book reading

There are 2 posts tagged book reading (this is page 1 of 1).

100 days

At the beginning of this year, I thought I’ll get going on two goals – 

  1. Reading more often, 
  2. Writing more often

For the second goal, I setup a secret public facing blog using the Ghost blogging platform. I tried posting something daily, with the idea being that I’ll just put the title as the day I’m on, and that’ll give me enough push to write every day. That fizzled out at the twenty second day mark.

Sometimes I feel like I need a blogging setup where I have no titles. It’s silly, but titles being in the way feels real. But more than titles, I think it’s the blogging platforms themselves. I have been feeling the weight of WordPress’ Gutenberg lately. It’s too unwieldy to be a clean blogging space. That’s why I went to Ghost. But that’s no better. Now I’m on the prowl again, for something simpler and easier to mess with. Heck, I even went with Classic Editor on WordPress to see if that helps me make writing easier. Let’s see how that plays out.

As for the first goal – reading more – I don’t just want to read more. I want to read daily.

I started the year with StoryGraph’s January Challenge – read a page or listen to a minute of an audiobook a day, and be entered to win something. I didn’t win anything but I enjoyed the process and it made the habit that much easier to adopt. It coincided with me finding some really well written Harry Potter fan-fic, so I spent the month burning through some really fun writing. Now I’ve settled into something longer and deeper. I like this tracking thing because I’m not really worried about the number of books I read but rather the number of pages I read. It’s a welcome change in how I gamify my reading habits.  

I know that for many, it’s not much of a milestone, these 100 days. But reading consistently for almost the third of the year isn’t a bad milestone at all and I’m proud enough to blog about it.

Cheers!

Good luck competing with Goodreads

Every once in a while, I come across a book management and listing tool. This is a broad category – it covers lists of the books you’ve read/want to read, your book notes, a social network inbuilt, and perhaps even the ability to buy books through them. Sometimes this is in the format of an app, and sometimes it’s a web service. Never mind that I actively seek these out (hey, everyone should have a past time), I always come out exasperated.

Why? Well, do you really want to build your entire book library all over again? I’m on the low-end of a prolific reader spectrum, and I’ve got about 260 books in my lists; that’s over a hundred books I’ve marked as read, and over one fifty that I want to. Most people have a lot more books than that in their lists, and almost all of them just hope in the back of their heads that Amazon doesn’t ever decide to kill Goodreads. Amazon has already been cozying up Kindle and Goodreads – you can post your Kindle reads, reviews, and notes directly to Goodreads through the Kindle apps. What’s to say that in a few years time they don’t decide that they’re done collecting our data through Goodreads and can shut the service down?

Oh, but don’t worry, you can export all your Goodreads data!

Really? Thanks! What do I do with it once I’ve exported it?

Uhhhhh…

See, this is the problem. This is why I keep looking for alternatives. But every time I come across one, I immediately realize the blind spot they aren’t addressing. If you’re an app/service, what you need to jump-start your platform is data. The ‘elegant’ way of doing this is to ‘ask’ the user for it. I put that in quotes because it’s more mandatory than just a small ‘ask’. If I come to a service, spend some time poking around, and realize I need to input all of my books all over again, that’s an immediate turn off. Services like Goodreads aren’t like conferences, where you can slap on a name tag and wander around till you find someone interesting to talk to. They’re more like parties, where if you don’t know anyone, you’ll just end up bored and.

So, this is what I ask of you if you’re making a service to compete with Goodreads – ask the user to export their data in an ugly .csv format and import the entire file to your service. Then you’ve got the entire library the user has curated on your rival service since the dawn of time without lifting a finger. You don’t even have to have this as the front and center of your UX. Get your user onboarded, get them talking, and then somewhere along the way, gently tell them you’ve got this amazing import feature that’ll help them quickly ramp up. If they care about books, they’ll do it. Those are the serious users of your platform anyways.

But nowhere have I seen this happen. I’ve recently come across a few apps – Litsy (by LibraryThing), Reading List (which seems to allow CSV imports, but needs them to be in its own format, instead of the Goodreads format; you’re this close folks!), BookBuddy (again, imports only its own data, god knows why) and some web services which I’ve already forgotten about, none of which seem to understand this basic concept of stealing from the enemy.

But what am I saying? I wrote all the way back in 2012 about how useless exporting data from Internet behemoths is. Nothing has changed in the last seven years. Till today, companies and apps come and go, without realizing that using prior data is a jump-start, not poisoned fruit.

Indie services actually get this. If you install the Goodreads plugin on Calibre, it lets you quickly import your data so your library is complete. Similarly, if you use the WordPress Book List plugin, there’s a way to import your Goodreads data. Because people who care about data, understand reuse of data. That tells me that if you’re not reusing my data, you’re not building a platform for me.

So good luck competing with Goodreads. Unless you can get my data from them and reuse it, you’re just shooting yourself in the foot.