Sinileunen/PexelsReading, once a largely private activity, has become more public and communal with the emergence of book-centred social media spaces. But while the “BookTok” and “Bookstagram” communities are often in the news, Goodreads, founded in 2006 and estimated to have 150 million users, was arguably the first digital network to focus on reading. Goodreads, which has been owned by Amazon since 2013, invites users to track and share their reading – and their opinions – through ratings and reviews. They can see what’s popular with other readers, and easily follow friends’ reading. For now, Goodreads is the leading platform for tracking and sharing your reading.But a serious competitor has emerged in The StoryGraph, a similar digital platform created by software engineer Nadia Odunayo in 2019. It advertises itself as “a fully-featured Amazon-free alternative to Goodreads”. An easy way to import your Goodreads data is a prominent feature. The StoryGraph’s user base was recently reported to be 3.8 million and it is healthily growing. Political aversion to supporting Amazon has only grown since Trump’s re-election (and Amazon owner Jeff Bezos’ attendance at his inauguration). This is a leading reason users are abandoning Goodreads. But it’s not the whole story.What does Goodreads do?A Goodreads profile allows users to publicly present and project their tastes and preferences. It also works to build a social network and a sense of community around reading. For many, it has become an intrinsic part of their reading experience. Tracking reading through Goodreads can create a sense of accomplishment. This “gameification” of reading through the accumulation and display of Goodreads data can also be both satisfying and surprisingly addictive. As journalist Kat Smith put it in the Guardian: “I love reading, but I also love the feeling of people thinking I’m well read.” (Mind you, in the same article, she said she was leaving Goodreads because the pleasure of accumulating achievements on the site was starting to eclipse the books themselves.)Goodreads has become an influential part of the writing and publishing ecosystem, too. Visibility and high ratings on Goodreads are extremely important for new titles. This can have a very direct impact on sales. The information users share on the site helps publishers to track reading tastes and trends. Reading was once a private activity, but has become more public and communal. Cottonbro/Pexels What about The StoryGraph?So what is prompting the switch? Superior visual design may be one reason. Goodreads has not been significantly updated for some time and now appears rather clunky. The StoryGraph’s popularity skyrocketed after a 2022 review on the popular website Book Riot. A recent Guardian profile will surely deliver another boost.The StoryGraph also offers a more nuanced breakdown of its users’ reading. True to the “graph” part of its name, it displays detailed statistics on the titles they have added to their online libraries, organised by genre, length, rating and other factors. It also integrates AI for personalised book recommendations. The plaform’s machine-learning AI will create summaries of unread titles that may potentially appeal to users, based on its analysis of their reading histories. But in some respects, the StoryGraph is more notable for what it lacks. Early reviews criticised it for the absence of wider social media integration. You “can’t import friends from Facebook or Twitter” and “can’t directly post from The Storygraph to those platforms”, wrote Chris M. Arnone in Book Riot in 2021 (though more advanced integration may be coming this year and you can, as mentioned, import your Goodreads library.)Indeed, the social features of The StoryGraph seem quite limited. You can’t comment on the reviews posted by other users. It is possible to “live read” a book with others and post reactions, but interaction is restricted. This may, however, be part of The StoryGraph’s appeal. Odunayo told the Guardian she wanted to avoid a situation “where anyone can just comment on your review and you’ve got to deal with being scared to put reviews up there”.It is no secret that Goodreads’ focus on social features and its encouragement of interaction has led to coordinated campaigns against books (even pre-publication), personal attacks, deceitful reviews by authors trying to game the system, and even extortion attempts threatening authors with bad reviews.Not owned by AmazonThe Storygraph’s status as the only significant social book cataloguing platform not owned by Amazon lends the platform credibility.Amazon’s purchase of Goodreads was described at the time as a “truly devastating act of vertical integration” by the US Author’s Guild. It effectively cemented Amazon’s control over online book discovery and selling.In 2008, Amazon purchased Goodreads’ now-defunct competitor Shelfari. The same year, when it bought AbeBooks, an online marketplace for used, rare and out-of-print titles, it acquired the company’s 40% stake in another reading tracking site, LibraryThing. When Amazon purchased Goodreads in 2013, they pledged to “do no harm” to the platform. While this may be the case, it has not taken any concrete steps to arrest its decline. Ex-Amazon employees have suggested the company is mainly interested in Goodreads as a source of user-generated data and has little motivation to improve it. Despite occasional measures, such as a 2023 pledge to strengthen account verification to block potential spammers, and an expanded team to handle problematic behaviour, a lack of effective moderation means review bombing, extortion and bullying have gone largely unaddressed on Goodreads.Goodreads toxicity“Review bombing” – where authors receive a multitude of one-star reviews intended to lower their overall rating – has become a persistent threat on the platform. Sometimes this is the result of coordinated campaigns against books due to perceived racism or insensitivity. For example, the controversy around the portrayal of Mexican characters in Jeanine Cummins’ American Dirt saw the novel subjected to review bombing on both Goodreads and Amazon, though this did not have a significant impact on sales. Further, Goodreads permits pre-publication reviews, as publishers will often distribute advance copies to significant Goodreads reviewers and influencers. This means books can be deluged with one-star reviews before many of the reviewers could have credibly read them. Elizabeth Gilbert Such campaigns will often be based more on tenuous perceptions than reality. In June 2023, Eat, Pray, Love author Elizabeth Gilbert withdrew her historical novel set in Soviet Siberia from publication shortly after it was announced, following a pre-publication review bombing on the title’s Goodreads page.With little evidence, significant numbers of the negative reviews had concluded The Snow Forest would romanticise Russia in ways that would be insensitive to Ukrainian readers. Most of the reviewers could not possibly have read the book.Some suggest non-white and LGBTQI+ authors may be at most risk from this practice. Cecilia Rabess was subjected to an intense review bombing campaign before the publication of her novel Everything’s Fine, about a young Black woman – an investment analyst at Goldman Sachs – who enters a complex relationship with a conservative white male co-worker. Cecilia Rabess. Simon & Schuster Though most negative reviews felt the novel had been inappropriately marketed as romance by the publisher, they often included personal attacks – with many calling the book anti-Black and racist – that had a profound impact on Rabess. “These are broader campaigns of harassment,” she told the New York Times. “People were very keen not just to attack the work, but to attack me as well.”More recently, a soon-to-be published fantasy author, Cait Corrain, was exposed as having used a succession of fake Goodreads accounts to post a series of deceitful reviews. These alternatively praised her own work and disparaged those of her perceived rivals, who included authors like Kamilah Cole and Molly X. Chang. Review bombing on Goodreads has even been known to escalate into outright extortion by “scammers and cyberstalkers”, according to Time magazine. Self-published authors can find themselves held to ransom, threatened with a series of one-star reviews that will tank their Goodreads rating and make selling or marketing their books effectively impossible. In 2021, Time published an all-caps ransom email sent from an anonymous server to one indie author:EITHER YOU TAKE CARE OF OUR NEEDS AND REQUIREMENTS WITH YOUR WALLET OR WE’LL RUIN YOUR AUTHOR CAREER […] PAY US OR DISAPPEAR FROM GOODREADS FOR YOUR OWN GOOD.“A couple hours” after she reported it to Goodreads and refused to pay the ransom, her books began to get one-star reviews.But the hostility on Goodreads is not only directed at authors. Reviewers themselves are often subject to attacks and harassment. For example, both essayist Lauren Hough and debut author Sarah Stusek have notoriously lashed out against Goodreads users who “only” gave their books four stars. Given all this, it may benefit The StoryGraph to be more explicitly focused on tracking and displaying reading data than on building conversations and communities.Julian Novitz does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.