Why is goodreads unavailable

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The StoryGraph lets you set your own star ratings, so I can finally differentiate between a true four-star book and one that deserves a 3. Finding books to read on The StoryGraph is much more fulfilling, too. Or maybe, because of the general state of the world, I need something fast-paced to hold my attention — but I want it to be more than pages, too, so I can feel a sense of accomplishment when I finish it. Publishers scrutinize Goodreads reviews, weighing them alongside more conventional metrics like sales numbers and New York Times write-ups.

But anyone can leave a Goodreads review. As you might imagine, this system has a high probability of being gamed. And once you know how that data is being used, the reviewing process feels wrong. The StoryGraph did not set out to explicitly fix these problems, Odunayo tells me, nor did she intend for it to be a direct Goodreads competitor. But Odunayo did spend a fair amount of time speaking to avid readers, and in that process she learned about the many ways in which the Goodreads community felt let down by the site.

At the same time, however, sales are dominated by a handful of bestsellers: in crime thrillers accounted for the majority of fiction sales, with one book alone making up 30 per cent of the non-crime-fiction sales.

The Chandlers envisioned Goodreads becoming a precise tool to solve this problem and encourage more diverse reading, with finely honed, specific recommendations based on books that similar users had read and discussed. But this is the least reliable and most complained-about aspect of what Goodreads claims to offer. With the vast amount of books and user data that Goodreads holds, it has the potential to create an algorithm so exact that it would be unstoppable, and it is hard to imagine anyone objecting to their data being used for such a purpose.

Instead, it has stagnated: Amazon holds on to an effective monopoly on the discussion of new books — Goodreads is almost 40 times the size of the next biggest community, LibraryThing, which is also 40 per cent owned by Amazon — and it appears to be doing very little with it.

In an alternate universe, we could be living with a meticulous tool for finding books we would love to read, from a much wider diversity of authors.

Instead we have a book tracker that, for many people, barely works. All this makes Goodreads an obvious target for a competitor. However, it has huge advantages over any new contenders; its megalithic books library and its tens of millions of readers give it a very comfortable position.

But the discontent is quietly reaching breaking point. Ten years ago, Tom Critchlow, an independent strategy consultant from the UK now based in New York , mounted his own challenger to Goodreads: 7books, launched in and now offline, having peaked at 6, users.

Since then, Critchlow has been analysing why Goodreads competitors tend not to work. In it, he outlined the fundamental challenges behind creating a serious Goodreads competitor. Goodreads and Amazon dominate web searches for books, which allows them to account for a large proportion of book-related internet traffic.

Alongside the lack of incentive, Critchlow also believes that Goodreads ultimately still serves the purpose most people use it for. Critchlow may be sceptical, but new competitors continue to enter the book-tech fray, and one in particular is beginning to make waves. When I tweeted about wanting to leave Goodreads, I received an avalanche of recommendations for The StoryGraph from people across the English-speaking world. Though still in development, it already has tens of thousands of members, attracted by the promise of a place beyond Goodreads.

Users tell me this platform could be our way out.