Hello! I am currently making a reading tracking website (a la Goodreads, StoryGraph, and LibraryThing) as a personal project and have hit a bit of a wall, so I’ve come to the internet for ideas.
What do y’all like about your tracking service of choice. What features do you think are cool or important? Are there any things that your service doesn’t do that you wish it did?
Thanks in advance for your thoughts!
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Things that are/were irritating to me the most:
- Polish major platform doesn’t allow multiple reads of the same book. I want to track the number of books I read each year and this was a problem if I reread something: I had to decide when to mark it or mark other edition to count it.
- Goodread’s mess with book editions. There is no filtering on the edition list, so something like “Son Kichot” has thousands of editions and good luck finding yours.
- Goodread’s inability to properly mark releases that are split in parts. So the LoTR: Fellowship is T1 of the series. And someone could argue that The Hobbit is T0 (there could be also something like short story between them - T0.5). That’s okay. But now someone is releasing the Fellowship in two books. And the system doesn’t work anymore as usually these are added as different works of Tolkien. It’s half policy half design problem, but it makes checking the author’s bibliography painful.
I like Bookwyrm. Pretty much the only thing I’d change about it is that only one other person I know uses it.
It’s probably not the feedback you’re looking for, but I’d rather not have another platform for it, unless there’s a really compelling reason, or you have a plan to move people off Goodreads en masse.
Thank you for your perspective!
Definitely a reasonable critique but honestly I don’t plan to ever release it to the public, it’s really just for me.
Same here. I love the social aspect of it, privacy respecting, etc. Wish it had an app and was easier for people to get into
I’m loving StoryGraph. I value its vast array of books, audiobooks, internet based “non-book books” (things that don’t have an ISBN). Also, it’s book import isn’t perfect but very nice. Lastly, I love their metrics. They’ve done an awesome job of it and it’s a joy to see them.
I enjoy Literal.Club for its large number of clubs and high interactivity. There are network effects that Literal has which StoryGraph just hasn’t achieved yet.
StoryGraph has tried to implement Community and Book Clubs but it doesn’t work the same way - Literal’s Clubs are for discussing books in general, while StoryGraph’s book clubs are focused on reading one book at a time, with deadlines, discussion sections etc.
A combination of the two which I can pay for would be mind blowing! 😊
Thank you for your thoughtful response! I will definitely use your feedback! For instance I hadn’t thought much about non-ISBNed content and will totally work on that!
Glad to help. Some of the non-ISBN content I’ve read and tracked on StoryGraph is the mega-web-novel Worm and various interstitial PDF mini-stories that an author posted on their website as part of a continuing Sci-Fi series. All of this content on the service is user-input. All you would have to do is create the feature. When I discovered it, I realized how awesome it is to be able to track such content.
Remember - great artists steal. So go check out the community features on Literal and the tracking features and user-entry features on StoryGraph.
