The StoryGraph saw a surge of new subscribers the week after the election, echoing Bluesky
I’d love to, but the functionality of alternatives isn’t good enough for me.
I have zero interest in any of the social media stuff. I just want to track my books and make lists with UX that actually works. The sad part is that their tools aren’t even that good. The others are just really bad.
I had the best results with https://www.librarything.com/. It’s probably the least mentioned alternative yet the most polished.
Though eventually I just went with a custom solution for myself.
I’ve pretty much tried everything. They’re all relatively similar, but I don’t think any have the bulk edit option, and even with the fact that I only can manage a couple lists on goodreads (because I just read too much fiction and ended up erasing them), not having it is too much of a downgrade for me. (Though it has been a little while, and they were all pretty clearly in their infancy when I tried them.)
Rolling my own is going to have to be the way I go, too, eventually. It’s probably the only way I get series and authors as first class citizens in lists, and should make it easy for me to spin up quick lists for specific discussions in a way that is very low friction. I get sidetracked too easily and haven’t just buckled down and done it though.
If you are using android you could try Openreads. The UI is really clean and everything is stored on the device (can be exported / imported). No social media bullshit, just tracking your reading progress and seeing some stats about it.
It’s not for me.
An app is good interface wise, but if I was going to stick to a single OS it would be iPhone. But I do want it to be server based. I need the access to their database of books to keep a reasonable list, and a big part of the reason I keep it organized is for the ability to share lists in relevant conversations. I just don’t have any interest in feeds of friends lists or any of that.
Goodreads version actually kind of sucks. A shared list doesn’t keep my ordering and doesn’t surface my reviews as part of the list. I’d also prefer to be able to put a series or author into a list, with a “review” of them as a whole over an individual book. But none of the others have an acceptable bulk edit tool that lets me go through 50 books at a time checking boxes to make bulk edits. They want me to manually search each book to add to a list one at a time, when even Amazon’s version is an incredibly tedious prospect.
Have you tried Bookwyrm? It’s also available self-hosted, if you want to ignore or limit the social media part.
Someone else said, Openreads is a good, entirely local, app, with CSV in/export, and written in Flutter so you should be able to run it on your desktop, too.
Or, if you read e-books and don’t want the social media part, use Calibre. My only issue is that it doesn’t sync all of the information my Kobo obviously tracks, like read times and star-rating.
