Goodreads | The Good and the Bad 

We need more videos like this to put the pressure on! My biggest problem is the rating, I really just want them to add half stars.

The main problem with the rating scale is that it used to be qualitative scale, much like Netflix, where each star has a meaning (didn't like, it was okay, liked it, really liked it, loved it). I actually still use it this way, but it's obvious that most users did not use the scale as designed. Goodreads has since removed those labels but did not change the scale. The data now is a complete statistical mess of mixed interpretations.

It's good to track and motivate your personal reading habits... I've definitely read more books per year because of Goodreads.

The things that drive me nuts are 1. the slowness and errors, which you talked about, and 2. the atrocious search feature. I'll try typing in part of a book title, and either no results show up or something completely different from what I typed shows up. I have to finish typing in the book title for it to bring it up. Same with authors. One great thing about the app, though, is the camera feature. I can scan a book's cover and it almost always identifies it correctly, in less time than it would take to type the whole title!

I used Goodreads for a few years. After a while, I noticed it became the driving force behind what books I chose to read; choosing shorter works rather than the large tomes I wanted to read just to check off another book for my annual book challenge. I exported my lists and removed my account a few months ago. I track my books via spreadsheet now and although it's slightly more work, it's more satisfying.

I've definitely had that "well God dang" moment... Your delivery at 3:49 was perfect LOL

100% agree with your comments Mike. For me, Goodreads is a planning tool (more like window shopping) earlier I used to get heavily influenced by the book rating but as I kept on reading I learned to keep my own counsel. I think that we can draw parallels between Goodreads and IMDB. May be the parent company Amazon can just adopt the best practices from IMDB.

Great video Mike, especially the critique of art vs artist. That seems to percolate to Booktube as well. Was trying to get recommendations based on the Goodreads choice awards and so much was based on authors political leanings, beliefs, etc. The blind voting in those categories without having read any of the books was grating.

The fact that there's no advanced search feature is so annoying. Just want to search something like "books with 4* ratings released before 2010 that have fantasy and detective as genre" is just not possible.

I agree with all your points. I like Goodreads, in general. It helps me get enough information to decide if I want to read a certain book or not. It also helps me to record my reading experience through the years, even if the rating system sucks. However, I don't think it's for everyone....🙄 Great video, Mike!! 😊

Great video and an even greater shirt.

I agree with what you said. Now I need to figure out how to change the covers for my ebooks! 😂

Right there with you on this! It works for what I need, and I don't mind too much that the interface is a bit outdated, and yeah I also wish there were half stars. But it serves its purpose well of keeping a reading diary, organizing my tbr, and being a place where I can quickly see what friends are reading or what they think about certain books.

Goodreads helped me find like 90% of my favorite books. The fact that I can get dozens of quality suggestions based on certain shelves, authors, ratings and genres is amazing, especially for lesser known gems in the horror, grimdark, comic and manga categories.

I'd be more worried that if they put a new coat of paint on it they'd suddenly decide to charge a subscription for it 😅

I really enjoy Goodreads, the reviews are helpful. Also appreciate the giveaways they do I’ve won several books and with that have found some great stories i probably would not have picked up!

10 * YES - it needs it!!!! Also, their mobile app is atrocious and completely missing features only available on their site. That's just sad! Cheers, Mike!

Great video, Mike! I like it fine, sometimes the incomplete meta data an be annoying but I like tracking my reading on it, particularly the yearly reading challenges. Recently I've started writing reviews too by being cheeky, copying and pasting the transcript from my videos and then making minor adjustments lol, just another medium to try and reach more people 😊

Great video Mike! Despite some hangups I have with it, I still love Goodreads. A big deal for me is that it syncs with my Kindle. It lets me be lazy lol.

I never knew there was any hate about Goodreads. I like it alot. It really helps me stay on track with reading as I use it daily to update what page I'm on. Like you, I use it to gage if I want to read a book or not. It also helps me to simply see what's out there, what new books have dropped in my favorite genre of historical fiction. I don't have any problems with it really. I guess the star system would be better with 10 instead of 5, so I'll give you that. ---- Good discussion about Goodreads, I would have not known there were people who hate it otherwise, ..... interesting.

I use the 5 star rating like it is according to Goodreads. Amazing, Really Liked It, Liked It, It Was Ok, Didn’t Like it. My most common rating is definitely 3 stars tho: “Liked it” My only issue with this is it should be 6 stars. If there is an amazing star there should be a f****** hate it star. Reserved things that damage brands like HP and the Cursed Child for example

Goodreads isn't great, but it's the best we have. I do wish that Amazon would put a little bit of effort into improving it, though.

I use Story Graph. Never bothered with Good Reads... thanks for the video.

Whenever I want to read a review on a book I am considering reading I always jump to the 3 star reviews, maybe even the 2 stars. I feel they are more honest with their reviews. I avoid the 1- and 5-star reviews as they often are hyperbolic in either direction. I also agree on the content discussion. Too many times I go and most reviews mention whatever real life issues surrounding the book or the author. I just want to know if the book is worth my time.

I don’t mind GR. The only nit pick is the loading and crashing for me. Even the loading isn’t too bad cos on the App I can click away from the main page it’s trying to load onto my books page and it’s fine. It’s also quick to go out and reload the app when it crashes. But I do wish it wouldn’t in the first place! I love seeing what others are reading and ‘want to read’ as it gives me ideas for my TBR. I also value seeing reviews from others just as you do Mike. Great video!

Yep I pretty much agree with everything you said about Goodreads Mike. The rating system and the errors are terrible. I had a notification that refused to go away for almost 2 years. Other than that, I like to use it to organize all my lists and to also check the legitimate reviews for books I want to read.

I love how you look at both sides of arguments. Side note: you can change cover art on the kindle? 👀 I’ve had my kindle for years and somehow didn’t know this. Do you happen to have a video on how to do that?

Screw Goodreads, I just go to 'Mike's Book Reviews', it has all the info I need about what's good.

Very nice video. I do use Goodreads regularly and very much like the reviews, the series order and also finding translations/editions. What I don't like: the star rating system, I think the half star would help a lot as you mentioned. It is very slow and crashes randomly. Review bombing should definitely be moderated as should ratings for unreleased books. I'm not talking books that have release dates with ARCs going out, that's great but more the "book is announced - 5 stars because author is great or 1 star because author sucks" before the manuscript is even turned in!

One thing I HATE is the Kindle + Goodreads integration. If I open a Kindle book for the first time? Read. Remove it from my Goodreads ‘read’ shelf and open it up again on Kindle? Read 2 times.

I used Goodreads for a few years, but then got tired of the popularity contest side of things. Was finding it hard sometimes to find decent recommendations if on-trend books would smother everything. It was taking up a lot of my time to make my lists and TBR planning, and was fun for a while. And yes, even back then the system was sluggish and the rating system is awful (should have half stars or out of 10.) It ended up killing my love for reading. So I ditched GR years ago for keeping my progress in a physical reading journal, and I have a bookshelf for my TBR and Libby for books I want to listen to. Much easier for me, and it's fun creating my journal. Have read way more books, been introduced to free books on Libby, and am not influenced by recommendations. Best, freeing, decision!

I just want to save lists and add books myself just like I used to do. But that app needs an update. I use storygraph for statistics and reading challenges. Edit: because they've just added readalong feature and I'm already excited about it 😁

I enjoyed both Goodreads and Bookbub for following authors and leaving reviews.

Great video, as always Mike. The main thing I have always looked for with Goodreads and others of the like is will it easily let me organize my books and will it allow me to create a virtual book shelf...I am desperate to find a free website that allows me to see my books on a virtual bookshelf...aka not in a list, not in a folder, but I want to see and organize my books (physical and digital) on a digital bookshelf that I can visually see. Like the books in Mike's background, but in digital format. That would be amazing and help me organize my increasing number of digital books. Let me "pull the digital book" off of my digital bookshelf. Call me crazy, but I would love that.

I just use it as a checklist for myself, a log of books read this year, books to read, etc.. Don't really care for any of the social features of that place.

My biggest beef against GoodReads is that official librarians decided to delete entries from my account for items that weren’t, in their opinion, real books. On the first incident, they deleted every audiobook from The Great Courses since those are derived from lectures. They eventually caved and allowed users to re-enter they removed. On a second occasion, they removed, audiobooks from audible originals, because there were no paperback versions, hence, not a real book. I can forgive the first incident as a mistake, but the second incident was a dealbreaker. I can’t trust an organization that willfully deletes user information because they don’t agree with it.

I've mostly used goodreads to keep track of what I've read and my rating for that book. I can say that I agree with everything you said. Yes there's errors, the rating scale definitely needs improvement and much of the website is very dated. I have had several positives from using goodreads as well. I've won a few giveaways and I've been approached by a few authors to review books. I've also found several books I wanted to read by browsing the website. It definitely has its faults but it isn't as bad as people make it out to be

I also have an issue with the recommendations feature, I love epic fantasy but for some reason it keeps recommending chic lit, maybe I have some weird setting on, I am very new to Goodreads, but I do love to search for new treasures and add them to my tbr ❤❤❤

Maybe about 8 years ago I spent around 30 minutes writing out a review on Goodreads. When I tried to publish it something went wrong and my whole review was lost. I was so incredibly upset! Not long after that I realized I was letting Goodreads affect me too much, so I deleted my account and haven't looked back

I agree with just about everything you said. I always wondered why everybody complains about it; it works fine for me! Except, that is, the issue of it not loading. This is the ONLY website I regularly visit where this is a problem! Weird.

Great video! Goodreads isn't perfect, but I still like it overall. I admit to still being nostalgic for Shelfari, which was the first book-related website I ever joined. I got to talk to some pretty cool people on there. Thanks for sharing!

I still like Goodreads. But for stats i like Storygraph more. Plus i learned myself Excel to make some sheets for reading and see what books i have hahaha.

I like GR’s I don’t have complaints at all. great video Mike

Just a small note on the framing of some people can't separate the art and the artists. It makes it sound like it's the ideal but some people just can't do it, it's not they don't understand and can't they perfectly understand and choose not to do it, they don't believe in it, it's more important to them to support people they deem worthy of support.

I use Goodreads and Polish equivalent lubimyczytać. In Poland we have 10 stars for the test book. It’s easier to use and allows to be more precise but I’ve recently come to terms with the fact that people have different tastes and rating systems so I don’t pay attention to them anymore. I rate books for me to be able to see if I liked it year ago, especially because I love rereading books.

I love Goodreads (I’m probably your mother’s age). Using it to record my reads since 2012, I would never have kept a list without it. I check it to see if I’ve read a book already, check series’ orders, and read reviews. I never use the recommendation feature (that’s what BookTube is for), stopped listing books to read, and gave up the personal yearly reading challenge. My number is set to “one book” now so that I can look how many I’ve read, but the pressure was annoying for this reader of long fantasy books.

I still enjoy using Goodreads, but I do use Storygraph as well. When I'm uncertain about a book I look at Goodreads and read the reviews.

I completely 100% agree with you on author and product. I don’t care about the authors personal life. I don’t care about their political views. I care about the skill and product. Now, if the author shoves politics down our throats in the writing then I will care. Otherwise, please give me amazing writing. I normally back up the authors (to be honest) and I don’t care if that pisses people off.

Another fantastic video! thank you! I hate the ratings. If it was up to me i would do 0-100 haha. Just like a percentage. Might be overkill to a lot of people, but it makes way more sense to me.

Mike looking good with DX shirt! Big wrestling fan, mike?

Great review, Mike. I would add, not as a criticism of Goodreads, that one can succumb to the pressure of the quantity of books read in a year, based on perusing the site/app. I average around 60-70 annually. That range may be intimidating to some, and comical to others. Personally, I'm focused on reading great books and am not motivated by hitting a specified number, via the annual Goodreads challenge. That being said, I participate in said challenge, for nobody other than myself. As of today, I'm at 65 books read, with a goal of 60. But had I fallen short, who really gives a sh*t? I bring this up as I've had a few people tell me they don't use Goodreads because they don't read enough to justify time spent on the platform. What!!?? I always bring up, as you pointed out, that it can simply be used as a repository for books they'd eventually like to read. I'd use it for that reason alone. I wouldn't remember half the books friends recommend if not for the Want To Read feature. The memory ain't what it used to be. Which is probably why I hide my own Easter eggs. Keep up the great work. I'm knee-deep in King's Fairy Tale, because of your review. Cheers and happiest of holidays

That book " Stinger " you showed by Robert McCammon is a pretty good read. Right below his best two i think.

My first year on Goodreads. I believe at the end of the year they will send a pie chart of your reading profile. Is there a way to do this throughout the year or do I have to wait until the end of the year? Do the book counts start over on Jan 1 or do I need to keep track of my year end totals so I know how many I read in the current year?

I do like Goodreads but my biggest gripe is the search to find a book. I try to find the exact edition so the page counts are correct when I update my reading progress. Sometimes there can be thousands of editions for popular books. If the search criteria could include the publisher that would be a great help.

Great shirt for the Video Mike. Goodreads needs to get a super kick/pedigree combination, lol.

i mostly use librarything as i like the layout more personally but i use goodreads as a back up and it works good enough. i just wish these sites had an /10 scale than a 5 star system

I'm mostly ok with Goodreads, but would prefer some competition. They need to delete reviews / ratings of books that haven't even been published yet! Other than that, I'd much rather have Goodreads than not

As a developer i can say that it has bugs you can actually see without going into code or anything.

It is amazing how the website has not changed since I started using it in 2016

When an unpublished book already has hundreds of reviews: 🙃

I look for reviews on Goodreads after I've finished a book. Once I have my mind set to read something I just do it. After I read it I post it on there because if I do it before I may get someone saying how much they disliked the book. I've made friends on there who read about the same books that I would read, so from time to time we may recommend books to each other. Growing up it was a bit simple. If you saw more than one person reading a book you just made your decision to read the book that way. There were no reviews to go on but your own and you made the decision whether the book was a good read or not.

I wish you could sort your TBR on the mobile app also, not just desktop

Dial-up! Omg, sooooooo slow and I never knew until I switched back lol.

Some of the problems have the easiest solution: do you want to read the book? Then read it. No matter if 100 people dislike it or not. "This book I wanted to read has 2 star in Goodreads but I really wanted to read, what do I do now?", just read it if you want to read it. People have to learn to stop being so easily influenced. Literature is suppose to be a personal experience that you can share with others, in good and in bad. Determining what you should read based on a social media ranking or other's opinions rather than if you liked the premise of the book or even just the title or the cover is not the purpose of literature. So is as simple as "you want to read it? Then read it".

Nice shirt

Just wanted to say that actually you can hide particular spoilers in a review on Goodreads without hiding the whole review. You just have to use the HTML they recommend, like insert spoiler here

I just started using Goodreads about two years ago, and I like it. One gripe I have is that star ratings seem to be on a wildly different scale depending on the fandoms. I read mainly horror and most of those books are graded by users on a much harsher scale (don't hurt any animals or it's 1-star for you!!) than other genres like fantasy. I do agree that a 10-point scale would be much preferable to the 5-star system. Does anyone remember using Shelfari? Was that popular at all? A friend recommended that to me about 10 years ago and I stopped using it, don't know what happened to that site.

First time I heard someone say it's easy to find authors or books on GR. There have been plenty of times where I've added or omitted a 'The' in the title or got it slightly wrong and GR hasn't been able to find it and offers entirely different books.

Oh man. I can’t believe you spoiled chapter 13 for me 😉

try storygraph! the biggest downside of storygraph is that it doesn’t have the same large community that goodreads has, but i think the user experience is worlds better

I love the video but my question is. Do the booktubers have like a secret chat the use and say hey lets all upload goodreads videos today to manipulate the algorithm? This like the 4th or 5th video ive seen on my feed today about this. Love your videos btw absolutely zero hate 😂

Mike, how and why did you up your reading/book consumption?

I've been using Goodreads since before I knew about booktube. I really like it for keeping track of what I read, and what my opinions were about a book. I can't stand the search tool. You have to type in every word, spelled correctly, or it doesn't show any results. That is stupid. I do wish we could give half stars. I usually write in a half star in my review if I need to. I don't give star ratings that much weight in my personal reading choices. The biggest negative I can think of is that I feel this pressure to overachieve on my reading goal every year. I tried to set my number low but I still subconsciously aim for 100 books every year. It can be difficult to maintain. I'm at 92 books this year. My goal is 80 but if I don't reach 100 I feel like a failure. Lol

Will you be reviewing Dragon Teeth?

How did you manage to go from a dozen books per year to dozens? What changes in reading did you implement? I'm stuck on 12-15 books per year and chalk it up to work and kids, but would love to get closer to 30-40 books/year.

I’ve never used goodreads…I just go with recommendations from other book worms lol I used to write a list of the books I read in a composition notebook but I don’t anymore

I think you can give half stars on the desktop version

The fact that Fourth Wing has nearly a million ratings and is sitting at 4.68 should tell you all you need to about goodreads.

I only use Goodreads to track my year in books.

For primary database for book info, it bugs me to no end it doesn't tell me a book's word count. Countless times I want to get a feeling for how long a book is and page count just doesn't do it when words per page can vary wildly from book to book.

Question Mike what kind of mic do you use?

9:49 That's why I always take the ratings x2 in my head, it just feels way more comprehensible For me, 6/10 (which would be 3/5) is still okay to read while 5/10 isn't, but both would be 3/10 in the Goodreads system!

Pretty sure they stopped development on Goodreads, hence the dated feel. Amazon has essentially stopped investing in it bc they know ppl won’t leave bc of all the historical data (reviews) which makes it so valuable

side load on Kindle? What's that about?

The half stars would be nice added a feature. I see a 3 star reviews as average. I give most books 3 stars. If I read 100 books, if I gave all those books 5 stars. That means all books I read are equal, that would make every book 'average' nothing stood out or was worse than anything everything else. As such, 3 star reviews are books I read and enjoyed, if i never read the book I wouldn't consider my life empty. 4 stars are books that I am glad I found, something that will stick with me for years or a lifetime. And 5 stars are books that changed everything. I'll compare other books to these within the same genre, I will ponder the story and characters across all media. Gandalf is the gold standard of wizards, whether it is D&D, video games, TV, all olden wizards will be compared to Gandalf, are they fleshed out, is their sagely advice important in book, and relatable to the real world, etc etc. These are books that make hunting for the next classic story worth it. The next book could give new perspective to life, philosophies to ponder, or it good be another good book (3 stars), or somewhere in between (4 stars).

I also do like goodreads :)

I've been using Goodreads for so long, I update it without even thinking about it. I have so many reviews on there, all the books I've read for over a decade that I'll always keep using it. The one thing I wish they would do is require that you write 3-5 sentences of WHY you give a book a 1 or 2 star rating. Just hitting that low rating tells me absolutely nothing and I automatically just think you're being a dick and ignore it.

Goodreads helped motivate me to read more.

Only thing that really annoys me is under “My year in book” sometimes you can see books you’ve read in the current year and sometimes you can only look back at the previous year. I like to track my current progress.

I do like and dislike good reads for several reasons. Prior to the amazon acquisition it was great. I by default will watch yours and Daniel Greene's reviews, as both of your tastes in fiction are similar to my own. The qualm I have is the marketing good reads does for recommendations. Despite my "read" or "to be read" history, I think because of my demographic (female/age group) that they push into those "others have read", fantasy books that I would never pick up (Sarah J. Mass, "romantasy" books) into my recommendations on Amazon and good reads. I like epic/high fantasy, grim dark. Also the quality of the reviews are sometime questionable .

Excuse me, Mike, it's called X. How dare you!

I am not a fan of the books being added to my TBR shelf when I enter a giveaway. Clutters up my list.

I've always been a Goodreads fan, and similar reasons - gauge an interest for a book I don't know much about, and to track my entire reading log since 2016. So I won't be the one to tell you why it's so horrible 😄 Also, Petrik had been my "fantasy advisor" long before I discovered booktube, lol! For anyone who is interested in horror, look for a reviewer named Char. She's usually near the top of most known horror titles

Not having 1/2 stars is my only complaint. It’s good otherwise. Has GR ever explained why they don’t have 1/2 stars?

Break it down… for me Mike… let me know if Goodreads should… Suck It! 😬 Man I miss that t-shirt!

I like GoodReads. I mostly just want to see what my timeline is reading. It bugs me that GoodReads has no Audible integration, though.

The problem with changing the rating system(this is my hypothesis) is how would the ratings compare with 10 stars. Would 3 stars be auto 6stars or 5? There are so many reviews that I can see it crashing the entire thing to change the star rating. It should have been changed back in 2015 or so. I don’t like good reads because it stresses me out. I’m not sure why, it just does. I only use it to look up books if I’ve never heard of it before.

I’m a big believer of separating the art from the artist!

I never use half stars so I'm fine with one to five stars. I don't give five stars anymore. If that is gonna happen, the book must be special.

Similar to review bombing - how are people allowed to rate books before they are released? The follow up to Fourth Wing, Iron Flame, was top of the rankings for so long before it was released, and I know those people did not have an ARC!