Written and reviewed by Jay Lee-Guard (he/they)
Ah, Goodreads: the internet bastion of literary genius, where sophisticated readers flock to leave insightful and witty reviews—not. For those who aren’t familiar with the site, it’s essentially a community based-platform where you can write and share reviews of books with other people, while also functioning as a virtual library by allowing you to organise books you’ve read into special categories on your account called shelves. Founded in 2006 and launched in 2007, it’s a fairly simple platform, conceptually, but has mutated like the strange mould in your trash to become one of the weirdest online environments I've ever been a part of.
First of all, like arguably too many platforms on the internet, it is deeply culturally American both in its management and in its user base. With good reason, admittedly! It has its headquarters in San Francisco, and is currently owned by Amazon (more on that later). However, with 150 million users, the platform itself is certainly nothing if not global. Almost any contemporary book published in or translated to English you can think of is available on the site to be rated and reviewed, leading to what should be a multicultural literary haven. Yet this proudly American site has resisted any and all urges it may have had to embrace this fact. I can think of countless brilliant books (see: The Saint of Bright Doors, Rakesfall, The Spear Cuts Through Water) with incredibly mediocre, or contentious, ratings. Many users have come to expect that if they don’t understand a book, it must be a fault on the book’s behalf, rather than considering the possibility of it being an intentional choice. Find any book which chooses to celebrate the literary traditions of another culture, or that might have a different target audience in mind other than white Westerners, and I can personally guarantee that you will find many people arguing in the reviews that, because the book wasn’t immediately accessible to them without a little bit of effort on their part, it “fails to properly engage the audience”, to quote a reviewer who shall remain nameless. I think of Goodreads ratings a little bit like the Bechdel test: if the ratings are atrocious, it’s a pretty good indicator that it’s a book which at least could use a little re-working. But anything three-stars and up could be of any quality, because ratings and reviews on Goodreads are impacted by the culture of the site just as much as they are the quality of the book.
Now, I said I’d return to the fact that Goodreads is an Amazon-owned company, and I meant that. It was acquired in 2013, which ultimately did two things:
Doubled its membership in the span of a few months thanks to Amazon Big Bucks!
Irrevocably changed the goals of the platform to encourage increased spending and overconsumption.
On each book’s page, right under the cover art are two big buttons. One says “Want To Read”, and pressing it will add it to a shelf with exactly that title. The other takes you to the Amazon Kindle webpage where you can purchase the book in electronic form. Don’t have an Amazon Kindle? Don’t worry! You can instead press the little arrow next to the button to be taken to the Amazon store page to shop for the book, or to the Amazon-owned Audible site to purchase it in audiobook form. Or perhaps you’d like to buy a second hand copy on Amazon-owned AbeBooks? To give Goodreads some credit, they do also list Barnes & Noble, Walmart eBooks, and a library directory, buried deep underneath every possible book-related Amazonian branch. The word Amazon doesn’t look real to me anymore.
Of course, no discussion of Goodreads would be complete without at least cracking the lid a little on the can of worms that is BookTok/Bookstagram/BookTube etc. To save time, words, and my own sanity, I’ll only take you through the briefest of tours through this insane corner of the community. First of all, Goodreads made the interesting choice to display someone’s follower count next to their name whenever they leave a review. While following someone doesn’t really change your experience of the platform—and can be a fun way to keep up with friends—it also serves as a kind of social currency. I still feel myself lending more weight to the short review written by the person with 500 followers rather than the more in-depth review done by someone with nine. And while it’s true that being a goodreads reviewer realistically cannot earn you any money, it can and does earn you something else: ARCs. ARC stands for an Advanced Reading Copy, and getting one means getting an exclusive copy of a book months before anybody else. While they’re often given out with the condition of writing a review about the book, and while the book is readable and ‘complete’, it isn’t yet fully finished as often some editing and rewriting work is yet to be done (the scope of which can sometimes be informed by the reviews of the ARC), being trendy enough to be given ARCs is something a lot of people aspire to. Some people become popular through sharing their honest thoughts and opinions, but many others craft their reviews of books like you’d craft a social media post—to appeal to as broad of an audience as possible. And if this means declaring that you think a book written by a non-Western author is weird, or bad, or confusing? Oh well! In addition, your reviews are more likely to be seen by more people if they’re about popular upcoming books, which disadvantages books which aren’t already in the spotlight. Literally none of this is conducive to people reading whatever they want and then writing about it which is, in my opinion, the basics of reviewing.
Now, if you’re anything like me and want to get away from Goodreads for a bit, but don’t know where to go? My platform of choice is Storygraph. Not only does it have almost every function of Goodreads but more polished and refined, it also doesn’t have a highly toxic culture and isn’t driven by corporate greed!
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