{"id":72500,"date":"2025-08-16T10:35:08","date_gmt":"2025-08-16T10:35:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/72500\/"},"modified":"2025-08-16T10:35:08","modified_gmt":"2025-08-16T10:35:08","slug":"for-book-lovers-its-perfectly-awful","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/72500\/","title":{"rendered":"For book lovers, it\u2019s perfectly awful."},"content":{"rendered":"

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It is a truth universally acknowledged that Goodreads<\/a>, the largest book-centric social network, is a merciless hellscape overrun by petty, perpetually aggrieved readers. The \u201cone-star Goodreads review,\u201d now a staple of internet culture, circulates on Bookstagram, BookTok, and BookTube in its most absurd forms\u2014from multi-paragraph takedowns of beloved classics to brutal little zingers. (\u201cNever reading a book written by a man ever again,\u201d reads one<\/a> for The Virgin Suicides.) Lauren Oyler devotes a chapter of her 2024 book No Judgment to Goodreads, generalizing about its legions of \u201camateur reviewers.\u201d Even Slate\u2019s own Scaachi Koul, in my favorite essay from Sucker Punch<\/a>, describes Goodreads as a \u201cdemocratized book review website steadily destroyed by people who can\u2019t fucking read.\u201d<\/p>\n

And yet! I love Goodreads. With respect to grumpy legends, I don\u2019t see myself, or most readers I know, in the caricature of Goodreads users as petulant and fundamentally unserious. Stupid little babies, if you will. I try to read generously. I am discerning but quick to delight, fully capable of holding contradictory ideas in my stupid little baby brain. I won\u2019t deny the site\u2019s many, many issues\u2014it is, after all, a data trove for its parent company, Amazon\u2014but I also can\u2019t reduce it to that alone. Here I am, three paragraphs deep in someone\u2019s 2017 review of Bluets. Now I\u2019m liking their two-star review of Wuthering Heights (because the characters were mean). Goodreads is not a good website. But it might be the best website.<\/p>\n

Is Goodreads, as a platform, intuitive? No. Beautiful? Certainly not. Does it work? More or less. The user experience borders on hostile. The site is beige and sluggish; the search function is uncooperative; \u201ccommunity features\u201d like groups and polls are confusing at best. When Amazon acquired Goodreads in 2013, it chose not to overhaul the aging infrastructure<\/a>, leaving the site much as it was when it launched in 2007: a digital proxy for browsing a friend\u2019s bookshelves. Here, at least, it delivers. Goodreads offers nearly nothing except a no-frills system for tracking and categorizing what I\u2019ve read and what I want to read. It tries to evoke the analog pleasures of owning books\u2014the satisfaction of curating a personal collection.<\/p>\n

\u201cGoodreads offers some stability in a really, really fast-moving world,\u201d said Lisa Nakamura<\/a>, a University of Michigan professor who studies the intersections of digital media, gender, and race. \u201cIt\u2019s keeping its UX to provide consistency and preserve an experience lost elsewhere.\u201d After all, she pointed out, books themselves are concrete objects, constant on your shelf.
\u201cThey don\u2019t change every time you look at them, unlike almost everything else.\u201d In a digital age where so much feels ephemeral, a site built around chronicling what persists feels unique and valuable.<\/p>\n

Most importantly, Goodreads is still where people go to talk about books. I read a lot of romance<\/a>, a genre often sidelined in mainstream literary coverage, and it is here, on this ugly, broken website, that I find smart and serious conversations about the books I love. Being on Goodreads feels like belonging to a massive, asynchronous book club made up of roughly 150 million<\/a> friends\u2014plus Roxane Gay<\/a>, Lucy Dacus<\/a>, and possibly Luigi Mangione.<\/a> Sure, some of those friends have really bad opinions, but that\u2019s how real-world book clubs work, too. And while sleeker, more user-friendly alternatives exist\u2014the StoryGraph<\/a>, for instance, boasts 3.8 million<\/a> active users\u2014none rival Goodreads in scale or sway. The site, vast though it is, preserves a bloggy intimacy that feels increasingly rare, a holdover from a simpler, less centralized internet.<\/p>\n

Not every part of Goodreads is worth preserving, of course. On paper, the site prohibits<\/a> reviews that harass authors or readers, or that aim to manipulate a book\u2019s rating. But lax moderation leaves books vulnerable to \u201creview-bombing<\/a>\u201d: coordinated, bad-faith campaigns that flood a book\u2019s page with one-star ratings, often before release\u2014and disproportionately affect marginalized authors<\/a>. Still, while many authors avoid their Goodreads pages, the site remains indispensable to others. When romance novelist K. J. Charles<\/a> released her 2013 debut\u2014a Victorian gay romance with fantasy and murder\u2014her publisher warned that its niche appeal would limit its commercial prospects. \u201cI\u2019ve got a career because an early Goodreads reviewer went absolutely mad for my first book,\u201d Charles told me. \u201cThere will always be readers who dislike your book. It\u2019s profoundly irritating to get one-starred before you\u2019re even finished writing it, but what can you do? You have to take the rough with the smooth.\u201d<\/p>\n

Charles\u2019 description of taking \u201cthe rough with the smooth\u201d feels entirely on point to me. The tech industry believes the future ought to be frictionless\u2014every digital interaction streamlined, every task automated, and every delay or hurdle eliminated. ChatGPT responds instantly with plausibly human sentences; I can buy and then read a book without leaving my couch. The aim is always less: fewer steps, fewer choices, less time between wanting and getting.<\/p>\n

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Goodreads, by contrast, is pure friction. Users manually log their books and wade through cluttered menus\u2014a hellish, click-by-click ordeal befitting a government website. The platform is stubbornly unoptimized; it won\u2019t anticipate your desires, let alone fulfill them. Even the simplest tasks, like searching for a book or finding a friend, require patience and persistence. Once, I might have found this annoying. These days, that very jankyness makes the Goodreads experience feel more deliberate, and in turn, more meaningful.<\/p>\n

Recently, Goodreads introduced a swanky new logo: a stylized \u201cG\u201d shaped like a magnifying glass over an open book, symbolizing \u201cthe book discovery and sharing of perspectives that are at the heart of the Goodreads experience<\/a>.\u201d OK! The company also claimed, somewhat ominously, to be \u201chard at work on improvements, both public-facing and \u2018under the hood,\u2019 \u201d which raises the troubling possibility of real change. \u201cIt\u2019s only a matter of time before they incorporate A.I.,\u201d said Nakamura. \u201cThe real question is whether users will embrace it, because industries tend to respond to user sentiment. And the Goodreads user base isn\u2019t like that of other apps.\u201d<\/p>\n

I can only hope the company treads lightly. Some things, after all, are worth the effort\u2014including a website that makes you work for your pleasure. \u201cGoodreads isn\u2019t good in itself,\u201d Charles said. \u201cBut you can sort of hammer something good out of it.\u201d<\/p>\n

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