Goodreads is a good service that should not be owned by Amazon. There are the obvious reasons related to consolidation and things like that, but in this post I’m talking about the quality of the service. I’ve been using Goodreads for less than a year, and in that time I’ve felt a few things about it.
Goodreads is Good
Goodreads has a lot of neat features! I love the progress tracking by page number. I also like the social features because it’s a quick way of saying “hey book-reading friends! Here’s what I’m reading, here’s what I read, here’s what I want to read”. it alleviates the need for sharing this stuff on larger social media, which is nice. So I like Goodreads.
Goodreads is Rough
Goodreads needs some polish. But it’s not the “this is a brand new thing, give it a minute to get things right” type of polish. It’s the “this has been left alone for a bit too long” type of polish. While Goodreads is fairly mature at this point, it’s also pretty buggy and feels a bit dated in some of its design. The latter isn’t a real problem, it could stay that way forever, but the former is something that’s only really going to get worse the longer it’s left.
Goodreads has an API…sort of
Goodreads has an API, but they’re not giving tokens out for developers anymore. The last update there was December 17, 2020, and it read:
As part of our overall commitment to continually improve our data management, Goodreads no longer issues new developer keys for our public developer API and plans to retire the current version of these tools. While we assess the value of APIs to determine how to support in the future, we continue to support active API users who meet our terms of service. You are welcome to give your feedback on Goodreads APIs by completing the developer API survey.
That ain’t comin’ back.
Goodreads has an Independent Purpose
Purely as an observation of mine, Goodreads has purpose, but not purpose that benefits at all from being owned by Amazon. Moreover, I’m not sure what benefit Goodreads is to Amazon, besides maybe links to buy books. Did Goodreads not have those before? Also it’s nice to be able to share progress directly to Goodreads from my Kindle, but I’m sure this doesn’t require being owned by Amazon to be a feature. I think there’s passion in what I see built in Goodreads, signs of being built by people who read books. Being acquired by Amazon is obviously in the interest of money, as acquisitions always are, and while it’s not lost on me that this acquisition took place over 10 years ago, companies are always reassessing the value of their current assets. As such…
Goodreads Worries Me
With all of the above said, I’m worried about the future of Goodreads. It’s a popular platform, but without clear benefit to its owner, and in a time when the work and legacy of many individuals can blink from existence without much visible hesitation, I’m a little bit worried about tracking my reading this way. I hope for a better future for Goodreads, and I think it’d at least be able to be an even better service if they were allowed to be.
In the meantime, there are several alternatives. The most promising option I saw in my search was StoryGraph. It’s built by one person and it looks like a good option. For my uses personally, I need an API to be able to pull my data from and display on my website, but StoryGraph looks to be doing the right things.
