Daniel > Status Update

Ah, I see that I can leave comments below the General update with a vastly larger character limit. So I can explain what I did (apologies to users who already know this stuff). First, some Goodreads shelf-help reference links:

* Goodreads Hack: How to Create Custom Bookshelves

* How do I create or delete custom shelves?

The main take-away from those pages is that the shelf magic happens on your page:
My Profile > My Books > Edit Shelves

1. Decluttering the "Want to Read" shelf. Goodreads gives you three "exclusive" shelves by default: "Want to Read", "Currently Reading", and "Read". A book can be on at most one of these "exclusive" shelves at a time (while simultaneously being on as many "non-exclusive" shelves as you saw fit to create). The idea behind an "exclusive" shelf, obviously, is to track a book's status as you read it. But these three shelves don't cover all the status options. You might start a book and not finish it, and either plan to finish it later, or abandon it. If the "Currently Reading" shelf contains a large number of books, it becomes less useful for tracking the books that you are actively reading at the moment. Creating a "paused" shelf, and giving it the "exclusive" property, lets you declutter your "Want to Read" shelf. Because the "paused" shelf is exclusive, simply adding a book to it automatically removes the book from any other exclusive shelf that the book may be on (such as "Currently Reading").

Even better, Goodreads is smart enough to show all your "exclusive" shelves in the drop-down list you get by clicking the down-arrow on the big status button on the book's Goodreads page. That includes the default three "exclusive" shelves you always saw, and any "exclusive" shelves that you create.

2. Saying "No" to "Recommends". The Goodreads recommender algorithm shows another recommended book whenever you refresh your "Recent updates" page. The only option the recommender shows you by default is a "Want to Read" button. But what if you don't like a recommendation? Well, there is a way to fight back. You can create a new shelf with a name like "not interested" or "say no to recs", check the "exclusive" box, and un-check the "recs" box. The "recs" box for a shelf tells Goodreads whether to use the shelf's contents to generate recommendations for you. Un-checking the box appears to tell Goodreads to stop recommending books that it thinks are similar to the books on that shelf.

The result is that when I click the status button on a book's Goodreads page, I get an "enhanced" popup window like this now, showing the two "exclusive" shelves I added:

Choose a shelf for this book
Want to read
Currently reading
Read
paused
say-no-to-recs
Remove from my shelf
Continue to tags

Unfortunately, I can't display this "Choose" popup from the recommendation on my "Recent updates" page. I have to open the book's page to shelve it as "say no to recs".

But it seems to be working. After I added just a few "bad" (in my view) recommendations to my "say no to recs" shelf, the recommender's recommendations seem to have "improved" (again, in my view).

If any of this looks interesting but is unclear, post a comment with your question and I will try to answer, or you can ask your favorite AI. Google Gemini for example seems to have amazingly deep knowledge of Goodreads, but it needs the right prompting to tell you about it. E.g., Goodreads might not tell you about a Goodreads feature that solves some problem you are asking about, because you didn't put the right clue in your prompt to elicit Gemini's deep knowledge about that feature.

Great to know Gemini can help! How-to information and more is also in the Help section here on GR: https://help.goodreads.com/s/ .