'It’s totally unhinged’: is the book world turning against Goodreads?
'It’s totally unhinged’: is the book world turning against Goodreads?
The influential user review site has suffered a year of controversies, from cancelled book deals to review-bombing, and exposed a dark side to the industry
Hopefully. Join Bookwyrm!
https://joinbookwyrm.com/ looks great! Since it's an ActivityPub service, could it also connect with Lemmy? If yes, how?
I don't think it can because Lemmy only federates article type objects. It does federate with Mastodon, Kbin (except I had a problem following my Bookwyrm account - not sure if that was fixed), etc - basically the microblog supporting ActivityPub services.
Thanks!
Bookwyrm federated with Mastodon. I can boost my bookwyrm post to my Mastodon feed (I usually avoid doing it since my review posts are usually long).
There's also openlibrary
While there are really bad things about goodreads, the article/interviews give me a vibe of "boohoo, we want to decide what people like and now they decide it themselves and we don't like that."
There is definitely an element of that from the article and I agree it's ridiculous. Some authors and their followers attack those who give poor reviews (because they can't accept criticism, instead arguing that a 'professional' review would give them a much better score) and on the other side you have people reviewing books that aren't even out. In many cases it's no longer a place to find genuine reviews, but an unmoderated wild west with crap at both extremes (a bit like Twitter in that respect). It's a shame because there are plenty of people leaving great reviews, but it's becoming much harder to find them.
I think sorting out actual quality reviews is harder than people think. Even something like Steam, where the cumulative user rating is relatively respected, surface a lot of junk reviews, because people respond to meme-ing and jokey shitposts more than actual high quality reviews. The signals even for a behemoth like Amazon to train an AI on just really aren't amazing. I know fakespot looks for outright fraud Amazon doesn't, but I think part of their success is that they're not the benchmark cheaters are trying to beat. In any case, "genuine" reviews and "quality" reviews aren't the same thing, and the latter is really hard to measure.
I think a more robust set of curation tools would have some value. Flipboard has been mentioned a bit lately for articles, and while I haven't used it, my impression is that the premise is that you subscribe to curated lists of different interests. Something like that for reviewers who catch the eye of curators could be interesting for a federated book platform.
My main issue with the article is the premise that "professional" reviewers are objectively any higher quality on average than user reviews. A sizable proportion of them are very detached from what real people care about. I absolutely critically read non-fiction, and am somewhat judgy if a certain rigor isn't applied, but for fiction? How is that fun? It's OK for a story just to be cheap fun. It's OK for different authors to have different writing styles and different levels of attention to detail and different levels of grittiness to their stories. There is absolutely actual bad writing out there, and some gets published, but a story not being for you doesn't mean that voice doesn't connect with someone else. A lot of book critics are huge snobs.
Seriously. I'd love an alternative that's anywhere close to basic functionality, but this article is beyond stupid.
Yes, allowing people outside whatever stupid circle to review books and have their reviews considered by other people is a good thing.
Now, a lot of the reviews are trash because a lot of people have stupid opinions on books. Some people just want something to trash and have reviews that reflect that. But that's equally true of "real critics" and their opinions are often just as bad.
Edit: I wonder if I could make a browser extension that recognizes book objects on one of the alternatives and lets you bulk select and make changes that way, replicating the flow or function calls they use now.
Bookwyrm sounds great, but actually using it to organize past reading and just re-make lists that already exist is absolutely brutal.
As a longtime Goodreads user I'm kind of smitten with Hardcover. It offers nearly everything I want: good database, lists, status, searching. Also has responsive developers and a promising roadmap. The one thing it's missing is, sigh, my friends. hashtag-networkeffect. I'm a paying supporter.
I've been a paying supporter of Storygraph since its beta days, but I just don't really get it. Its social aspects are awful. Maybe it's great for automated book recommendations, but I have zero interest in that. I just want to see what my friends are reading, have read/reviewed, want to read. And I want to keep track of my books.
Bookwyrms looks promising but each time I try it I run into new stumbling blocks. I will keep playing with it, but for now my efforts are all on Hardcover.
Yeah I love hardcover, I only wish it were a little easier to create & see the private notes I've written for a book. They're tucked away in the review page at the moment. Apart from that it's great, does everything I need with a nice interface.
I am sad that we have to start over with all these things.
Bookwyrm federated with Mastodon. I can boost my bookwyrm post to my Mastodon feed (I usually avoid doing it since my review posts are usually long).
I’ve had a great experience migrating from Goodreads to Obsidian with the Book Search plug-in (uses the google books API). I have a template file for exactly what data I want and how I want it structured (including quotes and notes), and I use Dataview to make custom queries on my book collection for read/to-read/reading statuses. It works very well, looks nice, and is all stored in text/markdown so I own the data.
Have you documented your setup? I’d be curious to learn more
I haven't documented my specific setup, but there are a few YouTube videos I followed to get my personal setup to a state that I'm happy with:
Literature is not a popular contest. A lot of great books would have been buried if we let review sites take control. Not to mention the amount of astroturfing and trolling tainting the "reviews".
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For Bethany Baptiste, Molly X Chang, KM Enright, Thea Guanzon, Danielle L Jensen, Akure Phénix, RM Virtues and Frances White, it must have been brutal reading.
Last summer the author Elizabeth Gilbert postponed a historical novel set in Siberia after hundreds of users criticised the book, which had yet to be published, as insensitive amid Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The author Sarah Stusek appeared to take offence when a Goodreads user, Karleigh Kebartas, gave her debut novel Three Rivers four stars instead of five and commented that the “ending was kind of predictable, but other than that it was incredible”.
Publications such as the Guardian, the New York Times and the Washington Post hold journalists and reviewers to professional standards, Patrick argues, whereas Goodreads lacks such oversight.
The site was launched in 2007 by Otis Chandler, a computer programmer, and Elizabeth Khuri, assistant style editor for the Los Angeles Times’s Sunday magazine (the couple married in 2008).
Shelly Romero, a freelance editor and writer based in New York, points out that most of the debut authors whose books that Corrain disparaged on Goodreads were people of colour, who already have an uphill struggle to get their work published.
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