddhist, but others tagged as 'Buddhism'. So there are still plenty of issues with it.

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

#59

Post by imglorp »

doiwin wrote: post #14
imglorp wrote: post #10

Business opportunity here to replace this? Start with some HN or Reddit style forum discussion code. Some income could come from affiliate links to indie booksellers. (Is there even infra for such a thing right now? Need to build that too?) Edit, answering myself, this guy has some thoughts: https://tomcritchlow.com/2020/04/15/library-json/ Edit, as for the index corpus, the USLC does okay: https://catalog.loc.gov/vw…

Is the USLC always updated with the latest books? What would be the legal background of using their index?

Oh, hm, ISBN is probably better? These guys seem to have a DB, wonder how they get it? https://isbnsearch.org/

It used to be that authors needed to deposit a copy of every new book at USLC, that's probably an old thing.

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

#60

Post by jpindar »

frosted-flakes wrote: post #49
chrisseaton wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Goodreads was better at helping users find new books they wanted than amazon themselves and so it made sense for amazon to buy them. I still don’t get it - people were already finding books on Goodreads and buying them on Amazon... so why did Amazon need to buy them? Why pay for it if it’s already working for you? And why pay a referral fee if people already want to ignore other options and go to Amazon to buy afte…

Amazon's referral program is open to everybody to use. How could Amazon restrict GoodReads from being a part of it?

By offering them a lot of money - i.e. buying them.
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