In which I extricate myself from Goodreads
Like Flickr, from which I recently extricated myself, Goodreads was another web 2.0 darling, where social discovery through sharing your reading lists and reviews, resulted in the combined total being much more than the sum of its parts. Already back in 2013, Amazon bought Goodreads, thankfully mostly left it alone, but also never significantly improved the user experience.
In fact, some things slowly got worse.
An extremely useful feature of Goodreads, was its API, the technical framework for allowing other websites, and apps, to ‘talk’ to the extensive Goodreads database. I (still) use this API in multiple locations, including Visit This, Read That, and Placecloud, the existence of an API being another leftover of that collaborative spirit of web 2.0.
Back in 2020, Goodreads stopped issuing new API keys, meaning that, unless you already had some API keys, you would no longer be able to programmatically access Goodreads data. It also implied that API access, on the whole, could be yanked at any time.
A second issue with Goodreads, is that, since 2022, Goodreads only allows ‘librarians’ to add new books to the database. Mind you, these are not actual librarians, but volunteers who have to pass a fairly rigorous test, and then are expected to work for free, for Amazon. This meant that, if you occasionally read a somewhat obscure, or very new, publication, if it’s not on Goodreads, you can’t add it, and can’t add your rating or review.
The latter is annoying, the former is insulting, specifically because the overwhelmingly largest part of the Goodreads database is user-created. If not by adding books and details on books, then through the millions of reviews.
When Goodreads announced the end of its API support, I looked around for alternatives. Specifically an alternative where I can keep track of the books I read, and which provides API access to the data. I found none.
More recently, when I reviewed an early copy of a book on walking, I searched again. Now, I did find an alternative, Hardcover.
Hardcover allows me to add books, keep track of the books I read, and has an API. All boxes checked.
Goodreads (still) allows you to export your data, and Hardcover provides an import of that data. And, of the somewhat over 1000 books I have in Goodreads, all but 23 imported seemingly flawlessly. For most of the failed import, oddly, the books were correctly identified, but my personal data on them, such as review, rating, and read-date, I had to move over manually.
The process took under an hour. Goodbye Goodreads, hello Hardcover.