StoryGraph vs. Goodreads – The Good & the Bad

2021 was going to be the year I started using StoryGraph. Goodreads has been my reader tracker of choice for years, but that’s mostly because it’s the biggest one out there. But the site has been static for years, barely changing anything despite being owned by Amazon, who you would think would be interested in creating a useful service to then drive people to buy books from its marketplace.

Frustrated one too many times by the act of somehow adding another duplicate to my shelves, AGAIN, I decided it was finally time to join StoryGraph. I set up an account, did my Goodreads import and…promptly forgot about it. Goodreads was engrained in my head and I couldn’t shake defaulting to that site.

So when 2022 rolled around, I decided it was the perfect time to make a fresh start with Storygraph. I spent a few days adding by hand the books I’d read in the time since I’d made the Goodreads import, which also gave me an opportunity to poke around the site and see what it offered and how it handled compared to its giant cousin. As I did so, I began collecting some musings about I liked and didn’t like about the two services.

StoryGraph – Community Driven Recommendations

StoryGraph is driven by the promise of helping its readers find the books they want, when they want them. Its banner slogan is “Because life’s too short for a book you’re not in the mood for.” And let’s be real, that’s an area that Goodreads has been sorely lacking in for years. How many times have you glanced over at the “similar books” section of a page and been completely baffled at what Goodreads is recommending?

While I’m still too new to StoryGraph to comment on how well its recommendations work, I CAN offer insight into the very helpful bells and whistles it offers to decide if a book is right for you. StoryGraph’s recommendations may work off an algorithm, but it’s getting much more granular data from the community. When you leave a review, you’re not just leaving stars and your handful of thoughts on the book. You can also contribute a whole host of insights into what the book IS. You can click on moods the book fits, like adventurous, dark, hopeful, reflective, tense, etc. You can mark off if the book is slow or fast paced, whether plot or characters is the driving factor, content warnings, and more.

Statistics!

All of these are summarized on the book’s main page, so you can get a sense of how the community feels about the book. If 73% of reviewers marked the book as tense, and 1% as relaxing, well….the book’s probably tense. Let’s say you are in the mood for a tense book, but not sure what specifically? You can pull up your TBR and filter it to all books marked tense.

(And of course, StoryGraph offers not just half stars, but QUARTER stars! Want to rate a book 3.75? Now you can!)

Of course, all of these stats being community driven is where StoryGraph can fall apart, especially for smaller books. There were times when I was adding a self-published book to a shelf that I discovered that the book didn’t even have a cover in the system, let alone any ratings or insight into the books. That’s not StoryGraph’s fault necessarily, but a by-product of the fact that it relies on the community so much. StoryGraph’s user base is likely not nearly as robust as Goodreads (yet), which means it has less data coming in. It’s a problem that exists on Goodreads too – I’ve read many a self-published book that has a few dozen star ratings at most, which isn’t a great sample size to judge a book’s reception. But it’s much more of an uphill battle for self-published and indie books to generate the data necessary to become part of the recommendation system on StoryGraph when no one is reviewing the books.

StoryGraph – Fun with Charts & Friends

StoryGraph does have a strong showing for the second half of its name, “graph.” Going to your Stats page offers you all kinds of charts breaking down your reading by year. A pie chart breaking down the moods of the books you read? Done. Line graph showing your page count reading by month over the last year? Done. Genre break down? It’s here too. Is it every stat you could ever want? No, but it’s a heck of a good start.

StoryGraph also offers you ways to set up your own reading challenges and share them with friends or the community, as well as a recently added feature to do buddy reads with friends. I haven’t played too much with these features, as they aren’t how I choose to read my books, but I love the fact that they exist!

StoryGraph – Room to Grow

Let me start this section that StoryGraph is a site that is actively in development, complete with a roadmap visible to the public about features they are working on, so it may be that in the future, these issues will have been addressed! At the moment, however, there’s a few areas of StoryGraph I struggled with.

The first is simply ease of navigation on the desktop version of the site. For instance, it is not apparent at first glance where to click to view your shelves of past reads. Goodreads has a nice simple “My Books” button that takes you to every shelf you’ve ever made. StoryGraph, on the other hand, has a button to take you to your “To Read” section, but if you want to look up your past reads? That’s under Profile, and then under “view all” under your recent reads. It takes a lot of hunting to find the shelf you’re looking for, and you can’t simply click between them like you can on Goodreads. There’s no way to easily jump from “Read” to “To Read,” though within those shelves there are robust filter options.

Where do I find my shelves and tags?

On the individual book pages, some basic information also requires some hunting – at least on desktop. Your own review is hidden behind a tiny “view review” button at the top, while the community reviews button can likewise be hard to spot. While it is located in the “Community Reviews” section, I found it easy to skim over the button that led to the written reviews, instead distracted by all the stats in the column.

I think a lot of this navigation issue comes from the fact that StoryGraph appears to be designed with mobile first in mind. When viewed in the app on my phone, everything fit the screen better, and some features that felt hidden suddenly became much easier to find. While some more intuitive labeling would still help even within the app, the experience becomes more fluid when you leave aside the desktop version. For me personally, this is a bit frustrating as it is far easier for me to do things like copy and paste reviews in a browser on my computer than it is on my phone, but your mileage may vary!

StoryGraph also currently lacks a “cover view” option, instead just presenting books as a scrolling list. This is a feature currently listed on the roadmap, but is personally a current aggravation, as it is much easier (and aesthetically pleasing) to glance at a shelf that’s a wall of covers instead of a list that shows one or two books at a time. It DOES, however, warn you quite clearly if you have somehow gotten to a page for a different edition of a book than you’ve interacted with in the past, making it much harder to create those erroneous duplicates that plague me on Goodreads.

StoryGraph Could Be The Future – With Help

In short, StoryGraph has a lot of promising features and potential that will get better so long as it continues to grow its community. Goodreads has long felt like a static site, with little changing or improving over time; StoryGraph has a window to evolve into a better service catering to those needs not met by its big brother. What is holding StoryGraph back (aside from needing a better interface) is that most of its features rely on community contributions, whether from readers or publishers. Since it’s not the default site, it’s not getting the same TLC in terms of things like updating covers as they’re released or being a stop for book bloggers to leave their reviews. But if you’re looking to help create an alternative to the Goodreads behemoth, StoryGraph could be the home you’re looking for.