In case you live under a rock and hadn't heard the news, Goodreads is now owned by Amazon, that behemoth of a bookseller/tax evader/price cutter that everyone in the book world loves to hate. Following the acquisition, there was a lot of talk of what would happen over at Goodreads: would the platform change? What would Amazon do with all our DATA (probably use it to sell more things)? Would anti-Amazonians quit the platform? What are the alternatives?
Bookriot ran a lot of great coverage on the acquisition, how readers reacted, what it means for readers, for publishers, and for the world of social book networks, and the current alternatives to Goodreads (a list that has changed even in the last few months), and I'm not going to re-hash that all here. I'm going to admit that I contemplated deleting my Goodreads account, for a variety of reasons, but in the end, I just... can't.
I'm hooked. Not to the book-tracking aspect of Goodreads; my nerd-self has created a spreadsheet that tracks all the reading stats Goodreads tracks for me and then some, including my progress in my yearly reading goal, pages read, books abandoned, author gender, pub year, and more. And though I check the little "want to read" button on approximately 1 million titles a month, I rarely, if ever, go back to my "want to read" shelf when selecting my next read or browsing a book store (I prefer a much more organic method of organizing my TBR, in that I don't organize my TBR list really at all).
No, I'm hooked on the social aspect of the reviews, the prioritization of reviews by those I know versus those I do not. Though the star rating system has its downfalls, the beauty of stars and reviews on Goodreads is that I can read these reviews in the context of a friend or fellow blogger's preferences. If I know a friend likes light, beachy reads and hated Cloud Atlas... well, that's not really much of a surprise now, is it? And if a blogger I follow reads mostly literary fiction and narrative nonfiction, but recommends a romance novel as worth genre-jumping for, that recommendation is going to mean more for me and my tastes than a recommendation from a die-hard romance reader.
There are millions--literally--of books out there that I will never, ever get a chance to read. I cannot possibly read fast enough to keep up with the onslaught of new books I want to read each year, not to mention all the old books I learn about each day.
Other websites, including Amazon.com, have rating systems, but a rating without knowing the rater tells me nothing other than that a stranger may or may not have liked a book. While reviews from people I know can never guarantee that I will like a book, they at least up my chances. That is, after all, why all us book bloggers do what we do, isn't it?
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