What could a better Goodreads look like?
In the previous post, I tried answering why no one has been able to build a better Goodreads yet. We learned about the growth loop driving Goodreads dominance and defensibility. If you haven’t already read it, it would be helpful to do so. You will be able to understand this essay better.
This post will unpack what the seemingly elusive better-than-Goodreads (or a more desirable social network for book-lovers) could be like. I will also discuss the strategic ways one could approach it. As a disclaimer, since something like this doesn’t yet exist, the content of this post will be more speculative than I would’ve liked. I’ve kept it grounded in user feedback & behavioral research as much as possible.
Before I jump into what a better Goodreads could be, I want to address what it should not be. It should not be an incremental improvement over what Goodreads already is. Based on personal experience, talking to existing users, and researching the web, most of the criticism on Goodreads can be classified across these themes:
1. UI & mobile-friendly
The most common criticism for Goodreads is the lack of an aesthetic user interface and the clunky UX of its mobile app. My personal take is that avid book readers tend to have a refined aesthetic taste (which reflects in the fixation for beautiful book covers), and any reimagination of a new social network will require conforming visual design. Their current UI doesn’t adhere to the standards of modern web design. Also, in the mobile-first era, having a well-functioning & navigable app is a table stake.
2. Discovery & recommendations
This is a big area of opportunity. In the previous post, we discussed the difference between incidental discovery & intentional discovery. Goodreads doesn’t deal with the former and isn’t too good at the latter. When users look for genre-based, topical, or similar-book recommendations, they often stumble into lists that are generated based on popularity. While these results would be a good fit for someone who reads occasionally, they are nearly useless for power readers. Long-tail books have a very weak discovery.
3. Search
Many users complain about the frustration they face while searching for books. The search tool is slow, non-intuitive, and if the user makes a typo, they may not see the book in the results at all.
4. Private shelves/Private stars
Currently, Goodreads doesn’t offer the ability to make bookshelves private. Many users are not comfortable sharing all of their read/to-read lists publicly though and would appreciate that level of flexibility. Some users are strained to share their verdicts publicly (need for privacy, fear of non-conformity) but would still want to track it privately.
5. Author interaction
Many users desire to interact with their favorite authors, but this isn’t a focus for Goodreads. While it does have authors on the platform, they usually exist only as profiles and don’t provide opportunities for engagement.
6. Community
Readers want to talk about the books they read. However, all of their current community products (Groups, Discussions, Creative Writing, Events, People) seem to be stuck in a limbo of poor engagement.
While a better Goodreads would address all of these pain points, solving these problems will lead to the classic error of missing the forest for the trees. Users may be good at talking about problems, but they’re rarely good at proposing solutions. More often than not, most users fail to even register the problems they have. Also, remember that none of these features will help defeat Goodreads. Its dominance stems from the moats built on search-driven discovery. Having a better UI offers no edge if potential users can’t find you.
A better way to imagine an ideal social network for books & book-lovers will need bottoms up thinking. It will involve using first principles to understand why people read books, their behavioral journey while doing so, and the problems they face in each step of that journey. These elements would influence the eventual product that is created.
What’s happening when we read books?
A popular adage says, “fall in love with the problem, not the solution”. You find problems by witnessing people’s behavior, their struggles, and their frustrations.
Let’s get into the mind of a reader and map out their entire journey of reading books.
Why do we read?
We first need to understand the reasons why people read. Depending on the type of book (fiction/non-fiction), motives for readers exist along the dimensions of:
- Learn — reading to gain new knowledge or information for pleasure, upskilling, or testing
- Imagine — reading to stimulate creativity for pleasure or creation
- Feel — reading to experience emotions to resonate with specific moods
- Share — reading to have interesting conversations for building connections, signaling status, or teaching
I want to call out two important distinctions:
- These are near-basal motives and one can argue/find motive levels above or below them.
- None of these motives are binary, or mutually exclusive. They exist on a continuum and vary by the type of book and the mindset of the reader. In this aspect, it would make sense to visualize reading behavior as a morphospace having these 4 dimensions.
For example, for most people, the motive to read Lord of the Rings would be Feel and Imagine (unless someone was reading it for academic purposes, in which case the other motive would be to Learn).
Being aware of the motives helps us model a reader's journey as they try to achieve these goals.
The journey of reading
The reader’s journey follows a distinct path of overlapping stages that can be broken down into a circular loop.
1. Discover
A reader’s journey starts with the process of discovery. Simply put, discovery means “being aware of a set of books that you may read to satisfy your present or future motives”. If you don’t know the options out there, you won’t be able to read.
A quick recap on the types of discovery from the previous post.
- Incidental discovery — this form of discovery happens when a reader is not looking for recommendations but comes across them while reading an article, browsing social media, listening to a podcast, watching a video, conversing with people. The defining characteristic is that it’s passive in nature.
- Intentional discovery — here the reader is actively seeking suggestions on what they should be reading. The reader can seek recommendations across multiple vectors — topical (I want to read books on a specific topic), similar (I want to read books similar to X), people-based (I want to see books read by thought leaders, friends, etc). To fulfill this intent, the reader will go to a search engine or the destination where you will find the information (for ex — someone’s blog)
2. Search
Most users who discover a book want to know more about it — what’s it about, number of pages, year of publication, author information, sub-genre, etc. They also look for social proofs like ratings & reviews before deciding to proceed further.
Goodreads enters a reader’s life at this stage when the reader searches for the discovered book on Google. This is at the heart of the growth loop that we discussed earlier.
3. Catalog/Shelve
Of the books you discover & find, you make note of those that you want to read later. At this stage, readers will add it to their “to-read” list. Different people have different habits — some add it to their notes, some maintain a doc or spreadsheet (more recently some maintain a list on AirTable or Notion), some send them as a sample to Kindle, add to Amazon wishlist. It’s also harder to manually maintain an “unread” list than a “read” list.
Goodreads provides readers with a “to-read” shelf as the default option to fulfill this objective.
4. Decide
Things start getting more complicated at this stage. This is when readers need to decide what to read. How do they do it?
At this stage either they know exactly what they want to read, or vaguely know the genre/topic. First, comes motive — what is the reader looking to achieve? Depending on where they fall on the Learn, Imagine, Share, Feel morphospace, they will start shortlisting books from their catalog/shelf (or try to discover through other channels). They may be looking to learn a topic or desire a specific feeling/mood (eg. read a thriller).
They will also look for other signals like metadata (number of pages, author, publication year, etc) and social proofs (rating, number of ratings, reviews).
Goodreads is miserable at this stage. Their search functionality for your own “to-read” shelf is broken, seemingly unusable. Usually, when someone adds a book to this shelf, it has a contextual story. For example, if you added a book because it was in Bill Gate’s reading list, OR you read Robert Sapolsky’s Behave and added complimentary books to read later OR your friend recommended it to you OR you went on a midnight binge of adding graphic novels you want to read. Goodreads fails to capture all of this context. Since it doesn’t capture it, it can’t surface for the reader to ease with decision-making. Losing this background story makes each book on your Goodreads shelf equal in value when you’re trying to decide what to read.
The other problem with reviews & ratings is that they capture mass popularity and not critical popularity. Readers who don’t want to base their decisions on mainstream taste desire a Rotten Tomatoes like Critics Score.
5. Read
This is the most interesting and rewarding phase of the process as a reader gets to fulfill all of their core motives. A lot happens in this phase, and it’s a long behavioral journey in itself.
- The reader finds certain sentences or passages interesting and worth revisiting so they will highlight them.
- The reader will have new thoughts or connect dots to existing ideas. So they will annotate the text.
- The reader will feel confused about what they read and will seek help through online research.
- The reader will feel excited about what they read and will want to consume extra content on YouTube, Reddit, podcasts, blogs, from the author, etc.
- The reader will want to summarise what they read and remember later. So they will write notes.
Examples of supporting or exploratory content include rich media like author interviews from YouTube, podcasts, book reviews, relevant news articles, user-generated book notes and summaries, Twitter threads, Reddit posts, etc.
This is also the longest phase in the user journey and may remain unfinished for many readers.
Goodreads is completely blank in this phase. It offers no tools or resources to navigate a reader while they’re reading.
6. Judge
After the arduous but fulfilling reading phase, it’s time for the reader to pass judgment. The ordinary way is by reflecting on your reading experience basis in which you rate it. Some readers also write a review to capture their experience. Depending on your need for privacy, you can choose to share it with the public or keep it to yourself.
Goodreads allows you to achieve both of these goals though it lacks private judgments.
7. Recommend
Recommending is a short but important phase. It allows you to signal status and nudge others to have the same experience you did. Recommendations can be positive as well as negative.
Goodreads doesn’t provide tools to share recommendations outside its network. Recommending to your friend-list on Goodreads is also a broken experience. Also, the process of recommending needs the reader to put forward a convincing and well-packaged argument that answers, “why should you read this book”, and Goodreads offers no help here.
8. Discuss
The second greatest rewarding phase of the journey is discussing what you read. Everyone who reads a great book has a natural and powerful urge to talk about it with others. This usually happens on social platforms like Twitter, Reddit, or communities like book clubs or in your personal network.
The most important requirement for this phase is finding someone else you know (or have a keen desire to know) who’s read the book. While such people exist on Goodreads, you rarely connect with them on this goal. It should have been the destination for discussions, but the lack of activity on all the community products (Groups, Discussions, Events, etc) highlights that their users lack a space to engage.
In this phase, readers also have a desire to interact with the author. But since Goodreads isn’t the network or the tool for authors, it remains an unrealized need.
9. Explore -> Discover
As readers explore more content related to the book across multiple channels in the previous phases, they discover more books and the journey loop repeats. The content they explore here can heavily overlap with the content they consume in the Read phase.
Looking at the reader’s journey helps us realize the Goodreads blind spots. Each phase of the journey is a big product in itself, and any strategy to unseat Goodreads has to account for solving problems that it doesn’t solve (or doesn’t solve well).
What would it take to unseat Goodreads?
Ironically enough, the way to build a better Goodreads is to literally not start off by building a better Goodreads.
A competitive strategy will have its roots in the problems that Goodreads doesn’t solve for its users right now. Goodreads moats come from integrating itself very tightly into the Search & Catalog phase. Most of the discovery happens incidentally and outside their platform. They capture the reader immediately when he/she searches for the book and provide them a good enough way to shelve it. If a competitor’s core use case belongs to this phase, they are doomed to fail because they can’t beat Goodreads at SEO/Search.
To become the default destination for all-things-books, one has to have an incredible use case that makes the reader visit them more often than they visit Goodreads. A user visits Goodreads whenever they search or want to shelve a book. The only other phases which have more engagement or higher frequency of occurrence are Read, Discuss & Explore. Luckily, Goodreads happens to be weak in all of them. One would have to build a product to solve problems in any or all of these phases to ultimately pose a significant threat to Goodreads.
In addition to the product strategy, the go-to-market will also require one to find a scalable channel for user acquisition. It can’t be Book Search because that’s already been monopolized by Goodreads. The channel also has to fit with the product strategy. Read, Discuss & Explore — each can have its own channel strategies.
A company that becomes successful in building an ideal network for readers will be decided by many factors, not the least of which is a good volume of luck. But the choices they make strategically will define if they are able to provide the haven book lovers so desperately desire. Along the journey, they will also have to identify opportunities to monetize. Books are estimated to be a $125–150 billion market by 2025, and such a network provides a giant opportunity to capture some of this value.
As anyone who reads books knows, they are doing so much more than consuming black text against a white page. They are actively building new worlds and filing away information in their heads. Their brain snaps and pops with new ideas. The satisfaction of reaching back into your brain to connect something you learned previously, and a new piece of related information is a thrill seldom anything else can match. The joy of sharing this knowledge enriches lives and having others experience the same feelings and emotions that you did is priceless. On a primal level, Goodreads only provides a tool to create book lists. It doesn’t capture and adorn everything beautiful about reading. For this reason, the world needs a better destination and I hope we get one soon.
