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I added loads of people from the thread yesterday and today and hit my daily adding limit both times.  Here's my profile. I read lots of terrible books and give them good ratings because I have no idea what quality writing is. I don't review stuff, but I shelve nearly everything I read to make it easier to navigate.It's telling that all the authors complaining about GR reviews write YA fiction. YA books don't tend to be met with much criticism from their target audience, especially not about sensitive issues like sexism and unhealthy relationships (two staples of the genre, thanks to a certain broody stalker vampire). When a reviewer calls out a YA book for being antifeminist after the author has seen literally hundreds of gushing reviews from teenage girls, it's bound to inflame the author's righteous indignation. How could her book possibly be bad when it's sold hundreds of thousands of copies? Time to get on Twitter and tell the world how wrong that stupid cow is! Of course, that kind of behaviour is not specific to YA, just more prevalent. Just because an author writes "adult" fiction doesn't mean he's going to act like one.
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Feb 2, 2012 03:39
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Poutling posted:Just out of curiosity, why would you want to tag a book 'horse piss' if you knew it would only apply to this book? Is it for the sake of remembering that there was horse piss involved in this book somehow? And if so, why wouldn't you just use the review system as a way to jog your memory of specific things that caught your attention about the book? Well, I think he meant more like "that is the only book I have read about horse piss, but I would be interested in finding more books about horse piss", which is a valid point, except that the shelving system works fine for that. For example, I'm currently reading Tomorrow, When The War Began by John Marsden. The book page is here, and on the right you can click "see top shelves" to see everything that the book has been shelved under, sorted by popularity. Going through the list, I can see that one person has tagged the book as "shipwrecks". A bit strange, since the book has nothing to do with shipwrecks, but you can click on the shipwrecks shelf to go to a page with all the books shelved as shipwrecks. It's actually a pretty neat page and also includes tagged quotes and lists. I see there is no horse-piss shelf at the moment. But there could be! All you need to do is shelve.  That being said, there are a few changes to the shelving system I'd like to see which would make Goodreads a thousand times better: - The ability to order and group shelves, so you could put all the shelves like "shipwrecks", "earthquakes", and "volcanos" under the heading "disasters" rather than have them all cluttering the shelf list - The ability to cross reference "horse-piss" and "shipwrecks" to find all books about horses pissing on crashed ships As far as I know there's no way to do the latter, and definitely no way to do the former. Please correct me if I'm wrong, though!
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Mar 6, 2012 08:30
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486 books on my to-read shelf.  Only 288 books marked as read.
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Mar 10, 2012 05:26
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naptalan posted:That being said, there are a few changes to the shelving system I'd like to see which would make Goodreads a thousand times better: Oh hey so I just found out you can totally do this! Underneath your list of shelves in "My Books", there's an option to "select multiple".
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Mar 14, 2012 01:40
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To be honest I really wouldn't care if Goodreads turned the top review on a book into a paid position. I'd still see my friend's reviews before that, and the people I'm following (including quite a few of the GR bullies  ). So long as they made it clear that the review was "promoted" or something along those lines it wouldn't really feel shady, it'd just be another advertisement. I'd consider it the same as the "editorial reviews" on Amazon, which are managed by the author/publishing company.Of course, the difference between Amazon and GR is that the former is a store and the latter is supposed to be a social networking site for readers. If they're willing to let authors promote positive reviews of their books, as you said, it becomes an author space and not a reader space. Once you've decided that authors can pay to manage reviews, they become more important customers than your reviewers. What's stopping GR from changing the terms of service to ban "overly negative" or "unfounded" reviews that might seem like an attack on the author? I doubt that the majority of GR users would care enough to boycott the site, and probably a lot more authors would engage with GR if they didn't have to worry about "attacks" from reviewers. Maybe that's getting a little too  though. It'll be interesting to see where this goes!edit: Dan Krokos makes some really good points in that interview about author/reader interaction: quote:Imagine if someone gives a glowing review to a new novel. They just really loved the book. The author shows up and comments with smiley faces and thank yous and everyone feels really great. Then their next book comes out. I added a fairly little-known book to my "to-read" list a while ago and the author sent me a friend request hours later. I don't do reviews, but I'd be a little hesitant to even post a star rating knowing that he's watching so closely. There are times when it can be fun to engage with an author and talk about what you liked and didn't like about his work, but most of the time it just makes for an awkward situation, especially when the author is the one who approached you. It's kind of like a friend sending you a link to his fanfiction.net profile and badgering you for your critique on his slash fiction (sadly this has happened to me more than once  )
naptalan fucked around with this message at 02:42 on Aug 22, 2012 |
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Aug 22, 2012 02:26
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There are loads of things you can do with shelves! I use the standard broad categories like scifi, fantasy, YA, crime, etc, but I also tag for specific things that I like to read about, like post-apocalyptic settings and road trips and awkward indie kids. I also have a few shelves to remind myself and others of how much a book sucks without actually going to the effort of writing a review. Shelving my books lets me find new books using the recommendation system, and it also gives people an idea of my reading interests and sense of humour (or lack thereof). A lot of the popular reviewers use the shelving system heavily and that makes it easy to find good reviewers to follow - just check to see if they have a lot of books shelved under the genres you're interested in. If you find someone with similar tastes to you, you can go to their shelf for, say, dystopian fiction, and sort by rating to find books they liked that you haven't read (example). I hope that doesn't make me sound too much like a Goodreads shill!  I am just a nut for organisational systems.
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Sep 5, 2012 08:20
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PureRok posted:You have a password for adding someone as a friend and your shelf is private. Guess I'm too stupid to figure out the password. Hint: it's four letters and rhymes with spoon. Perfidia I just realised I was dumb and didn't add my username to the message! This is me.
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Nov 14, 2012 03:06
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Poutling posted:The voting for the 2012 best of list is so depressing. I started using the site more frequently when the 2011 goodreads best-of list came out and I have to say it's really gone downhill. There's WAY too many sequels, which I just don't get. Last year I picked up a lot of stuff from the best-of lists that were new to me and I really enjoyed. My favourite comment on that best books ever list: "proof that the truth is not democratic =/ seriously, jane austen? errughhh." The top 5 best books of all time are young adult novels from the last decade, but the real travesty is that a Jane Austen novel appears further down the list.  Just checked out the 2012 awards. It seems silly to do a "best of 2012" award in the middle of November - Days of Blood and Starlight came out on the 6th, four days before nominations closed, and it's the best new YA novel I've read this year. It also has a higher average rating right now than the 3 books that are most likely to win YA fantasy: Insurgent, City of Lost Souls, and Pandemonium. Not that that counts for much, but still! Anyone want to post their picks for the winners? Best fiction will be JK Rowling, best thriller will be James Patterson, best YA will be John Green, best scifi will probably be John Scalzi. Best book of the whole year will be 50 Shades or The Fault In Our Stars. I anticipate a great amount of drama when the porn fans and the YA brigade collide.
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Nov 16, 2012 06:11
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Deleting your account seems a bit extreme since we don't even know to what extent Amazon will influence the site. The worst outcome I can think of is, as AreYouStillThere already mentioned, if Amazon lets the site stagnate like Shelfari. I don't think that's likely but even if it does happen, it's still not something worth worrying about now. Wait until a better alternative comes along before jumping ship, at least! then wait 3 years for Amazon to acquire the new service, rinse, and repeat
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Apr 8, 2013 08:07
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The Grey posted:I can think of a worse outcome... what if the books you've bought from Amazon all start showing up automatically on your Goodreads page? There are some books I got from Amazon that I'd prefer my friends not know about. Oh god  I hadn't thought of that; there are some real shockers on my Amazon account. I hope if (when) they offer account linking, books are added as private/hidden and subject to your approval before showing up on your Goodreads page.
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Apr 9, 2013 05:41
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So I just found out about Riffle Books - it's a new Goodreads alternative being touted as "the Pinterest of book discovery". After signing up and poking around, that seems very apt. There aren't many users on Riffle yet and it feels a little feature-sparse compared to GR. There are no star ratings, just read/reading/recommended, and apparently no reviews. Instead, users make reading lists for a particular theme or answer questions like "What books would you hope your soulmate has read?" (apparently The Hunger Games is a popular answer  ) The popups for books don't even show a synopsis; you have to click to the individual book page to see what it's about, so I guess you're meant to find books based solely on their covers and whether people you follow like them. Overall I found it very unimpressive. It feels like an attempt to copy parts of Pinterest and Goodreads without really understanding why either system actually works, and the end result just doesn't seem like a good system for discovering new books or sharing your taste in books with others. I found this list of other Goodreads alternatives - I am quite happy with Goodreads but it's always good to know what else is out there! Anyone tried anything else on the list?
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May 13, 2013 07:31
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AreYouStillThere posted:I know a lot of people like complaining, and "BUT MY FREE SPEECH ON THIS SITE I GIVE NO MONEY TO" It's a good point. Writing tends to be a very personal thing; it's hard to criticise the way a book was written/the content in a book without criticising the author himself. For example: a ton of reviewers comment on Christopher Paolini's "borrowing" of ideas from other fantasy novels (with varying levels of contempt); is that attacking the author or the book? What about if you say "he doesn't know how to write"? And for comments unrelated to the content: what about saying that he comes off as very arrogant in interviews and that turned you off the book? If that's not OK, is it still OK to say it's impressive that he wrote a book at 15? It's not that I disagree with the new rules - there is clearly a point where reviews can cross from criticism into harrassment, but it's hard to make that judgement. I don't envy the GR modders. Speaking of reviews, since we're discussing Keeley (here's his Eragon review - featuring Byron and Robert E. Howard), what reviewers do you guys actually like? What other terrible reviewers do you see everywhere on the site? I really like Mike Puma. He almost exclusively reviews books he actually enjoyed and always has something interesting to say about them. Ceridwen is great too - here's her Eragon review. You can tell a lot about a reviewer by what they have to say about Eragon. 
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Sep 23, 2013 02:53
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but this really does seem pretty lovely. Lots of threats of mass exodus and blog starting. I know this is affecting a small, but vocal, portion of GR - mostly sassy YA reviewers who love GIFs - but one of my favorite reviewers asked an interesting question (paraphrasing), "What about Mein Kompf? Can we say Hitler was a dick? If that's okay because it's obvious, this slope doesn't get much more slippy."