Why I like Storygraph

Storygraph is a book organization provider and social media website. If you’re familiar with Goodreads, then it serves a similar purpose to that.

It does the basics of that kind of website well:

• You can track which books you’ve read, what you’re reading now, and what you plan to read in the future
• You can connect with your friends and see their books
• There’s a huge library of books (and their editions) so you can accurately track what you’re reading
• You can access it over the web or with an app on iOS/Android
• You can set up a reading challenge to encourage yourself to read more
• It provides recommendations for new books based on what you read

And then there are the things that start to push it beyond the basics:

• It’s easy to add new editions if they’re missing - I’ve done this a couple of times for very niche titles
• It has proper support for deciding you’re not going to finish a book (sometimes a book just isn’t for you, and that’s fine)
• Reading challenges are flexible. Sure, you can read X books in a year. But you can also create your own custom ones
• You can import your existing library (from somewhere like Goodreads)
• It has stats!

Custom challenges took me some time to realize what they allowed me to do. As well as a standard X books in a year, challenge yourself to read so many pages. To read books in specific genres (or just new genres). Even build an arbitrary list of books that make up a challenge - so it can be any criteria you like. I set up two challenges in 2025 (in addition to my normal reading challenge): to read some longer books (over 500 pages) because I was doing that less, and to read 3 books in Japanese because I’m learning the language.

And I mentioned stats, right? Storygraph generates tons of stats about your reading. Here’s a graph of how many books and pages I’ve read:

That’s one of many stats you can get.

All of that stuff is cool, but that’s just why the website is good. The reason I’m here specifically recommending it is because, as of July 2025, it is independent. It’s not trying to sell you anything except its own premium membership. It’s motivated to get better because its users want to use it to find good books, not so it can sell you Kindle or Audible subscriptions.

I’m throwing shade at Goodreads here, and to me that’s why Storygraph is important, because it’s important that there is a viable non-Goodreads website like this. Check out my page where I talk about why.