Solidifying my dislike of Goodreads, I got my “year in books” email from them today and the first thing that loaded, at the top of the email, is an ad. For pillow cases.
Once you're #1 on Google searches for half of the published corpus of humanity you stop caring about little things like that... Surprised storygraph even has that many users when they're nowhere on Google when I search books.
I mean I'd bet 90% of goodreads users are just googling quotes but yeah this girl got her timing right, Amazon bought goodreads and then just sat on it for like a decade... Storygraph would never ever be able to compete with goodreads on search, so they sorta had to pivot to winning on social and stickiness.
It’s cyclical. Once the StoryGraphs and Hardcovers of today are big enough to be not bothered about some users with refined UX taste they’d do the same. This repeats.
I don't think it is Amazon so much as sheer number of users.
When you have 20K (like Hardcover), it is much easier to be focused on each of them (or at least small groups of them) than when you have 20 million - much less a few multiples of that number.
As we grow, even Hardcover will have to evolve. This noted, I know this team (including myself, to be clear). Adam is truly focused on innovation and dev excellence. Ste, our lead designer, always has his eye on UI/ UX improvements and listening to what our users want/ how our users are using the site. As for myself, I'm the data/ social media guy - always looking to make our data as solid as possible and looking to use social media as effectively as possible. :)
Nadia has a couple of people working with her as well - Rob does some stuff, and Abby is their Head Librarian (or whatever similar title, she's effectively an all-around assistant that runs their Librarian Corps in addition to doing a few other things).
Hardcover is similarly a 3 person team - one primary Dev (Adam, Founder and Lead Dev), one primary UI/ UX guy (Ste, Lead Designer), and one primary data guy (myself, Head Librarian, also runs our Librarian Corps).
Nadia is awesome, don't get me wrong. What they've done over there is truly impressive and you'll never hear me say otherwise. Hell, I'm a paying supporter and librarian over there, I think they do such great work.
But I do think that what we've got going on at Hardcover is even better, and I'll stand by that too. :)
Excited to hear about Hardcover! I like StoryGraph but the lack of API frustrates me - I want to be able to sync back to my general notes store (Obsidian). Hopefully Hardcover works better with that.
Which is funny, StoryGraph is a Ruby on Rails app, exposing an API is a doable thing, which leads me to believe it is not a priority or a purposeful design decision.
Yeah Hardcover seems to have a GraphQL API they use for their UI, which they expose. There’s not a lot of extra polish for third party devs — it feels like “this is the API we use, use it or not, things may break”. On the other hand, StoryGraph does server-side rendering and so it doesn’t have an API already. So adding one would be a decent amount of work
To be clear, Hardcover also does server-side rendering.
GR ditching their API was one of the primary motivations for Adam Fortuna (Hardcover's founder and Lead Dev) to even think about trying to create a competitor, so when he did create one, having an API available to others was a primary focus.
Note: Hardcover is also working towards open sourcing at some level, hopefully in 2025.
I’ve also found Hardcover.app, which I quite like. It has an API and a slightly more refined UI, but it’s clearly more than one person working on it.
Of course, if your focus is book clubs, Fable is likely the app for you