ŷ������

I am not sure how this will be better than current Amazon reviews and suggestions. I doubt I would find ant value in it.

I was just looking into this because someone in another of my groups mentioned it. It might be helpful for personalized recs; it's too soon to tell. But I noticed that some of the books I bought for my grandchildren, including coloring books!, are showing in my library.

They also have an Amazon Book Club



I don't get it. This site has name recognition. Just make a new website, port over as much of this as they can, burn this source code, and make the new one something useful!

My first attempts at using it show major defects in its filters. For example, the list of books by the historian A. L. Rowse includes editions of Shakespeare’s The Tempest (but not anything else by Shakespeare). I can create accurate lists by myself, and have, and I am not likely to make much use of this feature until there is considerable improvement.

Given that Amazon has been purging my early reviews (which are twenty years old, but still relevant), and not allowing me to repost them, I am less than impressed by their recent efforts to improve the site.

Still waiting for them to fix my current reviews.
They removed all of them and have prevented me from posting, and can’t tell me why.
Investigating. For a month.

Currently just fed up with anything Amazon.

A lot of my most recent reviews have been warnings about defective Kindle books. I am no longer much interested in promoting sales on Amazon, which is a pity, since I like reviewing books I enjoy in a way that reaches a large audience.

You know that this means that GR is likely going away in the next few years, right?

Ian wrote: "A lot of my most recent reviews have been warnings about defective Kindle books. I am no longer much interested in promoting sales on Amazon, which is a pity, since I like reviewing books I enjoy i..."

Yep 👍

Rick wrote: "You know that this means that GR is likely going away in the next few years, right?"

🫥

Yeah, there are a variety of changes on Amazon to make it more "useful" to readers. Personally, I haven't been engaged by any of them.

There are good alternatives for recording books, but I haven't found one that has a mix of reading updates, rating, useful reviews and community discussion.

some of the options, if they work, might be good like incorporating borrowed books. And, as the recommendations on ŷ������ are terribly mismatched to my tastes and the ones on Amazon itself are meagre, that might be a plus. And the Wish List addition could be useful.

Oddly enough, it lists 2613 Kindle Books and my Content & Devices page lists 2661 books, so there's some kind of disconnect. I do not see my Docs or anyway to add them. And I hate the Grid view none of which they asked about in the survey

A few years back I switched from .com to .co.uk and now when I follow the link in the article I only see the books I bought while on .com marketplace. And no "Your books" on the .co.uk version of the site.
Such a mess.
Totally agree that just upgrading to ŷ������ 2.0 keeping all the good parts would have been smarter. But I'm afraid they're doing all these "improvements" not for the sake of users, but for the sake of boosting sales, so all our wails are in vain. :(

Olga wrote: ".."

That’s a guarantee 😎

I feel like one weakness to this new Amazon competitor is that I think there are a lot of readers with very robust habits of not getting their books from Amazon. They don't reread and they are willing to wait, so they get their books from the library. Those people aren't going to feel as compelled to join this new social network. And then the absence of those people is going to weaken the network effects which is one reason why we're all so loyal to ŷ������, despite the awful experience which now seems quite clearly to be by design.

Absolutely!
I also had the same thought. What about all those books I loan in Libby or buy in local book stores? Even Audible purchases are not included (as far as I see), though it's also Amazon basically.

Any book site or community whose main focus is trying to sell me something has limited value for me. ŷ������ has remained decent because.of momentum. ŷ������ 2.0 created by Amazon will not be good.

I probably need to try out some of the others to see if I like any before they pull the plug

Yeah, I was talking to my husband, who works in tech, and he thinks it's fairly likely that Amazon will pull the plug at some point. He is a comics book reader and he notes that they did that with Comixology, though they took a year or so to do it.

Some tech companies do buy other tech companies just so that they can kill them, either quickly or slowly. IBM does it all the time.

Are there any viable alternatives to ŷ������? Sure, the UI is a bit outdated but the groups are great. For talking to people about books this works.
It is too bad that Amazon won't update ŷ������.

Yes, I have heard that one of ŷ������' major bragging points is their flourishing groups.

Great :) Amazon shouldn't underestimate the value of good groups. We talk, we exchange recs etc. I bet many of us, me included, have bought books because of that. From Amazon at that too.

Amazon once had Discussion Boards, which served some of the community-forming functions of ŷ������, including targeted recommendations. Amazon killed it, with warning, but no real explanation. They may have decided it wasn’t worth the money because it merely encouraged consumer loyalty. And explained reviewer guidelines to the clueless. (On the other hand, it did spread the word on Amazon problems, and so encouraged complaints.) Killing ŷ������ may be just another example of the same attitude.

It makes me worry. Habitica killed the guilds, which were like a forum or Discord-like chat (but worked way worse). So despite them flourishing they may well decided the groups aren’t worth it.

Ian wrote: "Amazon once had Discussion Boards, which served some of the community-forming functions of ŷ������, including targeted recommendations. Amazon killed it, with warning, but no real explanation. Th..."

They did leave the digital and device forum up and running. I think that one saves them money from all the help some customers give to other customers. I'm a regular there. And we know a lot of solutions/tricks that aren't covered in the help pages and customer service is unlikely to know

Technically it wouldn't be that hard to replicate GR. But none of those that have tried are serious competitors because of inertia - this group has 36k+ members. Most will not move to a new place, especially if they are also members of other groups. And then there's moving your books collections. And some will move to a new site that won't have some favorite feature and not go back.

However, if Amazon kills this site (as in actually takes if offline and forces us to this new thing), that might be enough for a reasonable competitor to get some traction. Right now, we don't have to make that decision since GR is still here. But the inertia that keeps people here disappears if the site does.

I feel like just by announcing that it has a competitor to ŷ������, Amazon will be pushing many people to alternative sites, if only so that they can have some options.

Mindy wrote: "I feel like just by announcing that it has a competitor to ŷ������, Amazon will be pushing many people to alternative sites, if only so that they can have some options."

So... what ARE some GR alternatives? Especially ones with group features like this site. I don't actually use the book tracking stuff all that much. For me, the value is in the groups and all of the alt-GR sites I've seen are focused on library management and/or recommendations. Storygraph is nice... and utterly lacking in groups featured for example. Booksloth is YA last time I looked and has no web interface being app only (and mobile app as well).

A complication is that there's no longer a programmatic interface for getting your data from GR - they stopped that at the end of 2020.

this group can be found but is not presently moderated on: Library Thing, Amazon, The Story Graph

Discord is our other moderated space

The Storygraph thread is here if anyone wants a look. Discord info is here.

That is so awesome! This group is just so ontop of everything!

The problem is that TSG doesn't have forums. Yes, our shelf is there but unless I missed it, there's no group forum place like this over there.

LT has groups. Could be interesting. The strength of GR is that it combines these forums with the ability to track books. Splitting things, e.g. Discord for discussions and TSG for tracking feels less than optimal. Dammit, Amazon...

Yeah no groups/forums yet, but I remain hopeful!

I can't imagine that they'd give GR the axe anytime soon. It's too huge.

Book depository was huge��

Twitter was huge

I was talking to Mindy about this in another group...

I wonder if GR might be different? At least the database side of things �� which has been built by an army of volunteers and exists as the (English) world’s master database for books. Shutting that aspect down would feel bigger, like shutting down Wikipedia.

Beige wrote: "... I wonder if GR might be different? At least the database side of things �� which has been built by an army of volunteers and exists as the (English) world’s master database for books. ..."

DPReview was seen by many in the photography world as the master database for digital cameras, in part because of their extensive studio photo samples stretching back decades. Despite that Amazon announced earlier this year that it was closing. It was only saved by a combination of widespread protests and by another company stepping forward to acquire it at (after, by some measures) the last minute.

I do hope you're right, but...

Me, too

Let's face it: the only thing that Amazon is interested in is the largest profit possible in the short term and maximum control over the market. Long term: what's that?

I think the point that @Beige made about ŷ������ being the iconic database for books in the English-speaking world is an interesting one. Because now that Amazon has made its intentions clear, it probably wants THEIR listing of books to be at least one of the top databases. So, actually, ŷ������ being the go-to reference place to get more information about books becomes a threat. I mean, when I look at books, the first two places I check are ŷ������ and Amazon, since I buy a lot of Kindle books. Amazon probably wants more people to point their browsers towards their book listings instead of just turning to ŷ������.

That probably by itself would be an important "business objective" ---- just getting people onto the Amazon website to look up information about a book.

Mindy wrote: "That probably by itself would be an important "business objective" ---- just getting people onto the Amazon website to look up information about a book."

but the first link to find a book always seems to go to Amazon

A fair number of my recommendations are published by Amazon, too.

My root problem with Amazon creating a competitor is that I will never trust the recommendations. I know Amazon owns goodreads but it is mostly community driven. Anything a company has to say is inherently biased towarda that company

Hank wrote: "My root problem with Amazon creating a competitor is that I will never trust the recommendations. I know Amazon owns goodreads but it is mostly community driven. Anything a company has to say is in..."

Amazon's recommendations overall seem better, to me, than the ones on ŷ������ and they're actually books I might purchase

CBRetriever wrote: "Amazon's recommendations overall seem better, to me, than the ones on ŷ������ and they're actually books I might purchase
..."

I've noticed this too and I think it's because Amazon has data on all your purchases. GR can only really go off books you've shelved and those you've reviewed. They should be closer if someone shelves all of their purchases on GR and reviews each book they read, but purchasing is a strong sign and since Amazon can see your reviews there and perhaps here (if you've connected both sites), they can correlate purchase and opinion. And, of course, Amazon has a material incentive to improve recommendations since those drive revenue.

Part of what I like about GR is that it has a full suite of features. I don't really keep a database of what I read so that aspect doesn't matter to me... but it does to others and it's here. I'm more here for this forums and reviews...but others probably don't care about those.

Recreating the data part of GR is comparatively simple. TSG does that as does LibraryThing. But adding in the social features, the idea of librarians, etc is more resource intensive and thus more expensive. The expense is likely trivial for Amazon but for a smaller startup sized business it could be significant. I wonder if that's why none of the GR competitors do it.

There are book reading groups on Reddit, including sff, some of which have groups over here. Not been on them in a while, but discussion can happen. Doesn't include the books you've read catalogue.
For discussing SFF there is the Science Fiction and Fantasy Chronicles - again no book catalogues, but it is a moderated place for book discussion, film discussion, social discussion, book writing, critiquing and publishing, gaming, art and music. Users go to the bits they are most interested in. No discussion of world affairs or anything likely to start a row.

Carro wrote: "There are book reading groups on Reddit, including sff, some of which have groups over here. Not been on them in a while, but discussion can happen. Doesn't include the books you've read catalogue...."

Sure but those aren't integrated with the same site where you track. your books.

And then there are challenges, voting, etc that GR supports. Having everything in one place is a huge advantage - a book of the month being read by a group can drive people to the book page which lets people buy the book, etc.

well, there's no way under recommendations to say "I do not want this book". But the recommendations look a bit better

Mindy wrote: "That is so awesome! This group is just so ontop of everything!"

TheStoryGraph is adding a beefed up "Book Club" experience - and soon - according to their roadmap. It doesn't look like it will support a full forum experience yet, but I remain hopeful. I got a subscription to their "Plus" model specifically to support that. I think we (as a group) should keep our finger on the pulse of what develops over there (I have no financial interest in TSG - just really want something to replace GR).

Jen, we have a thread for Storygraph, linked above in this thread! :)

yeah, the mods at least are very eager to see where TSG goes next!