I have been using Goodreads for a long time. It’s been an excellent way for me to track my reading, set goals, and write reviews on the books I have read. With that said, Goodreads is owned by Amazon, and there has been a lot of discussion about moving away from Goodreads because of this. The challenge is that I have been using Goodreads since 2014, and that’s a lot of book information to re-enter somewhere else. There would need to be something equitable in size, and have the online book library Goodreads has. With that said, The Storygraph might be a suitable option to switch to.

I have been using Storygraph on and off, and I think there are vast improvements over Goodreads. The first one is the ability to rate books in half or partial stars, where Goodreads only offers one through five stars in its reviews. The spoiler tag in Storygraph actually works. To hide notes under spoilers, you would add <spoiler> include the text that’s a spoiler and end it with </spoiler>. It wasn’t brought to my attention until a few years ago that spoiler tags don’t work on the mobile app version of Goodreads. All this time, the reviews I thought were hidden from spoilers weren’t. I have now been hiding my entire reviews on Goodreads for this reason. In Storygraph, my content is hidden where it needs to be. Storygraph also offers more stats on the books you read. It shows the pages you read in the year, genres you read from, and what books you gravitate to on average. I didn’t think I would be as interested in the stats as I thought I would, but I find them intriguing to read.

One thing I recently completed was transferring my Goodreads books to Storygraph. I didn’t realize this, but you can go into Goodreads and export your library. Storygraph allows you to upload this file and adds your books from Goodreads into Storygraph. I had a large upload as I have over 800 books that I have read. The file took a few days to process, but sure enough, I received an email from Storygraph once this was completed. For the most part, everything was accurate. There were about seventy books where I had to manually add in dates read and copy and paste a review. It didn’t take long, as I would work on this when I came home from work, editing a few books at a time. It’s really slick.

Will I ever move away from Goodreads? I don’t know. I feel similarly to Goodreads as I do to Facebook. I never post on Facebook, yet it’s one of the ways that I keep in touch with relatives I don’t see often. I deleted Facebook from my phone, so I’m barely there anymore. Goodreads, I feel more nostalgia for because I’d attribute Goodreads as one way I was able to get back into reading after not reading for a few consecutive years. With that said, I think Storygraph has a ton of potential, and I’m looking forward to utilizing it more going forward.