Goodreads Et Al

Recently people wanted to move from Goodreads to open alternatives to move away from the grasp of Amazon. I wanted to do the same so I moved to two or three apps and used them for a while. I stopped using them for one simple reason.

They don't have an extensive library of books, so when you start to read a book you can either spend several minutes adding all the information about the book you're reading into the system, or you can save time and stick with Goodreads. When you're reading audiobooks and e-books you might not have all of the relevant information.

Another flaw of these apps is that they have a monthly or yearly cost. Bookly wants 31 CHF per year, So does Bookmory. That's 62 CHF per year if you choose to have both apps, which most will not. With Bookly you can spend 150 CHF for lifetime ownership.

31 CHF per month, for apps where you have to manually enter the books you're reading. For that you could set something up in Excel or a similar app for free. We would pay, and we would get to do the work for them.

With Storygraph you get an experience that uses AI to give you more data about your reading habit but for this they charge 40 euros a year.

If they had a web app then this could make sense. With a web app it would take a few seconds to add books into the database. If we enter books manually on a phone we are likely to create duplicates and make mistakes.

The Experience

In my experience of Twitter, waze, Instagram, Goodreads, Strava, Zwift and more we start out investing in them, using them, giving them our data and then they sell themselves to the highest bidder. YouTube did this too. Yes, I love the ideal of independent apps, and yes I would contribute financially to use them but every app I have invested time and effort into has been sold.

It's not just that they get sold, once they have the right valuation. There are a dozen apps to choose from. How do we choose which app or apps to use? How easy would it be to migrate from App A to App B, and from Goodreads to App C and from App C to Goodreads?

Do you want to have your entire reading history on each app, which can take several days of effort, or do you want to use a different app each year, and with time choose the one you want to stick with?

Initially I loved the idea of switching from Goodreads to other reading apps, until I realised how much work it would be, and then I reverted to Goodreads. It's just easier.

One Last Thing

Although I speak of all these apps Audiobookshelf offers me a "year in review" that is a little skewed. According to this app I have finished 43 books, read for 14 days, through 1263 sessions and counting. My top narrator was Larry McKeever, the top genre was Literature and Fiction and the Top AAuthor was James A. Michener.

Of course I did not read this many books. It's that this is how many books I added to Audiobokshelf as read, this year.