GoodReads

And Why I am Leaving in 2023

Hello, lovely soul,

As you probably are aware if you follow me on all my social medias that aren’t the blog, then you know I avidly track my reading as I progress through the year. I use two platforms, GoodReads and StoryGraph – the latter of which I will be reviewing in the new year -, to track my reading.

Each platform merits its own review and with my intentions to leave Goodreads in the dust of 2022’s exit, it is about time that I did that here.

GoodReads, first and foremost, is owned by Amazon(aka Jeff Bezos) and Otis Chandler. Although it costs nothing to be on the platform, it is a platform that functions more like Amazon as it really doesn’t provide readers with proper data on their reading habits. We’ll dive into that more when I talk about StoryGraph in 2023.

Essentially the list of what you can do on GoodReads is as follows:

Track what books you are currently reading
Track your progress in the books you are reading
Track how many books you have read in a year based on your goal
Create “shelves” to store your books in
Automatically categorize your books between your “To Be Read”, “Currently Reading”, and “Read” shelves

That’s it. I don’t get personalized recommendations based on what I’ve read. Just general recommendations based on the season. And those recommendations aren’t on the website or in the app. Those come in emails which is another issue I have with that.

Earlier over the summer, I received an email with recommendations in it. At the top of the email it always reminds you of your goal progress and how far you currently are in the book you’ve most recently updated.

The issue?

It said I was at 14 books and still reading a book I had already completed. It had been at least three months since I had been at 14 books, if not a little less. When I called them out on this on Twitter, they just sent me to a link where I found no information as to why the emails are filled with the most up to date information. Like seriously, how is it that difficult?

And like I said before, the recommendations aren’t personalized to things that I would probably be interested in based on my reading choices. As you can probably tell since I’m sticking with StoryGraph, I get a lot of that stuff provided to me there in a lot more detail than I do on GoodReads.

In conclusion, all of the GoodReads links will be leaving anything link areas on the blog. My account will still be over there but I won’t be active there.

So see ya later, GoodReads.