|
Here's me: http://www.goodreads.com/deety I write a lot of overly long reviews, and read mostly genre stuff with some nonfiction and older novels mixed in. I've got a question that pops up if you friend request me, but it's just there to discourage spammy authors.
|
#
¿
Jan 29, 2012 22:38
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 22, 2024 05:41 |
|
|
I usually do the quick synopsis thing, even though I've seen some users complain about reviews that include them, because writing a couple of sentences about the plot in my own words helps me to remember it much better later on.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 30, 2012 00:15
|
|
|
Some of those authors need to get over themselves and realize that Goodreads and review blogs don't exist to sell their books. Many of those same folks are happy to ask their friends to put up five star ratings and gushy reviews, but then they whine that readers who didn't care for the book should keep their mouth shut. It's kind of insulting, like they don't trust potential readers to look over a variety of reviews and make their own decision. I absolutely stay away from authors if I hear that they've publicly made a fuss over reviews or reader comments. I've got a shelf full of other books to read, and I'd rather support writers who either connect with their readers like mature adults or just avoid the drama entirely.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 1, 2012 11:01
|
|
|
I've found the lists helpful for a few really focused topics, but in general, they're garbage. Many of the ones I've looked at in the past have so little activity that there are books on the first page that only one user voted for. The level of self-promotion on them is really loving annoying, and it's a big factor in why even some of the smaller lists are crap.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 3, 2012 18:53
|
|
|
Hedrigall posted:Also, for a while I only had shelves of years: 2010, 2011, etc. Now I've got mostly genre shelves, and I'm going to delete my year shelves because if you go through your Stats, you can filter books by the year you read them anyway. I just want to point out that, for folks who reread, those yearly shelves may still be good to have. The most annoying thing about Goodreads is that you can't record multiple read dates for the same book, and all those stats work off the read date. You can shelve a different edition and have one read date for that second shelving as well, but that's a pain for those of us who want to keep cover art or accurate info about the editions we read. So by using yearly shelves, I can still go back and have a record of all the books I read in a particular year, even though their stupid database only lets me save one read date.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 29, 2012 08:28
|
|
|
I've been trying to bring up tags in the feedback forum for years now. Every time the situation comes up, most folks in that group try to tell me that the shelves are tags. It's like beating my head against a wall.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 6, 2012 00:58
|
|
|
WeaponGradeSadness posted:Out of curiosity, what are you looking for from tags that you can't get by shelving a book on multiple shelves? Shelves, as they're implemented on GR, are a different thing than tags because they're the main way of navigating your book list. If you make as many shelves as you may want tags, you can no longer see them all down the left margin. Then you're stuck clicking back and forth between multiple pages in this massive, mostly alphabetical list in order to do anything. Those of us who want to have quick access to our most frequently used shelves can't have more than the fifty or so that will show on the book list without pagination. That sounds like a lot, but it really isn't if you read a variety of subjects and would also like to use tracking shelves to mark things like library books, ebooks, or whatever. I really want tags to help me keep track of nonfiction subjects. If Goodreads had a reasonable tagging system, one that didn't also function as site navigation, I could easily keep track of every book I've encountered that has info on wooly mammoths or the Monmouth Rebellion or Scott's trip to the South Pole. I'm not going to make shelves for such specific subjects, but I really want to tag that kind of thing. I can detail all of a book's contents in the review or private notes area, but that doesn't do much good in terms of grouping because you can't search or sort by those fields. deety fucked around with this message at 08:58 on Mar 6, 2012 |
|
#
¿
Mar 6, 2012 08:55
|
|
|
It's something I've considered, but it would be a major pain in the rear end to revamp if their system changes. Sticky shelves were introduced as a quick fix after GR, without warning, removed dashes from the beginning of existing shelf names and made it so that you can no longer begin a shelf name with a dash (some copy/pasted characters, like em dashes, still work for now). Goodreads did that to get more consistency in shelf names, most likely to help out with the recommendation system. People had been using those dashes to sort their shelves, and a few of my friends were forced to reorganize their whole shelving systems. Since GR has already shown a willingness to change a user's shelf names, I'm really hesitant about putting a lot of effort into using that new sticky feature only to have some other major change take place. I just know that I'm going to finish categorizing a thousand books one day before they announce subshelves or something. It's a lot more likely that I'll just work over my old LibraryThing account, use that for categorization, and limit my Goodreads activity to reviewing. LibraryThing is ugly as hell and their social features are awful, but their system is better from a cataloging perspective.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 6, 2012 19:35
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 22, 2024 05:41 |
|
|
Ornamented Death posted:That's almost certainly what they're doing. gently caress those guys, they ruin the fun of stumbling across something rare at a used book store or library sale or something. My old library's book sale would always get slammed with these folks the first day, snapping up all the unique stuff. Last year they actually had a company come in before the sale, evaluate all the donations, and separate the valuable books to list online. It's hard to complain when the library made more money that way, but the reduced selection was pretty obvious. It was fun to hear some of those book pickers complain about it, though. Some of them had apparently driven in from neighboring states, so they were pretty upset.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 17, 2013 20:06
|
|