In today’s post, I’ll look back at my experience with the Goodreads site and what its future holds for readers and writers in the light of the last two years or so.

My history with Goodreads is longer than it seems – Kindle e-readers had Goodreads integration back when I bought my first (recently replaced) Kindle Paperwhite back in 2016. It helped me to read more through the yearly challenge. It connected me to some great people who helped me with my writing journey. But, in recent months, my use of the platform has declined a fair amount. Is that just me, is there some issue with the platform, or is it a combination? That’s something I’ve been pondering recently.

What is Goodreads used for, and how?

As far as I know – and I’ll welcome any corrections from people who have a longer history with the platform – the main point for Goodreads, especially before it was bought by Amazon, was to serve as a place to connect book lovers to discuss their favorite books. The strong point, I believe, was that it listed books from all platforms and languages, thus being great for aggregating reviews. It also offers book recommendations based on your previous reads, though this system lacks some basic “human thinking” in the way it way too often recommends mid-series books (in my experience, more often than not).

I used the discussions a lot in the early days, especially when it came down to asking for writing advice. But this fact shows one of the largest weaknesses of the site: its discussion system is extremely simplistic and thus very obsolete and outdated – it doesn’t even have a real quotation system that even other old forum systems (such as phpBB) have. Thus, especially if you’re more active, tracking active discussions and the threads of thoughts in them is extremely clunky. It also had very limited tools for moderation and, in my experience, faced frequent abuse by spambots.

Review issues

Goodreads makes review bombing much easier than anywhere else given that, compared to Amazon (and I guess other retailers), anyone can rate and review a book whether they’ve read it or not. This makes it way too easy to review bomb books and authors for various reasons. It also allows rating books that are yet to be published.

This is another shortcoming – authors who had been (in)famous for having their readers wait years or even decades for the next books in their series, have those long-awaited books accumulating thousands or hundreds of “reviews” that, due to the platform’s shortcomings, often serve as a way to vent the readers’ frustration about the lack of development (or even information about development) of said books. Combined with artificial ratings (as fans tend to give those yet-to-be-finished books high ratings or low ratings, based on whether they’re still excited or already disappointed by the waiting time).

Spam

Goodreads might be used the most to discuss books, but its simplistic discussion system has way too many flaws, of which I’ve mentioned some. One of them is that it’s pretty much simple HTML-based text rather than anything more robust such as PHP or JavaScript. But the lack of moderation tools, not just for groups but in general, means that posting harmful links by spammers was way too easy. Goodreads made some changes (I think in late 2022 or early 2023) that limited the way links can be used (the site will remove any custom text from a link as this was the most frequent way of masking harmful links) but that was only a band-aid solution.

Authors and marketing

David Gaughran, one of the major advocates for self-publishing over traditional publishing, has mentioned in his guides that despite being the place where millions of readers gather to talk about books, Goodreads is pretty much useless for self-published authors. Which, I dare to say, is a missed opportunity. Given a passing glance at Goodreads’ advertising tools, it’s designed for advertisers who can splash a major sum at once – which means traditional publishers or at least small presses. However, I think the site design is another flaw in this aspect. And maybe the way people use it – they simply aren’t in a “buying mood” when browsing Goodreads. Thus, the (still flawed) recommendation system might be better in pushing books than actual ads.

My personal speculation is that self-published authors, who tend to be more tech-savvy and lean towards trickle ad spending, simply use different strategies than those Goodreads offers and thus focus on different platforms (these days, mostly Facebook, Amazon, and BookBub ads) that are designed in a way that better suits the needs of self-published authors. Also, as there were times when some self-published authors were way too pushy about trying to sell their books (given the high competition, this is understandable to a degree), the users and user-created groups favorable to interacting with authors are few in numbers.

Book listings

Goodreads had an active user base and benefited from that fact to a major degree. But the lack of moderation tools meant it was also prone to abuse. Some time ago, it put heavy limitations on who can add or edit book data. Until that point, avid readers often manually added information about books they’ve read (title, author, description, length, formats, etc.) but this is now open only to Goodreads staff and verified authors. As someone who tends to read books from self-published authors who have yet to gain a noticeable audience, this means that the books I’m reading are often not yet in the database. And this doesn’t happen only to small authors, but even some large names among self-published authors. This was a major decline in quality for me.

Given that Goodreads is owned by Amazon, it has some degree of integration, and Goodreads adds a book that your Kindle marks as read – but only the title, author name, ASIN, and cover. Description, length, language, edition, and other information aren’t “fetched”. And, given that “ordinary” users can’t add this information themselves, this led to a spike in requests to Goodreads staff (by a good deal made from volunteers among passionate readers) to add this information. Waiting time has grown from minutes (small edits) or hours (adding a book with major details and series information) to several days shortly after the change has been implemented. Thus tanking the usefulness of the site for “pioneers” who tend to read books from unknown authors or very fresh books, if the author isn’t active on the site to add the book manually themselves.

At some point (summer 2022, I believe) the site also changed the design of book pages, while leaving the rest of the site intact, which led to a design schism. Furthermore, some information once readily available isn’t as well reached in the new version (talking especially about Kindle Highlights).

Echo chamber

Given the massive user base, I’ve often had feelings that Goodreads is, in many ways, an echo chamber comprised of fans of the major authors, thus reducing the platform’s usefulness for author discovery. This feeling is reinforced by the Goodreads Choice Awards which seems to reflect fandom size more than book quality (as some of the high-ranking books were, at times, released only days or even hours before nominations closed).

Platform fracturing

With all the above, Goodreads had lost the appeal for self-published authors (if it had any in the first place). There are better platforms for marketing their books, as well as for interacting with readers.

Just the same, the lack of a decent discussion system and building a platform as a reader-reviewer, other platforms have been used for book recommendations (such as blogs, YouTube, or Instagram – though the latter two have their shortcomings and are dealing with enshittification as well and, lately, hosting outright scam ads), leading to a situation where there many ways to discuss books on many places but none being really good.

---

To close my thoughts, I think Goodreads will stay along as there’s no hint of a competitor site rising to the challenge when it comes to sharing reviews and discussions about books – but that might be the only use left. Social networks are probably a better way to recommend books to someone you know. There are much better ways for authors to market their books, and better platforms (with fewer limitations in format) for reviewers. In many ways, it seems like Goodreads had wasted a lot of potential and that Amazon is leaving it on the back-burner, and possibly forgot about it in a way.

With that in mind, I’ll welcome your opinion and experience with the site. Do you use it as a reader and/or a writer? In what ways?