Why has no one made a better Goodreads
People who read often desire to read in connection with other readers. Readers have found community within the website, “Goodreads.” And while it builds community and conversation, most who use the site want a better Goodreads. Anyone who’s used it for anything repeatedly shares a number of laments.
Some criticize the recommendation algorithms which have an uncanny tendency to cough up Harry Potter, entry-level novel recommendations, high school literature curriculum, or copious Young Adult options. Others complain about the broken search functionality or the lack of private shelving features. And if nothing else, almost everyone will comment on its ugly aesthetics; a relic of the Web 1.0 era.
“A better Goodreads” lament is so common that you can find daily tweets about this. Some examples:
In the end, most book lovers end up using Goodreads to keep a log of the books they want to read or have read. (And even that’s changing now)
Goodreads was acquired by Amazon in 2013. One would think that having Amazon’s customer ethos and resources would give muscle to create a delightful user experience. Disappointingly, it’s remained an elusive dream.
Why hasn’t Goodreads improved over the years?
While difficult to be certain about the real reasons, it seems the strongest may be a lack of motive. Goodreads enjoys a monopoly in the space of book social networks. Looking at data from Similarweb, Goodreads records 95mn visits per month, whereas its closest competitor, LibraryThing, is less than 1.5mn visits per month. And if there’s one thing we know about monopolies it’s that they don’t have strong incentives to push themselves toward innovation. This will likely remain the status quo for the future (their founders — who would’ve been the strongest voices of change — departed from the company a year ago).
These two factors — dissatisfying users and hesitancy to change — are a recipe for innovative startups to emerge and fill the experience void much desired by users of the service. However, we haven’t seen this happen. While it has been attempted, no one’s succeeded in making a dent.
There is a long list of startups that tried to unseat Goodreads, but they’re either in the graveyard or floating in limbo. Examples include BookClub, RocketReads, LibraryThing, ReadingList, Booknshelf, BookBrowse, Booklikes, Libib, BookSloth, Bookself.
Why did none of them work? Most of them were targeting the very problems that Goodreads users want them to solve.
Let’s look at what makes Goodreads so hard to unseat. To answer this, we need to understand their moats. But before we do that, a brief detour will help us to appreciate the genius of their strategy.
One of the most critical steps in a reader’s journey is the “discovery” of books. More often than not it’s the first step when someone thinks about reading. If you don’t know what to read, you will never be able to read.
So how do readers discover books? This question has multiple answers, but they can all be collapsed into two types of behaviors:
- Incidental discovery — this form of discovery happens when a reader is not looking for recommendations but comes across them while reading an article, browsing social media, listening to a podcast, watching a video, conversing with people. The defining characteristic is that it’s passive in nature.
- Intentional discovery — here the reader is actively seeking suggestions on what they should be reading. The reader can seek recommendations across multiple vectors — topical (I want to read books on a specific topic), similar (I want to read books similar to X), people-based (I want to see books read by thought leaders, friends etc). To fulfill this intent, the reader will go to a search engine or the destination where you will find the information (for ex — someone’s blog)
Now of these two types, the dominant behavior is Incidental or Passive discovery. Serendipity allows you to stumble across a book that you might want to read later. If not from personal experience, you can validate this using the site flow from where users land on Goodreads.
Irrespective of how you discover the book, the immediate step you will generally follow it up with a search to know more. And where do you go to search? Google!
With this understanding, let’s look at how Goodreads enters the reader’s life. To appreciate their moats, we need to look at their Growth Loop.
The driving force behind Goodreads dominance is this growth loop.
Step 1 — A (potentially) new or existing user searches for a book on Google. No matter which book you search for, the top results will always have the Goodreads listing. In fact, Google surfaces the Goodreads rating in the Knowledge Panel. Goodreads is a monster at SEO. (Fun fact: Goodreads is the top result for the search term “quotes”; the genius is that people who are searching for quotes are also highly likely to be people who like books)
Step 2 — Having a monopoly on the search traffic ensures most new or returning users visit the Goodreads listing. Here’s where the second step of their growth loop kicks in. Most users who search for the book want to know more about it — what’s it about, number of pages, year of publication, about the author, sub-genre etc. They also want a second validation on the worthiness of reading and Goodreads rewards them by showing social signals like ratings & reviews.
Step 3 — Having consumed information up to this point, now it’s time for the user to take some core actions. Generally, by now the user would’ve decided on one of these two options:
- I will not read this book — the journey ends, and the reader moves on to resume whatever they were doing.
- I will read this book — here the reader will usually want to make a note to their to-read list. Different people have different habits — some add it to their notes, some maintain a doc or spreadsheet (more recently some maintain a list on AirTable or Notion), some send as a sample to Kindle, add to Amazon wishlist. However, all of them include friction. It’s also harder to manually maintain an “unread” list than a “read” list. The easiest way to maintain this would be to take action on the platform itself. Goodreads’s default shelf is called “to-read” and readers can directly catalog to it with just one click. The other benefit of cataloging on Goodreads is that its public visibility makes it a strong social signal as well.
Once users start maintaining a catalog on Goodreads, a percentage of them will also start adding ratings & reviews to amplify their social signals (“I’ve read this book, and here’s what I think about it.”). This creates more content and social-validation data points for Goodreads.
Step 4 — Goodreads uses all of its metadata on books, as well as the user-generated content to optimize their search visibility through high-quality signals. A (potentially) new or returning user will find this content via a search engine and Signs Up/returns to Goodreads.
This external search discovery-driven growth loop also creates a very strong lock-in for Goodreads. When users start maintaining their catalog/bookshelves, the switching cost becomes extremely high. For most active readers these catalogs could vary between tens to hundreds to thousands and pose huge migration inertia. Couple this with the fact that the early adopters for any potential competitor would be existing book lovers and asking them to migrate their bookshelf could be extremely challenging. And without migration, you wouldn’t have data to create content that would give you visibility in search traffic. (While Goodreads offers a Connect API to fetch user lists, they obviously don’t allow competitors to use it).
Over time this loop has offered compounding returns to the extent that Goodreads has created enough recall and brand positioning to become the de-facto search destination for books. This can be evidenced by the source of their traffic. Direct traffic now accounts for almost 40% of their visits.
At the heart of this loop is their dominance in search.
Any competitor that challenges them on discovery-through-search is doomed to fail. They will never be able to get top search slots and fail to build liquidity in the network. It’s the classic chicken-and-egg problem of any novel marketplace. Without owning search, they won’t have users, without users they won’t have data, without data they won’t own search.
So while Goodreads continues to remain broken, it does solve the most basic problems that a reader faces-access to information on the book, access to social-proofs, ability to catalog books-and solves them well enough to not warrant a change to another service.
But not all is lost! This doesn’t imply a better Goodreads can’t exist. While they’re the monopoly they still don’t have great liquidity in the “social-network” part of their business. Most of their users don’t use Goodreads to discuss books. All of their Community products (and they have multiple — Groups, Discussions, Creative Writing, Events, People) are dormant which means Goodreads doesn’t surface these features upfront anywhere on their website. The most followed person on Goodreads is the author, Stephen King, and he has 0.7M followers. Contrast this to Twitter where he has 6M followers (almost 10X!). This probably implies that in spite of the monopoly, Goodreads doesn’t appeal to ~10X the potential number of readers for various reasons, and it’s an opportunity that’s waiting to be tapped. The caveat — it can’t be through discovery!
In the next post, I’ll explore what a better Goodreads would mean, and the strategic routes available to a company that wants to compete with it.
This untapped opportunity means that readers can have better means to connect with others and discover new books. In the next post, I’ll explore what a better Goodreads would mean, and the best routes available to anyone wanting to compete with it.
