Goodreads’ strongest utility is its shelves, which function as a kind of external brain for some folks.

That’s me, ha ha! I use Goodreads solely to keep track of my book collection and reading data, and completely ignore the reviews and all of the social media features.

I have a habit of checking out reviews on Goodreads. I don’t take it too seriously, but the UI is less busy than Amazon and reviews are often a little more chaotic, random, and personal. I like that. I use it to track the books I read, which aren’t many but it’s simple enough. From my own sample, Goodreads rarely form my decision on which books to buy, but it’s up there in my mental algorithm mixed with a bunch of other stuff.

I only use Goodreads anymore to track my book collection or when trying to find books for high school students at the library where I work when looking for similar books to recommend to ones they’ve already read and enjoyed.

I use it for tracking my own books because I can add a plug-in into Calibre, which automatically takes care of it, but I’ve also started using StoryGraph and hardcover.app which is a more manual process, but hopefully can get automated soon as Hardcover at least has a public API.

I’d be interested if anybody wants to share links to their own on those services. I’d like more people to follow, my links available in my bio on Lemmy

I don’t really use Goodreads.

Occasionally I’ll log on to look at what books are similar to something I’ve enjoyed, but that’s it. It’s owned by Amazon so I know the reviews are shit.

I have no idea.

I do know that I’m not super enthusiastic about Amazon being the one controlling my reading history, but I’ve tried migrating to several of the alternatives and it’s just too much.

Goodreads has a nice page where you can see 50 books at a time, skim down the list, and checkbox to make bulk changes. I’m willing to painstakingly reconstruct lists like that with an alternative, even though it will still be kind of a pain. But I’m not willing to manually search every title to add it to a list, or go through my reading history and need multiple clicks and backwards navigations for every book I want to add to a list, and that’s the state of anything I tried a couple months ago. Bookwyrm specifically sounds really nice, as a way to use federated tools to find people with similar interest and follow their reading and share. But the transfer is a lot.