Trendspotting: Alternatives to Goodreads

Each Goodreads alternative offers something Goodreads doesn’t—but none of them compare in terms of community size and will require greater investment to compete

Like most authors, I have a Goodreads profile and do some light work in maintaining my presence there, even though I don’t personally use the site to track my reading or review books. I don’t typically suggest targeted marketing use for most authors, given the toxic nature of some review activity on the site.

But for better or worse, Goodreads, with 100 million users, continues to matter for new-release marketing and promotion, particularly for traditional publishers offering print and ebook giveaways. Like Amazon (which owns Goodreads), it’s a popular site for readers to review or rate a book, and it ranks high in Google search results for book titles and author names. Even though complaining about Goodreads’ outdated site design and user experience is a favorite pastime in the writing and publishing community, that doesn’t seem to have hurt its marketing influence.

Still, Goodreads’ stagnation has opened the door for alternatives. In recent years, in addition to numerous book club ventures, I’ve seen a determined uptick in the number of efforts to displace it, even if by a fraction. Here’s a look at what’s happening in the market.

The StoryGraph is the leading competitor. Launched in 2019, the site has received significant media attention from outlets such as Book Riot, Bustle, BuzzFeed, The Washington Post, Lifehacker, and TechCrunch. It was founded by Nadia Odunayo (based in London), who says the site’s business model puts users first. As such, it takes no advertising and instead relies on paid subscribers ($5/month) to fund the site, but a free tier of service remains. In July, Bustle reported the site has 322,000 total users. The downsides: there isn’t an iOS or Android app (although you’ll find a workaround), and if you value the social/community aspects of Goodreads, StoryGraph offers very little of that.

To get started with StoryGraph, Goodreads users can import all of their shelves and reviews. The site will appear clean, quiet, and refreshing, and it removes a lot of the Goodreads anxiety by not focusing on friend/follower counts or prioritizing reviews/ratings. To learn more about its features, I suggest reading BookRiot’s full review of StoryGraph.

Oku (formerly Readng) launched in late 2020. It looks and feels a lot like StoryGraph and also uses a subscription model ($6/month). While its functionality is limited unless you’re willing to pay, you can still import your Goodreads activity and track/organize your books. But you don’t get personal reading stats or goal tracking for free as you do with StoryGraph. The company was co-founded by Aziz Firat in Oslo and Joe Alcorn in London.

Also launched in late 2020, BookWyrm is a decentralized social reading platform that relies on Patreon support. As of this writing, it enjoys 57 patrons paying a total of $325 per month, but use of BookWyrm is free to anyone. However, it’s a bit complicated to explain, as you don’t necessarily join BookWyrm as much as join a specific community of users or an “instance” of it. Once you’re in such a community, you can track reading, write reviews, discover what to read next, etc. There is a “big” instance of BookWyrm you can join with a couple thousand users, or you can start your own custom Goodreads-style site using BookWyrm’s source code. BookWyrm accepts file imports from Goodreads, StoryGraph, or LibraryThing.

BookSloth started as a mobile app and now has an associated website, still in beta. Launched in 2018, the free BookSloth app has all of the features you’d expect from a Goodreads alternative, but the userbase is small and you’ll find limited activity there. It was founded by Lincy Ayala and Xiomara Figueroa in Puerto Rico for many of the reasons you’ll see stated by other founders: frustration with Goodreads.

LibraryThing is the longest-lived alternative, established prior to Goodreads in 2005. It has roughly 2.7 million users and was founded by US-based Tim Spalding. It has a strong library cataloging focus and holds considerable metadata about each book; part of its business model is providing information to libraries. Like Goodreads, LibraryThing’s user experience and design is relatively unchanged since its founding, but the user base remains active. In 2018, LibraryThing acquired the iOS/Android social reading app Litsy, which syncs with LibraryThing’s database. Litsy has been described as what you get if Goodreads and Instagram had a baby.

Finally, keep an eye on Boston-based Readerly. This friend-powered recommendation engine that looks like Twitter is waitlist only right now. And there’s also Copper (in beta), which looks a lot like Goodreads if it were focused on putting authors at its center.

Bottom line: Remember the Browsery app? Probably not; it was the Goodreads alternative launched by Barnes & Noble in 2018. The field is littered with such attempts, and I expect most services mentioned above will not be around in another five years. That doesn’t mean such efforts aren’t worthwhile. Maybe one of these hopeful alternatives will get purchased and grown by someone with the funds and infrastructure to truly compete. Could someone whisper in Bookshop’s ear about this?