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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

#71

Post by jseliger »

freddie_mercury wrote: post #21
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 und…

I've seen people looking for extremely specific books get stuck

At least some number of writers seem to get started by wanting to read a book that doesn't exist, so they decide to write it themselves.

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

#73

Post by garmaine »

freddie_mercury wrote: post #9
garmaine wrote: post #2

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

I've never had a problem. It doesn't do a great job with recommendations but I don't really care. There are thousands of book recommendation blogs, lists, BookTube channels, etc. I'm not sure why people think every site/app needs to evolve to engulf every tangential aspect of a given ecosystem. HN can never make up its mind whether it likes distributed systems or not. HN also loves the benign neglect of HN itself (fo…

This right here. I actually think adding some sort of machine learning recommendation system would be an anti-feature. I do use the site for recommendations on what to read next, But I get that from reading the reviews of other users. These reviews often say “the idea of this book is good, but was done better by ______ in _______.” That context is critically important. Just being told I might like this other book is not helpful.

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

#74

Post by freddie_mercury »

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?

Sure, if you only care about America. But people in other countries read books too.

Here's the best selling book in Germany:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/45006237-das-geschenk

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

#75

Post by brmgb »

thorum wrote: post #68
Negitivefrags wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can’t think of a website in any domain where people don’t complain about recommendations. People complain about goodreads, Netflix, amazon, etc. Even things like google ads whose business is ultimately showing ads for products you might like to buy, a kind of recommendation algorithm, people constantly complain about irrelevance. And they have billions of dollars on the line for making that better, not to mention a…

Music recommendations seem to work OK. My Spotify discover playlists are always decent.

It's hit and miss.

Sometimes it's very decent. Most of the time my discover weekly playlist contains 95% of music I find plain bad.

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

#76

Post by noema »

henrikeh wrote: post #40
DarkCrusader2 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sin…

Goodreads does have that. It is called lists: https://www.goodreads.com/list?ref=nav_brws_lists

Funny enough, this is another obvious feature that they get completely wrong -- lists are publicly editable, with no (apparent) way of restricting adds to the original creator. So inevitably any niche curatorial effort slides back to the lowest common denominator taste over time.

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

#77

Post by aahortwwy »

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…

> People still complain about Netflix recommendations and they've spent tens of millions of dollars, possibly over a hundred million dollars, on it and are one of the most valuable companies on the planet with one of the best engineering teams on the planet.

This blog post talks about this exact subject: https://apenwarr.ca/log/20190201

> Why do people think algorithmic recommendations are easy? Or even desirable?

They're easier than you think, it's just most of them on major platforms are optimized to maximize your engagement with the platform, rather than your enjoyment of the content.

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

#78

Post by lkbm »

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…

I've complained about Goodreads a lot, but the idea that their search is bad is new to me. (Except in that I can't open each result in the dropdown in a new tab. Very annoying.)

If I type in Inferno, it drops down Dan Brown's, Sylvian Reynard's, and then Dante's. If I search for Narnia...actually it pops up as the first guess when I just type "N".

Turns out there are edge cases where it does poorly, but it's never been a problem for me, and I search Goodreads pretty often.

EDIT: I should clarify, searching by title or author works really well. Searching by additional metadata is missing, and that's very sad -- I end up just browsing lists. Openlibrary search has a much steeper learning curve, but you can search by reading level, or publisher, or anything.

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

#79

Post by a_bonobo »

matthewfelgate wrote: post #70
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.

What does this mean?

When you finish a book you can review it, or assign shelves. The default shelves are to-read and read but you can add many custom ones too. The shelves work like tags. Once you have a decent amount of books with tags, goodreads will start recommending books based on these tags.

For example, if you have a 'non-fiction' shelf, goodreads will give you books others have rated high with the same tag at https://www.goodreads.com/recommendations/shelf/non-fiction

It's much more specific and for me works better than the 'because you read book X, you might like book Y' which is often very random.

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

#80

Post by unraveller »

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…

You can only say the algorithm works when you know the precise aim of the algorithm. Perhaps the "recommendation" engine is designed to dislodge the user from engaging too much with their own assessment abilities and instead have users respond to less guarded social cues setup elsewhere in the sales funnel.

You can push a lot more pulp on unsuspecting people once it's familiar AND seen in a socially proofed popular list.

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