Devastatingwildness > Status Update

Goodreads, like any Web site that belongs to someone else, has a mix of pros and cons. If you want control over your information you have to set up your own system. I use a personal wiki running MediaWiki as my own note-taking system.

Since I don't own Goodreads, I take the risk that it could just vanish at any time, along with any information I have contributed to the site. So if there's anything I want to keep, I have to keep it on my own system.

I have some gripes about Goodreads, but I don't see anything that artificial intelligence (AI) won't be able to fix someday. For example I find a lot of problems with books and authors, especially those having low popularity. It's tedious to report these problems to the librarians group, and there aren't enough human librarians to correct all the problems. Among those I find most commonly are: multiple authors with the same name that need to be disambiguated into separate author pages, and multiple editions of the same book that need to be combined. Goodreads unfortunately inherits the general chaos of the publishing industry, which consists of individual publishers who just want to sell their own books and don't really care about keeping track of all books, editions, and authors. Bringing order to chaos requires human-level intelligence, which is a scarce resource despite the world having > 8 billion humans. Someday AI will be able to clean up the Goodreads mess, cheaply and quickly.

The feature I would most like to see added to Goodreads is a setting to remove all the fiction books from my feed and recommendations. I live in a country where half the population believes in a literal Noah's Ark and that Trump won in 2020. The last thing we need is the mindless distraction of fiction.

Why do you want to shelve editions of the same book? Is this for your own use, e.g. to keep track of having read each of the different editions, or is it to allow others to see that you did? If for your own use, that's the job of your personal note-taking system (which Goodreads doesn't try to be). If for informing others, there are other ways to do that, such as by noting your edition reads in your review of the book, or in comments below your review.

I've never seen any system designed by someone else which works exactly the way I would have designed it.

I don't think you will see that power of selection over your content soon. That was still possible some years ago but platforms decided to take over all control. I remember being able to block specific adverts in YouTube, now I can only rely on adblockers and the app shows me scams daily. And they are one of the biggest platforms in the world, they simply don't want to be different. Money over literally anything. Goodreads was bought by Amazon so the same logics will apply here. I can't block or even close the ads for 'Book of the month' at the top of the page. Its app is obselete since some years ago and they don't care to take it closer to the capabilities of the website. I started using an alternative app for YouTube content recently that allows me more control. I would love to see it for other websites but those are voluntary projects so I don't think it will happen broadly. Everything is profit driven to a scale individual people can't manage. I share this vision on the topic of climate change by the way, that's why I think we need to take back control in order to make a world we desire and not the world companies design and benefit from.

There are many reasons to shelf different editions of the same work (not the same 'book'). That was something you could do before and I still have many editions of the same work shelved because of that. Different editions have different translators, different prologues, they include scholarly commentaries and notes or not, some are in the original language, some are bilingual, etc. Those different editions are books I may be interested in specifically, and for many and different reasons I need to treat them differently because they are and Goodreads decision was just another artificial wall against my needs and individual discretions.

I can tell you for example that I can read a book in spanish and english. I may want to read both. I can't read german, and due to the complicated nature of that language historical translations of a book have had an specific impact in their times and I need to treat those editions differently. Some editions of a work even change the content of the book while retaining the same title and are merged into the same file here in Goodreads (and that's probably the more handy way to do it).

Having people talking about different editions of some works can be very confusing as some translations are wrong or correspond to revised versions and so on. Goodreads is not an scholarly indexation of works and it shows repeatedly for people with special needs, but it can improve.

About personal note-taking, you could add before some private info about the edition that you personally owned. Now you can't do that either.

It is not that they designed it in a way that does not satisfy me or somebody else, that's a mispercetion. The point is that they intentionally designed in a poorly way for users so they can pursue other goals like visual connection and superficial engagement. You can filter 1/2/3/4/5 star reviews, but you can't filter reviews in your language or reviews for specific editions. If they can do one thing they can do the other. I think the site is poorly maintained generally anyway. These as some symptons. We are only here to generate a public that can easily click 'Buy on Amazon' under the 'Want to read' button.