I Want to Fix Goodreads

For the King book, my wife read it and we talked about it and I just don’t want to read it. For the Knight book, I read the first few pages and know the Nike story and don’t want to read it.

Maybe I’m missing out and they are truly amazing. But I can’t read all that they recommend just in case they suddenly get great at recommending.

It’s a challenging problem and the risk of missing out is there. But I don’t know of any way to truly eliminate the risk unless I read every book recommended. And my life isn’t long enough.

I think many of us (in the Open Library community) want to see many players in the space and as much creativity as possible. We love books and we love giving book lovers options. Inventaire, LibraryThing, Goodreads, and fivebooks are all amazing services which have pioneered different, amazing experiences. And each brings something unique to the table. Goodreads is loved by 90M people.

It's also true that it's challenging for any single application (e.g. Goodreads) to serve 90M diverse users in all the ways they may prefer.

We see opportunities for the community to be better included in helping cultivate a more inclusive and diverse book ecosystem. Will it be better than service X? I don't care as much, so long as it allows researchers, students, enthusiasts, parents, and other patrons (who may be left behind by current solutions) to achieve their goals.

In order to support this mission, our primary objective at Open Library is making sure useful book and author metadata is as accessible as possible via APIs, data dumps so the community can build the right solution for their use cases. And of course, doing the best we can to build basic, useful tools to help connect readers to their reading experience and to each other.

We're a very small team (staff of 2 eng -> 4M patrons) so without the community being excited and driving, what we're able to accomplish is very limited, beyond keeping the lights on and the book data happily flowing.

So I want to echo your sentiments olah_1. As a non-profit, our goal isn't to out-complete or replace any existing service. But it very much is to provide an "alternative".

An alternative where every netizen and book lover has the opportunity to shape the future of their library. Where there are books which represent everyone. Where everyone's use cases may be served (if people are willing to put in the work). And where the limit of what's possible is bound only by one's creativity and a shared vested interest in being a good neighbor.