This page was written in August 2025

My Concerns with Goodreads

There’s a lot to like about Goodreads really. It has an enormous catalogue of books to help you find your next favorite. It’s easy to sign up and a lot of people are already on there, so you can often find many people you’re already friends with. It makes it easy to organize your book collection so you can see “Have I read this?” on your phone while you’re standing in a book store, instead of needing to look through any actual shelves in your house to answer that question.

But this page isn’t a sales pitch for Goodreads. If anything, it’s sort of the opposite. But I am a Goodreads member, and I link to Goodreads from this site because despite my problems, I suspect that’s useful for many folks who might read my reviews. Goodreads is the 800 pound gorilla in the room of book tracking online. If someone keeps track of their books, they’re probably on Goodreads. Network effects like that, as usual, can be nefarious. So what are my problems with it?

Stagnation

My first complaint here is entirely user facing. As a user of Goodreads, I have a lot of gripes with the website that haven’t improved in many years. The premiere book tracking website on the internet should be improving over time, but it isn’t.

I joined Goodreads in 2012, which was, god damn, a long time ago. Goodreads hasn’t really changed that much in that time. Now that is absolutely not to say that things changing for change’s sake is good. (When I talk about ownership elsewhere on this site, you’ll probably see me talk about a lot of changes for the worse since the early internet.) But Goodreads could absolutely improve. Simple things like you can only change edition on the desktop website, not in the app. This has been a missing feature for more than a decade, which boggles my mind. Many of the pages are extremely unintuitive (“Why am I editing a review for a book I haven’t even finished reading or reviewed yet, in order to change my read dates?”)

Why do audiobooks have “pages” in its metadata? (And why are they usually set to the nearest hour of the length of the book?) Audiobooks have been around for a while at this point, and seem likely to stick around. They should be represented accurately.

The reading challenge system leaves a lot to be desired. The “read X books” every year is a great baseline - but why has it never gone anywhere from that? Not all reading goals fit into that shape - what if you want to try to challenge yourself to read the classics? Or some longer books? I didn’t really grasp how much the challenge system was missing until I saw the great one that Storygraph has, which let me set up goals like “read 4 more books that are more than 500 pages long by the end of the year” (because I felt like “read X books” targets were pushing me to read shorter books and I like long books) and “read 3 books in Japanese by the end of the year” (because I’m learning the language and wanted to set a concrete goal to help my learning).

Why can people review books that haven’t been released yet and brigade the author that way? (There are exceptions here like prerelease copies which should be handled, but certainly not by letting anyone review books in advance when nobody has read them.)

I could go on. If you’re a Goodreads user, I’m sure you could go on too. It’s clear that Goodreads doesn’t feel a necessity to improve in order to keep its audience. We’re captive to the network effect of our friends who we want to share our reading with (which is a very reasonable thing to want!) and our libraries of book data we’ve built up over time (which would take a lot of work to put together again!).

Amazon and Kindle and Audible

The next problem I have with Goodreads is its ownership. Goodreads is owned by Amazon. Kindle and Audible are also owned by Amazon. That does not seem like a good combination of things to all be owned by the same company. In one sense, I’m actually surprised that Amazon’s other brands aren’t more tightly integrated with Goodreads. And part of me suspects (as a total outsider) that that is a result of the torpor I was talking about in the section immediately above this one. Goodreads doesn’t add any features, not even the ones that make Amazon money at users’ expense.

Overall, Amazon has a strangehold on a lot of the publishing industry. Kindle has somehow led to a worse royalty scheme for authors than physical books, despite being dramatically cheaper to mass produce. One of my favorite authors, Brandon Sanderson, made a point about this back in 2022. The inflexibility of things like providing folks ebook copies along with their physical copies is nonsensical (basically every physical book should come with its ebook variant as a free pack in). The way Kindle manages regions and regional pricing means folks who don’t get neatly categorized end up lost in a labyrinth of unsupported states, potentially losing their entire libraries through accidental, innocuous changes to their Amazon account. The way Kindle restricts how you can read the actual book you bought (“That was your partner’s Amazon account? Sorry, you can’t read that”) is a state of affairs that no one would accept with real physical objects. And all the more frustrating is that this flies directly in the face of the obvious advantages of the book being digital - it doesn’t take up space so you should be absolutely free to bring it with you wherever you go!

Audible has a similar monopoly problem. Here’s Cory Doctorow talking about it on Sanderson’s blog. I intentionally never use Audible and it actually does limit the audiobooks that I can listen to because many are Audible-only. I do this because when I buy a book, I buy a book to own it. I don’t care if Amazon gets into a copyright dispute with Stephen King 10 years from now. I don’t care if Amazon decides they’re going to stop offering audiobooks in the country I live in (which is a preposterous restriction anyway). I bought a book. When I come back to it, I should still have it.

This is also why I link directly to sites like Libro.fm that let you actually own the audiobooks you buy. Once you download that book, it’s yours. The file is yours to keep for as long as you want, and Libro.fm has nothing to do with that anymore.

I’m pretty sure that most authors I read aren’t happy with the specifics of those arrangements either. And if there are those who are, I’d be interested to talk it through with them, because the pitfalls here are sometimes hard to see and are sometimes far away, but they’re very deep. Losing all of those books you care about because of some Terms and Conditions fine print isn’t where any of us should be.

But that’s all about Kindle and Audible, not Goodreads. My problem with Goodreads here is that as an Amazon owned company, it’s incentivized to encourage those monopolies. It’s the premiere social network associated with reading, and the review scores, popularity rankings, and site steering are all a prime position to funnel customers into Kindle and Audible, who otherwise might not have made that choice.

I want the goals of the book collection website that I use to be “be a better book collection website”. Goodreads’ incentives don’t line up to make that their goal. So I’d suggest you try something else. I discuss here why I really like Storygraph. You can even export your books from Goodreads and import them - no need to recreate your library by hand.