Are there any plans where metadata for Internet Archive patrons could be scoped to API tokens or applications (Oauth2), so that external applications could add value for users on top of the Internet Archive corpus?
Allow me to hijack - I'm working on something to make the experience of reading the text-only version of books on OpenLibrary better (if they decide to integrate it when it's done.) Email's in the profile if you want to help out.
Apparently K.A. Applegate is the second most prolific science fiction author. That's amazing and hilarious. I think a bunch of Animorphs were ghost written though.
If it's not broken, why fix it? I go to goodreads for the high-quality book reviews and community. I literally don't care about UX or fancy algorithms. I'd rather use an old algorithm called 'talking to someone I know' for book recommendations. Right now it feels like a clunky old site made for books reviews and I like that feel. I don't want some Amazon product manager who only cares about monetising (where can I smack ads?!) to touch it thank you very much. And god forbid some UX person gets hold of it and redesigns it in the boring/minimal feel (so it loads fast and we can smack lots of ads on it).
I am actually working to peel Goodreads apart and focus on doing one thing better, which is book discovery. I am actually launching into Beta on Monday -> https://shepherd.com/
If anyone is interested let me know what you think. The goal is to create an online experience that is like wandering through a bookstore and seeing little notes about which books are the staff's favorites.
You should submit this! I think it’s a great idea.
One way that people discover books is by listening to / reading about authors they enjoy, talking about other books and authors that they enjoy.
There’s an NLP problem in there for sure, because they like to both bash and praise certain people.
It’d be amazing to have a searchable graph of “Tolstoi likes Turgenev likes Gustave Flaubert”. There could even be a time aspect to it, as certain writers hated or loved their contemporaries as time went on.
At present, authors and literary people have these graphs in their heads, it would be nice to write them all down and expose them. At present it’s quite laborious to bootstrap such a mental graph by yourself, as a student or hobbyist.
I think the "Topics" list really needs some curation [1] and some more layers of taxonomy. Right now the "topic" breakdown seems 100% isomorphic to the "recommender" breakdown - the links literally go to the exact same URLs - which isn't sustainable. Bookshops don't have separate shelves for each member of staff.
[1] Do we really need both "Anglo-Saxon England" and "Anglo-Saxon Britain"? Or three different "Norse Mythology" topics and two different "Norse Myths" topics and a "Norse Mythology and Polytheism" topic?
I wanted to add to others suggestions to consider adding more genre-like categories. I realize they aren’t as specific as “world war 2”, etc, but I think you will miss out without the common popular genres there. For example, “best fantasy in 2021” or “best cooking book 2021”, etc, overlap with tons of interests and seem missing. Maybe write down every genre in Amazon search and see how your groupings compare? Just my 2 cents!
Open Library recently(ish) launched a bookshelf style browsing feature to mimic the organic discovery of titles based on your interests and, even though it’s frowned upon by some, the cover. It’s awesome. I’ve read so many books that I’ve scrolled past a thousand times on iTunes and Audible. It does help that I can flip through the books a bit before deciding to read it. Like you can at the store or the library.
In other words, good quality book metadata is expensive. Book recommendation/reviews aren't haven't been so profitable as to justify such investment. If I was a publisher, I'd put my money on the book influencers, not on Goodreads and alternatives anyway.
Author here. I'm going to join the argument that Goodreads may be clunky (in fact, it definitely is), but it's not broken. OP's criticisms all have some validity, but they overlook these far more important facts:
1. Goodreads has a LOT of users. It's the most extensive source of feedback on all my books. Lots of "wisdom of the crowd" that I can glean, looking at what people say. I'd rather have a kludgy site with 350 reviews than a UX masterpiece with only six.
2. Goodreads's huge user base means that reviews get noticed. This is crucial to keep the reviewing ecosystem going. When I put some energy into reviewing someone else's book that made an impact on me, I get a lively mix of upvotes and responses, which validates the time spent. Writing a crisp review on a minor site and getting no engagement is the worst user experience of all. Even if the official UX is beautiful.
3. Goodreads has pretty good tone control -- and that is not easy on any social site. People come to talk about books. Most threads don't get hijacked by MAGA/vs/woke. Anyone who overlooks this factor hasn't tried to operate a social site in the modern era.
4. Goodreads has the balance of power right between authors and readers. There are some things you can do as an author to drive engagement. But not a lot. You can't overwhelm the site with promo for a book that doesn't engage people. And Goodreads will stop you pretty quickly from flaming readers who give you one-star reviews.
All of these, I'll submit, are big, enduring advantages. They can't be swept away by a small new site with prettier UX or faster load times.
I agree Goodreads is not broken. At least not for me. The answer is simple - it's single player mode is so strong that it's hard to usurp. A good comparison would be IMDb. Even if you dont have friends on Goodreads, you can do all the things you need. You can discover books, read what others have said about it, discover more books from the same author, read the quotes, find similar books, and as an add on, find a community you can discuss books in. Then there is a list, not as prominent but added feature of finding what others like. In terms of jobs-to-be-done, it serves everything perfectly.
This is a huge underrated moat, and for any new startup, they have to usurp that. This moat is also why users stick and then the network effects kick in.
This missed the biggest technical moat by a mile: data.
Book data is scarce and expensive. Goodreads gets it for free because of Amazon, Amazon gets it subsidized because of Amazon's chokehold on book publishing. Any Goodreads competitor needs to license paid data and sort through the duds and the duplicates, and struggle to match up book with only ASINs that are on Amazon Kindles and nowhere else.
And Kindle integration. When you finish a book on a Kindle, it asks you to review it on Goodreads. If you want to add an option to review it on $otherstartup website, your best bet is a supreme court antitrust case.
I actually turned off the Kindle integration because it was horribly broken. Books would get marked read as soon as they were opened, and then it was a nightmare of navigating through the UI to try to edit the dates when you read a book.
Overall, I like Goodreads, but the Kindle integration is not a selling point in my experience.
Instead of reviews and recommendations from other bibliophiles, it's filled with mass-market Amazon-quality reviews.
The fantasy genre there became dominated by romance for a while, with no ability for me to filter down based on criteria like 'Ignore ratings and reviews from anyone who gave Twilight a 4+ star review'.
As an avid reader who has been using Goodreads for years, my reason for not switching to an alternative has almost nothing to do with any of what the author mentions. That reason is purely the promise of stability provided by a site that's been around for longer (not to mention the big-name ownership) - the faith that Goodreads will stay running for years and years into the future.
When it comes to the list of books I've read, I want to set it and forget it - and with a small upstart, there's always the worry that the maintainer will run out of money (or interest) and shut the service down. Sure, most of these book sites have import/export functionality, but why bother with that when Goodreads will likely be around for a long time?
This is a very valid argument. You have implicitly invested effort (in form of lists) in Goodreads, and wouldn't want to lose them. It's another reason why a challenger can't rely on book tracking as the primary feature to drive adoption.
Made an account just to comment: Goodreads seems to be way more interested in selling books than recommending books, and they want to sell books from Amazon primarily, then other major online retailers. I'll give points for including "smaller" retailers like Indiebound, but they're at the bottom of the list.
I just switched to LibraryThing and I'm in love with it. It not only predates Goodreads but it runs circles around it. Go to a book page on LibraryThing and you're treated to the most common tags for it, people with similar libraries to yours who have it in their libraries, member recommendations for similar books, lists the book appears on, forum conversations, and a full list of translators, editors, and illustrators. Want to acquire the book somehow? You can configure LibraryThing to have links to major retailers and even search for local book shops and libraries and have them appear in all book pages. AND, if you want to swap a book for another book instead, it gives you links to swap sites with how many are available and how many are requesting said book.
Big LibraryThing fan. I paid a teenager to label bins and catalog the books in each bin and made each bin a LT collection. If I can't find something on my office shelves, I check LT to see if it's in a bin. It's really handy.
Monetizing such a site would be difficult unless you happen to be already the world's biggest bookseller. Thus, any person/organisation with skills and talent to undertake such a task would be better off promoting something with wider margins.
Discounting this reason, and supposing it happened, then amazon could just turn up the dial and throw some resources at it. As things stand, they don't need to.
I'm hacking on a competitor (zeneca.io) with my best friend, and can relate.
I think one of the other big challenges to overtaking goodreads, is figuring a "hair-on-fire" kind of problem, where people would switch and use a different product frequently.
For us, one such problem was displaying lists in a way that you could share on your blog. This is getting traction, but issue there, is that this isn't something that incentivizes people to use the product frequently. Without frequent use, iteration is much harder. We're experimenting with deeper social, discovery, and tracking to solve this. If anyone has ideas, feel free to ping me!
I've never been into Goodreads or similar sites much, but my wife definitely has and reads a lot. She has switched over to The Story Graph and has really liked it (minus the lack of friends that are present).
This article focuses on "better" in the sense of being a successful business, rather than "better" in the sense of being a resource for book lovers. That's a really gross way to think, but he is correct in a sense, and it's why I always preferred Librarything with its wonky, book-nerd centric interface to Goodreads and its growth loops.
Goodreads is an excellent, mature, website with a vibrant community. I use it all the time and have never noticed it lagging or had trouble using a feature. I think it looks and works better than most of the space-wasting,
feature-hiding, animated sites online today. I review a few books a month on there and end up in interesting discussions frequently. The amazon kindle integration, with ability to publish your notes on a book, is a killer feature for me. IIRC they had this before Amazon bought it, too.
People seem to dislike the recommendation engine. I can't comment on this because I didn't notice it even had one... it's not a feature I'm looking for. I guess I get that from friends and possibly from the main Amazon website.
No matter which book you search for, the top results will always have the Goodreads listing. In fact, Google surfaces the Goodreads rating in the Knowledge Panel. Goodreads is a monster at SEO.
Due to this some companies are literally undethronable.
This reminds me of the question "Why has no one made a better Board Game Geek?" (https://boardgamegeek.com/). It actually is slowly getting better now, but it is still shockingly stuck with a UI/UX from the very early 2000s.
Another website, Board Game Atlas (https://www.boardgameatlas.com/) was launched a year or two ago to compete with Board Game Geek but hasn't really caught on, despite having a superior UI/UX and some killer features.
Why has it not caught on? Mainly because everyone is already using Board Game Geek. That is where the community is so unless everyone moves over en masse it probably isn't going to happen.
However! After Board Game Atlas was launched, Board Game Geek suddenly started updating their UI/UX.
Here you can see the pre-Board Game Atlas homepage:
They've made similar improvements for interior pages. Up until very recently the interior pages were totally unusable on mobile (the forums are still terrible), but now they are mostly usable.
My take away is this, if you want Goodreads to have good UI/UX, create a competing website that does the same thing as Goodreads with good UI/UX. When Goodreads feels threatened by the new site, even if people are not moving over to it en masse, they will start to find the time and money to fix their own UI/UX problems. Though, it may take awhile, BGG has been improving, but it is taking a long long long time. A shockingly long time.
Well, it is definitely true that BGG UI feels dated and disjointed, and if Board Game Atlas triggered some reaction on BGG side then great. I don't find BGA UI that much better. Cleaner, more 'modern' - yeah... which includes a lots of white space and rather low information density. On BGG I visit some forums, read reviews for games I'm interested in and browse the files section - even if UI could be improved here it is usable enough and the volume of information makes up for all the deficiencies, at least for me. And contrary to Goodreads BGG seems to have working search ;-)
I actually like the current BGG UI a lot. It certainly has its quirks but it could be SO MUCH worse. It is definitely more enjoyable to use than most "modern" websites out there. Clear textual links rather than figuring out mystery buttons, pages load reasonably fast (including those with very large lists) and it stays responsive too rather than slowly murdering the browser.
I am all for improving it but I really hope that it doesn't get ruined in the name of UX.
I think the issue with Goodreads continues to be that people want Facebook/Twitter for readers, and its not and will likely never be.
As an author, the specialty nature of Goodreads doesn't provide enough reach even though the segment of the population you are reaching is excellent. The additional eyes, and casual readers you pickup elsewhere makes the energy devoted to Facebook a better investment.
For readers, I just don't think the discovery aspect is as useful. I think a lot of this like last.fm, where logging listening could provide good recommendations. Books take longer to consume than songs or albums, and there was very little cost to music compared to books. Lastly I just think your average reader, doesn't read enough books to take advantage of the recommendations.
I'm mostly looking to share what I'm planning to read/am reading/have read with a small circle, and for that it's pretty much ideal. There's some basic collection functionality, but no complex library management, no discussions, no recommendation engine, and not very much metadata. It's probably not for everyone, but the minimal approach is refreshingly low-friction. Kudos to the creator(s) for the overall experience.
My only gripes so far have been that search is hit-or-miss (especially for non-fiction), all searches sometimes yield results in an unpredictable order (where an exact title match might be buried amongst partial or seemingly unrelated matches), and the cover they pick is sometimes less-common or downright obscure.
+1 for readng. But then, I'm not really fussed about other people's reviews or a recommendation engine. I just use it for logging what I've read and my own thoughts. I realise that's not everyone's goal though
[+] [-] mekarpeles|4 years ago|reply
Open Library was started by @aaronsw.
We're a library catalog with 3M+ books to read & borrow.
We've been around for 15 years, not going anywhere.
We're open source and non profit: https://github.com/internetarchive/openlibrary
We defend patron privacy, offer free APIs, and release all public data openly: https://openlibrary.org/developers/dumps
Most projects on this page have likely used our data.
We have a Reading Log and several other more substantial features in the works.
Our catalog spans more than 20M works: https://openlibrary.org/stats
You can help! https://openlibrary.org/volunteer
[+] [-] toomuchtodo|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] troyvit|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fastball|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lukasb|4 years ago|reply
(Hi Mek! Thanks for the help so far)
[+] [-] Grakel|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] heisnotanalien|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bwb|4 years ago|reply
If anyone is interested let me know what you think. The goal is to create an online experience that is like wandering through a bookstore and seeing little notes about which books are the staff's favorites.
[+] [-] gen220|4 years ago|reply
One way that people discover books is by listening to / reading about authors they enjoy, talking about other books and authors that they enjoy.
There’s an NLP problem in there for sure, because they like to both bash and praise certain people.
It’d be amazing to have a searchable graph of “Tolstoi likes Turgenev likes Gustave Flaubert”. There could even be a time aspect to it, as certain writers hated or loved their contemporaries as time went on.
At present, authors and literary people have these graphs in their heads, it would be nice to write them all down and expose them. At present it’s quite laborious to bootstrap such a mental graph by yourself, as a student or hobbyist.
[+] [-] mrec|4 years ago|reply
[1] Do we really need both "Anglo-Saxon England" and "Anglo-Saxon Britain"? Or three different "Norse Mythology" topics and two different "Norse Myths" topics and a "Norse Mythology and Polytheism" topic?
[+] [-] evanmoran|4 years ago|reply
I wanted to add to others suggestions to consider adding more genre-like categories. I realize they aren’t as specific as “world war 2”, etc, but I think you will miss out without the common popular genres there. For example, “best fantasy in 2021” or “best cooking book 2021”, etc, overlap with tons of interests and seem missing. Maybe write down every genre in Amazon search and see how your groupings compare? Just my 2 cents!
[+] [-] bagofbones|4 years ago|reply
Curious to know - how did you curate these?
[+] [-] waihtis|4 years ago|reply
Not to pry on your secret sauce, but if you're open would be good to hear how you're trying to do the discovery part differently.
[+] [-] elliekelly|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] busymom0|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] krmmalik|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] calrueb|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wenbin|4 years ago|reply
Over the past decade, Goodreads builds a huge army of volunteer members (120,000+) to help correct book metadata [1][2].
But to compete with Goodreads, a new service can start from a vertical, instead of ALL BOOKS IN THE WORLD. A subreddit could be a good MVP.
- [1] https://help.goodreads.com/s/article/What-is-a-Goodreads-Lib...
- [2] https://www.goodreads.com/group/show/220-goodreads-librarian...
[+] [-] villasv|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] GCA10|4 years ago|reply
1. Goodreads has a LOT of users. It's the most extensive source of feedback on all my books. Lots of "wisdom of the crowd" that I can glean, looking at what people say. I'd rather have a kludgy site with 350 reviews than a UX masterpiece with only six.
2. Goodreads's huge user base means that reviews get noticed. This is crucial to keep the reviewing ecosystem going. When I put some energy into reviewing someone else's book that made an impact on me, I get a lively mix of upvotes and responses, which validates the time spent. Writing a crisp review on a minor site and getting no engagement is the worst user experience of all. Even if the official UX is beautiful.
3. Goodreads has pretty good tone control -- and that is not easy on any social site. People come to talk about books. Most threads don't get hijacked by MAGA/vs/woke. Anyone who overlooks this factor hasn't tried to operate a social site in the modern era.
4. Goodreads has the balance of power right between authors and readers. There are some things you can do as an author to drive engagement. But not a lot. You can't overwhelm the site with promo for a book that doesn't engage people. And Goodreads will stop you pretty quickly from flaming readers who give you one-star reviews.
All of these, I'll submit, are big, enduring advantages. They can't be swept away by a small new site with prettier UX or faster load times.
[+] [-] ankit219|4 years ago|reply
This is a huge underrated moat, and for any new startup, they have to usurp that. This moat is also why users stick and then the network effects kick in.
[+] [-] say_it_as_it_is|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tmcw|4 years ago|reply
Book data is scarce and expensive. Goodreads gets it for free because of Amazon, Amazon gets it subsidized because of Amazon's chokehold on book publishing. Any Goodreads competitor needs to license paid data and sort through the duds and the duplicates, and struggle to match up book with only ASINs that are on Amazon Kindles and nowhere else.
And Kindle integration. When you finish a book on a Kindle, it asks you to review it on Goodreads. If you want to add an option to review it on $otherstartup website, your best bet is a supreme court antitrust case.
[+] [-] bagofbones|4 years ago|reply
The social data that Goodreads aggregates is definitely a moat, because it powers their SEO efforts further.
[+] [-] imgabe|4 years ago|reply
Overall, I like Goodreads, but the Kindle integration is not a selling point in my experience.
[+] [-] heroprotagonist|4 years ago|reply
[] https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths
Instead of reviews and recommendations from other bibliophiles, it's filled with mass-market Amazon-quality reviews.
The fantasy genre there became dominated by romance for a while, with no ability for me to filter down based on criteria like 'Ignore ratings and reviews from anyone who gave Twilight a 4+ star review'.
[+] [-] spillguard|4 years ago|reply
When it comes to the list of books I've read, I want to set it and forget it - and with a small upstart, there's always the worry that the maintainer will run out of money (or interest) and shut the service down. Sure, most of these book sites have import/export functionality, but why bother with that when Goodreads will likely be around for a long time?
[+] [-] bagofbones|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] edly|4 years ago|reply
I just switched to LibraryThing and I'm in love with it. It not only predates Goodreads but it runs circles around it. Go to a book page on LibraryThing and you're treated to the most common tags for it, people with similar libraries to yours who have it in their libraries, member recommendations for similar books, lists the book appears on, forum conversations, and a full list of translators, editors, and illustrators. Want to acquire the book somehow? You can configure LibraryThing to have links to major retailers and even search for local book shops and libraries and have them appear in all book pages. AND, if you want to swap a book for another book instead, it gives you links to swap sites with how many are available and how many are requesting said book.
[+] [-] stonesweep|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pjmorris|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sayhar|4 years ago|reply
https://openlibrary.org/
It's a nonprofit, it's tied to the internet archive, it's been around a long time, its improving very quickly, and it Lets You Check Out Books!
[+] [-] dazc|4 years ago|reply
Discounting this reason, and supposing it happened, then amazon could just turn up the dial and throw some resources at it. As things stand, they don't need to.
[+] [-] stopachka|4 years ago|reply
I'm hacking on a competitor (zeneca.io) with my best friend, and can relate.
I think one of the other big challenges to overtaking goodreads, is figuring a "hair-on-fire" kind of problem, where people would switch and use a different product frequently.
For us, one such problem was displaying lists in a way that you could share on your blog. This is getting traction, but issue there, is that this isn't something that incentivizes people to use the product frequently. Without frequent use, iteration is much harder. We're experimenting with deeper social, discovery, and tracking to solve this. If anyone has ideas, feel free to ping me!
[+] [-] bagofbones|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] FunnyLookinHat|4 years ago|reply
https://www.thestorygraph.com/
[+] [-] vuciv1|4 years ago|reply
https://swapiverse.com/
I'm making a decentralized book swapping platform. You give a book away and get the right to access any book that anyone has listed.
Reduces waste, and saves everyone money
Not sure if we will add in reviews for the MVP, but it's definitely looking like a cleaner version of goodreads.
Here are some screenshots:
https://twitter.com/_joshuafonseca/status/138028946914478489...
[+] [-] karaterobot|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] foobarbecue|4 years ago|reply
People seem to dislike the recommendation engine. I can't comment on this because I didn't notice it even had one... it's not a feature I'm looking for. I guess I get that from friends and possibly from the main Amazon website.
[+] [-] macando|4 years ago|reply
Due to this some companies are literally undethronable.
[+] [-] DavideNL|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] irrational|4 years ago|reply
Another website, Board Game Atlas (https://www.boardgameatlas.com/) was launched a year or two ago to compete with Board Game Geek but hasn't really caught on, despite having a superior UI/UX and some killer features.
Why has it not caught on? Mainly because everyone is already using Board Game Geek. That is where the community is so unless everyone moves over en masse it probably isn't going to happen.
However! After Board Game Atlas was launched, Board Game Geek suddenly started updating their UI/UX.
Here you can see the pre-Board Game Atlas homepage:
https://boardgamegeek.com/dashboard
Here you can see the post-Board Game Atlas homepage:
https://boardgamegeek.com/
They've made similar improvements for interior pages. Up until very recently the interior pages were totally unusable on mobile (the forums are still terrible), but now they are mostly usable.
My take away is this, if you want Goodreads to have good UI/UX, create a competing website that does the same thing as Goodreads with good UI/UX. When Goodreads feels threatened by the new site, even if people are not moving over to it en masse, they will start to find the time and money to fix their own UI/UX problems. Though, it may take awhile, BGG has been improving, but it is taking a long long long time. A shockingly long time.
[+] [-] hipnoizz|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] donio|4 years ago|reply
I am all for improving it but I really hope that it doesn't get ruined in the name of UX.
[+] [-] gpapilion|4 years ago|reply
As an author, the specialty nature of Goodreads doesn't provide enough reach even though the segment of the population you are reaching is excellent. The additional eyes, and casual readers you pickup elsewhere makes the energy devoted to Facebook a better investment.
For readers, I just don't think the discovery aspect is as useful. I think a lot of this like last.fm, where logging listening could provide good recommendations. Books take longer to consume than songs or albums, and there was very little cost to music compared to books. Lastly I just think your average reader, doesn't read enough books to take advantage of the recommendations.
[+] [-] sec400|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mikedc|4 years ago|reply
I'm mostly looking to share what I'm planning to read/am reading/have read with a small circle, and for that it's pretty much ideal. There's some basic collection functionality, but no complex library management, no discussions, no recommendation engine, and not very much metadata. It's probably not for everyone, but the minimal approach is refreshingly low-friction. Kudos to the creator(s) for the overall experience.
My only gripes so far have been that search is hit-or-miss (especially for non-fiction), all searches sometimes yield results in an unpredictable order (where an exact title match might be buried amongst partial or seemingly unrelated matches), and the cover they pick is sometimes less-common or downright obscure.
[+] [-] andycowley|4 years ago|reply