what to use instead of goodreads

I have been using Goodreads for years. Back when I first got into book tracking in 2011 I found Goodreads and immediately started adding all the books I had read and still continue to do so.

I generally really do enjoy Goodreads. I love all the people that I am able to follow and get book reviews from, I love tracking my reading and looking back at what I have read, and I like that I have almost 10 years of reading data already on the site.

But…..Goodreads is also owned by Amazon.

If you know anything about me you would know that I don’t like supporting Amazon. I wrote about some of the reasons why in my post Small Businesses To Support Instead of Amazon, but one of the one thing that is hard to shake is Goodreads.

Now I know that it would be hard for me to leave Goodreads completely as I review books and need to post my book reviews somewhere where the Publishers can see it. I already miss out for them by not posting on Amazon since it has been so long since I made a purchase that I can’t review any of my books on there.

I am interested personally on some of the options out there instead of Goodreads and wanted to check them out. Sadly because Goodreads is so big there isn’t too much out there, but there was one website that I started hearing about a few months ago, Storygraph.

Storygraph is still in the Beta stages at this time, but it has some very interesting features that haven’t existed in Goodreads.

Something I really like about Storygraph so far is their use of graphs in showing you what you read and breaking down the books that you like to read. I imported my data from Goodreads into Storygraph (which was quite easy though it took a bit of time)

You are immediately shown some stats on the books that you mostly like to read and then the fun begins. By clicking into your reading stats you are able to see some stats on the mood of books, pace, length, genres, and fiction versus non-fiction. These are so fascinating to look through to see what I really do enjoy reading over other things.

Here are some of my charts.

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One of the other things I really like about Storygraph is their Reading Challenge section. Not only do they have Reading Challenges directly in the website, you can add books to specific prompts which is great for keeping track of things all in one place.

One of the Reading Challenges that I am doing this year, The Read Harder Challenge is on there which makes it so easy to add the books to and there are lots of other interesting looking challenges as well.

I also like that you are able to filter your To-Read list to figure out what to read next based on your preferences which is something that I have never seen before.

Now for the downsides. Obviously this website is very new so it doesn’t have any of the bells and whistles that Goodreads has and is very plain. I am very excited to see where they go however and how they grow in the coming months.

While you can follow people, the community aspect isn’t quite the same on this site, but I also don’t have many friends on this site yet, so I don’t fully know how it will work when there are more people to interact with.

So for now I will continue to update two websites and if you want to join Storygraph as well, let me know and we can follow each other!