The company blog of Hardcover, a book-tracking site, covering its launch, tech stack choices, scaling incidents and yearly progress reports.
Commenters recommend Hardcover as a Goodreads alternative, praising its community feel, features, book recommendations and a team that responds to users.
I missed this when you posted, but I'd love for you to check out Hardcover! ( https://hardcover.app/ ).
We do exactly what you described - recommending books based on collaborative filtering and comparing your tastes with similar readers. There are a few ways we make this available:
• We calculate a "match score" from 0% to 100% for you with each book that we can. A score of 100% means we're pretty sure you'll rate it 5 out of 5. An 80% means we think you'll rate it 4 out of 5. We show this score throughout the site. This is similar to Netflix's match score (but a lot more basic ). I've found it's a lot of fun to follow people, then see this score next to books people are interacting with. That combination can lead to finding some gems.
• On the "Recommendations" page we show you the books that have the highest match score for you. You can filter the books on this page by popularity. Books with more readers means the Match Score will be more accurate.
• On every books page, we show "ratings by similar readers" and "reviews by similar readers". This gives you a quick way to see what other readers with similar taste think of each book.
• We have a Readers Page to find which readers have the closest taste to you. You can follow them if you want to see what they're reading.
We have all the same tracking you'd expect from GR/SG - tracking what you read, dates, stats, a feed of friend activity, private/followers-only books (in case you want to not have everything public)…
Yep, there are a lot for book tracking. Most people don't like Goodreads for anything except book tracking; I've interviewed a ton of readers for my website and haven't found anyone positive about the book suggestions yet...
I think the best for replacing Goodreads book tracking functions are:
https://hardcover.app/
https://app.thestorygraph.com/
Story Graph is the lending contender as they are quite popular.
I'd love a tool to help me manage my Kindle books directly. I am sure Amazon makes that near impossible when I looked into it.
I was looking into this space the other day, and the number of options has been growing. By my record there is:
- https://www.goodreads.com
- https://thestorygraph.com
- https://fable.co
- https://hardcover.app
- https://joinbookwyrm.com
I was actually trying to determine the best free source of metadata for books. I was hoping for something like MusicBrainz.
The best I could find seemed to be https://openlibrary.org. There is https://isbndb.com, but it is paid.
Good job!
I wonder if you could develop this as an add on to Hardcover.app - you could fetch people's books, images, and display the bookshelf.
All the data seems to be there:
https://hardcover.app/@BenHouston3D/books/read?order=owner_last_read_at&direction=desc&start=0&limit=40&view=shelf
For other ways to sync status/mark as reading, you can checkout [hardcover.app](https://hardcover.app). My wife found it as she is also very interested in divesting from Amazon. I found a [Koreader plugin](https://github.com/Billiam/hardcoverapp.koplugin) as well
I'm not into the social aspect, so Goodreads was never an option, but Hardcover[1] seems like a pretty good alternative.
[1]: https://hardcover.app