Show HN: I built a modern Goodreads alternative
kaguya.ioSince 2005, Goodreads has been the default book tracking site, connecting millions of readers. But let’s be real—it’s barely changed in 20 years. It’s the same site it was, just with more ads.
Still no half-star ratings.
No proper DNF (Did Not Finish) option.
UI still looks like it's from 2005.
Amazon owns it and doesn't care.
What’s live:
Custom shelves (Organize however you want)
Rich-text reviews (format your thoughts properly)
10-star rating system (More nuance than 5 stars)
DNF, On-Hold, and other reading statuses
Likes, shares, comments on reviews
Import your library from Goodreads/StoryGraph
A beautiful design that doesn’t make you feel like you’re using an ancient website
Coming next:
Deep tagging system (Genres, moods, character traits, tropes)
Beautiful stats & insights (Visualize your reading habits)
Discussion forums for every book (Think subreddit-style discussions)
> 10-star rating system (More nuance than 5 stars)
Does one really get anything meaningful out of saying this was a 6-star book vs a 7-star book?
Personally I think 4 levels is sufficient. Either it's rather bad, not bad but not good, good but not great or it's great.
Anything beyond that will have to be written in words.
Goodfilms (goodfil.ms), rest in peace, had a great two-rating system with Quality and Rewatchability, because the latter turned out to be a really useful metric.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3082241
One of the main frustrations I have with Goodreads is how limited the API is nowadays, and how there appear to be no measures against brigading and other campaigns. One of the core issues with ratings services.
Personally I'm hoping Open Library by the Internet Archive grows more in popularity, given how most websites come and go:
https://openlibrary.org
How does one use an average Rewatchability score to determine whether one should watch a movie?
If I'm trying to pick a movie, I don't care what its score for rewatching is, I care about what its score is for watching it the first time.
And once I've watched a movie, I don't care about whether other people say I should watch it again, I care about whether I want to watch it again.
A movie is different from buying a board game. If I'm shelling out $50 for a game, I'll want to know if it's still fun the twentieth time I play. But that isn't a consideration when picking a new movie to watch, the experience may be worth it even if I never watch it again. And ditto with books. I'm probably not going to read that 800-page book again, but that shouldn't stop me reading it once.
To present an opposite viewpoint, I try to only engage with media I suspect future me will be able to revisit and pull enjoyment out of at least once. I rarely actually do so, but I've found it to be a remarkably effective quality filter.
It's also a genre independent quality metric. That's not to be underplayed. Some examples of films that successfully passed it for me: Casablanca; Portrait of a Lady on Fire; Hereditary; Under the Skin; My Neighbor Totoro; The Fifth Element. I'm pretty sure most people would agree at least half of these movies are good.
It turns out most of the things I consider worth revisiting at least once are also things other people would consider that way. So for me a Rewatchability rating is a positive signal.
Have you ever watched a film like Come and See, Schindlers list, Grave of the fireflies, etc…?
These movies are some of the most impactful that I have ever seen, but by no means would I rate them highly rewatchable. They are gut wrenching, and some people can only stand to watch them once, few want to rewatch them, but they are also incredible.
I also gain a lot from a rewatchable piece of content, but you might be shorting yourself by always watching things designed to tickle the dopamine receptors.
I've seen the latter two, but they are most certainly very rewatchable. I saw Schindler's List again with my wife about a year ago and enjoyed it just as thoroughly as the first time.
>I also gain a lot from a rewatchable piece of content, but you might be shorting yourself by always watching things designed to tickle the dopamine receptors.
Now this I just do not understand. Things designed to be good on primarily the first watch, and allowed to degrade on future experiences, seem much worse for this.
Ahh.
I think we are coming from different feelings about rewatchability.
If you asked me to rate movies as to their artistic merit, their excellence as films, I would say that those all fall into “instant classic” territory. However, I would not want to rewatch them in the same way that I might want to rewatch a Coen brothers film, for example.
I agree! I think this is one reason why Rewatchability is an imperfect, though positive, signal - many people mean it in the sense you mean it, and would therefore mark them as not very rewatchable.
That's fine by me, of course. The more signals I have, the better my decision can be made on what to watch next on average.
I feel like a movie can be a good time, but I wouldn't rewatch it.
For example, I just watched the Gorge. I enjoyed it, but I wouldn't rewatch it. I don't think it necessarily deserves a bad grade though.
Now, some great movies I wouldn't rewatch. La vita e bella and grave of the firefly are beautiful, I just cannot rewatch them.
It's definitely a limited metric tho.
I'm curious—what would you like to do with the API?
Ironically, mainly to check for irregular voting patterns like brigading.
Not dissimilar to what Steam implemented, which is basically Bollinger bands for ratings.
To me, even 5-star system is broken by design, with a pressure to rate everything 4 and 5, especially if these are known to be classic books.
I rarely give 1 or 2 - in vast majority of cases it means I stop reading them, out of respect for my time.
What is nice, but underused (since most platforms want us to be excited, because of sales and adverts) is some kind of slider with mean at 0, for expected quality.
Even better, tags to choose from "awesome", "insightful", "well-researched", "funny", "cringe", "inaccurate" etc. I mean, there are tags, but I mean ones explicitly displayed next to rating.
No, and that's why Netflix switched to thumbs up/down instead of 5 stars.
And they mostly ignore that. They have access to what you actually watch, rather than what you say you like. They know what you start, what you finish, and how quickly you jump on a new one.
It doesn't matter how many times you down vote Mexican soap operas or singing talent shows. If you keep watching they're gonna keep suggesting them.
And result is stupid. It is pretty much impossible to discover something new on Netflix. It puts you into a quick box and no matter how much I try to find a comedy, I can't because it decided the same crime shows are my thing.
Netflix recommendation system just does not work. It does not allow me to find movies I can like, it allows me to see the same thing I seen once before.
I am not in the mood for serious documentary evey day of course, it takes more concentration. But when I am in mood for one, I should be able to find it.
Yeah and I hate this scheme. Facebook keeps showing me clips that I do not want to watch and yet fined myself drawn to watching like some compulsive behaviour. Urgh.
It's debatable this was the motivation for Netflix. More stars ==> more nuanced ==> more qualitative reviews ==> much more effort and time to decide if you should consume. Netflix is long(er) form TicTok and wants to optimize for continued consumption without friction. I wouldn't be surprised if they drop ratings all together and only offer a personalized AI curator stream. They could do this just based on viewing time and engagement and avoid even the minor disruption of "up/down". Don't make the sheep think.
They switched because it took more effort from users to rate on a 5 vs just saying good or bad. Because Netflix is a streaming service, casual users don't want to put in that much effort when they're chilling. Tracking is fundamentally different, where you go in with the expectation of organizing your library.
Last time I saw a movie there there was "super thumbs up" in addition to normal one.
For clarity I'd replace rating systems with "was it a good spend of my time?" yes/no question. Then just show percentages. Could not be clearer.
Agreed in general that 10 and even 5 is too much, and that 4 is a good compromise. Though personally I prefer thumbs up and thumbs down, plus a separate starring option. The first two signify “would I recommend this to anyone else” while the latter means “this has something interesting I’d like to revisit at a later date”. Something losing its star rating is par for the course, but the recommendation status is less likely to change (though it can happen). And yes, it is possible to give something a thumbs down and favourite it, e.g. when you don’t think something is particularly good or competent but it still had something which you recognise as meaningful to yourself specifically.
I don’t think this system is right for everyone, but I like it. Depending on the platform I may even use a rating system of 1, which represents the starring and everything else is just read/watched.
I informally often use a -1 to 2 scale. Bad, fine, good, great.
The difference between 1 and 2 on a 5 point scale is not useful.
This is a great scale to use when you’ve got a group of people because it’s easy to teach without needing to do calibration: -1 is bad, not meeting expectations, 0 is “not good, but meets expectations”, 1 is “good, better than expectations” and 2 is outstanding.
It’s hard to come up with a nice visual for it though, you just have to use the numbers themselves (or rather ugly emojis)
I think one of the most robust rating systems I've worked with is based on comparisons, i.e. "did you like this more or less than X". This is more computationally intensive, but it can be made to work even with intransitive and unreliable judgments.
It just feels satisfying to me—organizing my library neatly by rating, based on how much I like each book. A four-level system just doesn’t have the same impact. Personal preference, I guess.
Just ranking everything in order is the ideal rating system. And it's easy to convert to whatever poorly-chosen system someone else wants you to use. It does mean the scores for your first few ratings will fluctuate quite a bit, though!
If you added half stars and stuck to a 5-star system, there's less user surprise for functionally the same thing.
I did go back and forth on this. I just like 10 stars better. IMDB, MAL, Mangadex all have 10 stars. So it's not really uncommon. But yeah, if a lot of people feel 5 is enough, we'll just return it back to the 5 star system.
Anilist let's you switch your rating system. You can do 5 stars, 10 points, 100 points or a simple 3 points reprrsented with emojis. I quite like the idea, although I think it makes it a little more complicated to calculate ratings for all people.
You could do a simple weighting, probably adjusting for sample distributions.
I would guess that with experience and age preferences change. What's the point of a 10 star rating system if you have a 10 star rated book that you wouldn't rate the same after being ten years older?
Rating books on an absolute scale makes little sense to me.
The actual questions is: Whom can you recommend this book? Even mediocre books can be very useful for the right people.
Having worked on a rating system, I think 10 levels are useful (or 5 levels with half-stars). You can create better averages/recs using 10 levels, since ratings of 0 or 10, which are often spammy, can be down-weighed.
I can absolutely understand that it makes sense to have a much more fine-grained average, but personally I struggle to give meaningful ratings beyond the four I mentioned.
That said perhaps multiple binary dimensions would be better. Good story yes/no, interesting/unique premise yes/no, overall good acting yes/no, good cinematography yes/no etc etc.
I was interrupted, so when I picked up my brain continued with movie recommendation mode, I watch more movies than read books, but the binary multi-dimensional rating could of course be applied to books as well.
I once had an interesting conversation with my mother in law who was telling us about how much thought and effort she puts into scoring shows on IMDB. She was shocked to learn that I want my opinion to have more impact, so If I like a show I give 10 and if I didn't it gets 1.
Yes, but sadly a 10 is often used by fans of a lead actor to pump the ratings, and a 0/1 is used by the moral police as a protest vote.
> Does one really get anything meaningful out of saying this was a 6-star book vs a 7-star book?
I rate for myself, and not others. And for over 20 years I've used a 10 point system.
10 = Easily amongst my favorite
9 = Awesome, but not in all time favorites
8 = Really liked it, and would recommend
7 = Liked it, was worth my time, but not so much that I would happily recommend to others
6 = Liked it, but wasn't worth my time
5 = Neutral
And below 5 I don't distinguish. I randomly pick to indicate I didn't like it.
The thing is, 10 means "I'm a fan" It doesn't tell anything about if I've liked it or even if I've watched it
It kind of seems like you use a five-point system, then?
The difference being that I don't want someone to think that because I rated something 2 out of 5 that I didn't like it because it's less than 2.5. And for most people, a 3/5 doesn't mean "yes, I heartily recommend". But they can believe it for 8/10
(Actually, 7 points as someone else pointed out - by my point stands even with a 7 point system).
I agree with a lot of your top 5 so I’ll try to continue
5: I enjoyed sections of this book but as a whole I didn’t like it
4: had some cool ideas and there were moments when I got excited but the execution wasn’t there. Basically an amateur with a good idea
3: readable but unsatisfying. I finished it but was roasting it in my head the whole time
2: garbage. Bad story idea and bad writing. Nothing good to say except that it seemed like the author was trying
1: offensive. Celebrity cash grabs, polemics, etc. no artistic value whatsoever, author was not trying to write a good book. “Book” is just a format here
you use a 7 point system
I typically like 7 point scales (like this[1] post from jgc outlines), but your classification also seems pretty good.
[1]: https://blog.jgc.org/2007/12/seven-point-scale.html
Rating is a mess. Still I think people are used to express their opinions on a 0-10 scale, and they will appreciate if they can just keep doing that.
0 to 10 is a mess as well because some people give 10s very often and others only give a 10 for the very best things. And of course the bots all rate everything 1 or 10.
I was once playing around with a 3-point ranking system. Think thumbs-down, thumbs-up, and double-thumbs-up. The thumbs up and down would basically function as expected, while the latter would be weighted heavier for the recommendation algorithm. Basically a `recommend me more of this, this is high quality content` action.
There is a general problem with a 5 or 10 star voting system, consider a [malicious] user who only gives a 1 or 10 star vote, thus ending up with more voice than one that votes in the range of 4-6 which would be what the majority of the content deserve. Therein lies another problem too, while the scale would imply 5.5 to be average [out of 1-10 with no 0 option], most people tend to consider 7-7.5 to be average instead, there's a very natural bias on the scale.
This idea isn't actually uncommon however, as platforms tend to work with a thumbs-up, thumbs-down, and a `favorite` action of sorts. Some platforms tend to respect favorites in recommendations and some don't. I have found that YouTube doesn't care all that much about my... let alone favorites, it doesn't even care about my votes. TikTok however did this well, I had downloaded it one day and at the end of the day my feed consisted of neat programming tricks and lessons on color theory. Which kind of revealed something my own prejudice too, as I had expected TikTok to show me the worst content and it was the platform that respected my choice the most. That said these things change a lot so it wouldn't surprise me if the same test shows the opposite results a year from now on.
What you're describing is fully observed in education. The scale of your evaluation has to have an odd total of numbers and a limited number of choices. 1-2-3, for example. That means that each digit sends a strong signal. 1-2-3-4 means the 3 is the non-controversial choice. Average, so to speak, and you don't want average in your evaluation. You need to adequately grade stuff here, and giving most things an average grade is a weak signal that prevents you from differentiating.
When you grade by competency (not by knowledge), you also assign a written description for each grade. That helps a lot. I think those platforms are keenly aware of those facts I just described, and are trying to boil them down to simple actions for users, that impart large signal, and that respect the cultural norms of evaluation. That's why Letterboxd has a 5-star with half-stars rating system, but also has a like button.
for me there are 3 levels:
- books i wish i hadn't lost time with
- books i've read and were probably ok
- books i would give/recommend
YouTube changed to thumbs up/down from 5-star rating system many years ago like Netflix. They learnt most people either give it 1 star or 5 stars. It’s also hard to understand the meaning of 2,3, and 4 stars in the context of a video.
My stars are as follows:
5 - This book was so good that it’s life-changing
4 - This is a really good book
3 - I enjoyed this book, it was good.
2 - It’s alright.
1 - I hated this book with every fiber of my being, because it somehow tricked me into finishing it despite my hatred of it.
The 4-star system is indeed wonderful. A rating that is truly "neutral" doesn't exist in a world of human subjectivity
I could see "proportion of 10s" vs "proportion of 5s" (the max score in either case) being meaningful.
I completely agree. I've never read a 1-star (to me) book because that implies it's unreadable, and anything good enough to keep my attention room is generally 4-stars and rarely 5-stars. I bet if I look at my Goodreads it's 60% 4s, 30% 3s, and 10% 5s
I don't rate books on Goodreads, but I do look at the average rating when deciding to read a book. I won't start anything less than about 3.7 or 3.8.
No, that's meaningless precision. meaningful precision would be stars by category, not a generic overall assessment
I don't feel it's entirely meaningless, but I do agree multidimensional rating would be more informative and better to guide others.
Sure, but can we really deny that the 5 star rating is pretty decent and simple, having an exact middle point and then two levels for each side.
Well yeah, but I feel the neutral midpoint is problematic because I feel it's too easy to pick it. Removing the midpoint forces one to decide which side it leans towards.
If one really feels the need for the "meh" category, I'd say go for a 3-level system: bad, meh, great.
If there's no voting data, it doesn't matter what scale is used.
Black Panther has a rating of 96% at Rotten Tomatoes. So whatever the scale is, nothing is really meaningful. I've been in the cinema with about 60 other people and a friend. statistically one of us should have enjoyed it but we both found the movie shit. So no, 10 stars is not more meaningful as 5 stars. 2-4 should be enough to still be wrong about taste once in a while.
96% means that 96% of critics liked the movie enough to recommend it.
It also means that 4% of critics did not recommend the movie. In a theater of 60 people, you and your friend would fit into that 4%. So there's nothing wrong with RottenTomatoes.
Should be Positive / Neutral / Negative and anything beyond that described in text.
Reasoning: number ratings are subjective. My 4/5 is not the same as yours... or even the same as mine 2 years ago.
I don't mind a goodreads alternative, but regarding the UI from 2005, I am not sure I care. It works and people are used to it. I am not a supporter of "let's try build a new interface using shiny new technology" for the sake of new.
A dated UI is fine by me, but at no point did the current placement of the search field make any sense for the average user. It is de-emphasised, hidden almost below the fold, as if searching for reviews of a particular title wasn't the thing most visitors come there for.
Of course there are plenty of monetisation and engagement reasons for that UI item to be awkwardly placed…
Kaguya seems a little better here, but it too starts with a huge 'MAKE AN ACCOUNT OR FUCK OFF' message in mid screen, with the search field in the navigation bar on top. If you want become the Goodreads alternative, start with realising that a lot of people just want to see if the reviews are any good before committing to creating an account and contributing in turn.
I don't mind where the search is. I do mind that the drop-down results can't be opened in new tabs—they are links, so you can choose "open in new tab", but they're links to "#", so you end up opening the current page in a new tab.
It's just a bunch of basic usability problems like that that they've never bothered addressing.
The search bar is only weird on the home page, which I don't imagine is visited very much. I bet most people jump to a books page from a browser or phone search.
Arguably 2005 was a high water mark for UIs. That was when people were still focused on "human interface design" and hadn't adopted the A/B "revealed preference" nonsense.
I find the Goodreads UI clunky. To note down my start/end dates for a book I have to have some activity on it, and then I can edit those dates.
There are other corners of it that could be nicer. It's not so much about modern tooling as much as it is about using modern tooling to achieve better flow and more pleasant presentation.
I care most about perf/responsiveness as I navigate the site. GR was tolerable on this metric while I still used it, StoryGraph (for understandable reasons) is abysmally slow somehow.
I have the same complaint about BoardGameGeek. If it was super snappy to go with the dated design, I wouldn't bat an eye, but it is also kind of a slog.
Both are things I use for discovery a little bit more than I use to record my thoughts about my previous experiences, so my browsing behavior is very breadth-first search and that makes the slow loads more of an acute problem for me.
That's totally okay. If it works for you, keep using it by all means. The point of an alternative is to serve those who do have a problem and are frustrated with the status quo.
Agreed I really don't mind the interface, if anything, I hate the new stuff they've aded
for me it is the opposite - i actually prefer older UI.
Less optimized for farming my attention and ads, more optimized for me discovering things, and not being shoehorned into choices.
I view it as a positive. It's easy to find things and obvious which parts are interactive.
I was looking into this space the other day, and the number of options has been growing. By my record there is:
- https://www.goodreads.com
- https://thestorygraph.com
- https://fable.co
- https://hardcover.app
- https://joinbookwyrm.com
I was actually trying to determine the best free source of metadata for books. I was hoping for something like MusicBrainz.
The best I could find seemed to be https://openlibrary.org. There is https://isbndb.com, but it is paid.
This has long been considered one of Goodreads' big advantages: its massive publication database, ISBN and all. But recently Anna's Archive has been making quite a bit of noise about their considerable ISBN database:
https://annas-archive.org/blog/
This may well be a great opportunity to seed a Goodreads alternative.
I’ve always hoped that once we reach Goodreads scale, we’d be able to release database dumps like VNDB (https://vndb.org/d14) and Lichess (https://database.lichess.org/)
Since the metadata is contributed by volunteers in the first place, it only seems fair for it to be freely available rather than locked down.
My personal project, https://rate.house, is kinda like goodreads but for all types of media.
In case you don't know, there is also BookBrainz: https://bookbrainz.org/
If you want the best UX for tracking and easiest/fastest Goodreads importer try https://margins.app (disclosure: I'm the designer)
Where are you sourcing book metadata?
If this site takes off, you'll need a moderation strategy. Goodreads has been plagued by extortionary negative reviews.
https://www.npr.org/2023/12/17/1219599404/goodreads-review-b...
I just assume all reviews are lying unless I know the reviewer or have validated their past reviews. I don't know why these sites don't lean into the social angle and weight reviews by social-graph distance. This certainly doesn't mean you have to HIDE the public reviews by unknown people.... just give an incentive to give input at what sort of reviews you want.
> I don't know why these sites don't lean into the social angle and weight reviews by social-graph distance.
Goodreads does that though. Reviews from friends and people you follow are shown first
Ah, interesting, apologies for the accidental goodreads slander. I moved on to storygraph a while ago and haven't looked back.
Doesn't that require the user to curate a friends list of people with comparable tastes? I've never met someone who has my exact (eclectic and multilingual) taste in books.
Besides, I wouldn't even know who to 'friend' or 'follow' on a site like this. What's the point? Chances are I'd just end up in some bubble, which defeats the whole point of reading.
Presumably you'd agree with a review and then follow someone.
I can't say I've ever thought of reading as a way to fight against a "bubble", nor am I sure that being in a "bubble" is inherently a bad thing. I don't think my life is any worse for identifying that I'm not into fantasy smut or steven pinker or self-help neuroticism and in fact my life is better without these authors in it.
Yeah, reviews are inherently social. I’m waiting for someone to build a review platform on top of ATProto (bluesky).
We'll definitely implement automatic review bombing protection. I'm thinking something like Steam does.
How does this compare to https://www.thestorygraph.com/ ?
StoryGraph has made it pretty clear they don’t want to be more social—you have to go into your settings and explicitly turn on friends and followers.
They also de-emphasize reviews, hiding them under a button. There are no likes or comments on reviews, and they don’t have shelves like Goodreads.
But to me, a big part of Goodreads is the community, library organization, and reviews, so I want to emphasize those on Kaguya.
Also, I just think our design is much better.
That was a pretty good endorsement of StoryGraph. I bet a number of people just read your description and thought “yes, that is exactly what I’m looking for”. Of course, it also means you did a good job of promoting your own service, since it’ll attract people who want the opposite.
I just had an account there. It might still be active. The way you have explained StoryGraph, it seems I must spend some more time checking it out. Seems really what I might be looking for.
Came here to say this - the Story Graph is fantastic and highly recommended.
They haven't yet made me any good recommendations. I'm still giving it data, if for no other reason than to track my reading. I know that book recommendation is hard. But I do think I got better suggestions from Goodreads.
I’m certainly not the target for this. The following is going to sound harsh, but bear with me. Two things I really dislike about this, from what I look for generally from websites and services:
1. It doesn’t have any information about pricing or the business model. “Get started for free” — does it mean there are paid plans after I sign up? Does it mean it’s on best effort and might disappear suddenly if the person running it doesn’t have time?
2. I scrolled down all the way looking for a pricing link, and thought that the Help and Support link in the footer may help. But it goes to a Discord link.
I’m not signing up to find what “free” means and I’m definitely not going to sign up for Discord to get help or ask basic questions. If you cannot put up web pages for support, there at least ought to be an email address. Everybody (well, most people) has an email address. The percentage of people having an email address and willing to jump through another hoop (Discord) is going to be quite low.
I had to check if Help & Support is indeed linked to Discord and sadly it is. For me this is an instant turnoff. If there is no documentation but rather I am expeced to scout chat logs, I won't even start to use it. (I realize that this is a bit of a meme but it is true for me)
1. No, it just means completely free. And the website’s not going anywhere unless I die or something. I'll look into making this clearer.
2. Noted. We'll put up a proper email address. I just figured Discord would be faster.
Tech Stack
What happened with cockroach? :)
They switched to a non-free license about 6 months ago [0]. This is not just the usual BSL terms of "do not compete with our hosted offering, but use it in your own product without issue", but they mandate telemetry from the free version.
Oxide and Friends did a great episode on it at the time [1].
[0] https://www.cockroachlabs.com/docs/stable/licensing-faqs
[1] https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/whither-coc...
I am curious too
Does Phoenix have auth? Any reason you chose supa over phoenix? And do you store user info (reviews+stuff) in phoenix and just reference it with the supa uuids or do you store user generated info on their own in supa?
Phoenix doesn’t have built-in auth, and setting it up with Guardian (the JWT library for Elixir) took too much time. Since we were already using Supabase for Postgres, we decided to go with its auth to move faster. Supabase provides a UUID after authentication, which we then use throughout the rest of the database.
Why do you use supabase and not just postgres?
Do you use supabase’s api interface to do the queries? Or do you use supabase for other features?
When I first started working on the website nine months ago, I didn’t even know what Postgres was, so going with an easier option made sense. Right now, we also use Supabase for auth and emails.
For queries, we don’t use Supabase’s API interface—we interact with Postgres directly through our backend
Thanks for your answer. Interesting take that you did not know about postgres, but chose an api for storage instead. I would have done the opposite.
Well, they use Supabase for auth. Perhaps there's other integration there.
Why Next.js and not Liveview?
Little note: It seems the search is only by book title, not by author and not resilient to typos.
LiveView just has fewer libraries. For example, we use a rich-text editor called TipTap, and I’m not sure there’s anything similar for LV.
Yeah, search is currently by book title and series name. It should handle typos pretty well—Meilisearch allows for up to two—but I still need to tweak it further
Why Elixir & Phoenix and Next.js?
My personal quick nitpick of a feedback would be
- maybe users do not want a "modern" alternative to Goodreads per se? I know, I am not saying people are looking for a website from the 90s but one might want to keep in mind that this is a community that still reads books (and a lot of them actual paper books). This looks like standard website interface that get inherited from one of those nuvo web frameworks looks. The "feel" from the home page is very bland. Like a standard landing page of some sort.
- And sadly I do not want to create an account to explore the features and then hope that there is an easy delete a/c option. In fact even if I'd know I could delet the a/c I would be not inclined to create an a/c
- No, please don't do the 10 point rating. That's all over. 4 is the best with half stars. Hell, even 2 or 3 would not be bad. I'd have said 5 with half stars but that's essentially 10. 0, 0.5,…, 3.5, 4 is really the best imho. Even after Mr Ebert is gone and a lot of the later reviewes on his site are just, let's say not what he was even remotely, I still like rogerebert's 4 star rating system.
- Since I have not tried it, I hope you have an easy way to import everything from Goodreads.
For me, a killer feature would be easy JSON or Markdown export/sync, so I can use it in Obsidian.
Also - I am a bit afraid that it either falls into obscurity or gets sold to Amazon. Any ideas why it wouldn't happen? In particular - if it is not open source, then there needs to be some monetization mechanics - which one do you favour?
We'll have subscriptions for extra features like Letterboxd does. All basic features though is free forever.
The landing page is mostly filled with sci-fi. I know it's what's popular on the site and what's reviewed recently but it's sending the wrong message that the site is exclusively for sci-fi. Most readers don't read sci-fi, and readers who read sci-fi tend to mostly read sci-fi, so the average reader would think the site is not for them.
In harsher words: women don't read sci-fi, and are your target audience. Make sure your landing page surfaces things other than sci-fi and fantasy, or you'll never grow past that niche.
“Women don’t read sci-fi”?
Sci-fi and Fantasy *together* account for 15% of the sales, and the majority of buyers are female.
You might need to meet more women
Godspeed, running a consumer app in these niches is the hardest thing you can do and many people here just run their mouths without building anything that gets used by actual people.
I think most people looking for an alternative to Goodreads are using Storygraph.
I found the UI of story graph unusable, like among the worst I had ever seen. I remember having to google how to see books I've already read. Using hardcover.app now, whose only issue is that the performance is really bad
Storygraph is brilliant, but it really needs some UX love for things like viewing your book piles (read, to-read, dnf) etc.
It's also quite slow, but I suspect that's just part of it being a smaller site.
Indeed what I've been using, since I learned that Goodreads was owned by Amazon
Goodreads does indeed suck in many ways, but I am in favor of a 5 star system! I think oftentimes we need to commit to one rating or another and not waffle around with this "4.12425/5" type reviews :)
I think most n/x rating systems are extremely weak and the level of detail is irrelevant. Averaging leads to a soup where nearly everything that isn't objectively awful falls in 60-80% rating. There's no signal to determine if it's good or just mediocre based on the rating alone. Goodreads and IMDB have been utterly useless to me.
Rotten Tomatoes' system has a lot of positives and I see a ton of signal in Rotten Tomatoes scores. It only works with a critical mass of people rating a given piece and I don't think anyone could get that critical mass for books aside from Goodreads.
I had an idea of a rating system where people would have to create a ranked list of the movies/books. Their rating for a given piece would be based on where it is in their list, linearly. Then ratings would be relative to other content. I think this would be much harder to get off the ground than a Rotten Tomatoes system.
Criticker does relative rankings, percentile-matched, in kinda the same way. For films (not books).
So if I rate Feature Film I II & III as 30 50 70, and you rate them 70 80 90, we would basically "agree". It's a neat system that I wish other rating systems would use.
[1] https://www.criticker.com/
Very interesting to rate movies and see what it predicts. Sometimes it's fairly spot on and other times it's way off. Very mathematical. Thanks for sharing.
Seems pretty good! However, like all of these websites, it's only so useful without a large userbase to get ratings and reviews from.
Some feedback:
- Visually pleasing!
- It seemed to have failed to import some books from StoryGraph for me (e.g., "The Hive" by Camilo José Cela and "The Epic of Gilgamesh"), and as far as I could tell it did not notify me anywhere. I had no idea until I noticed that they were missing from my "Read" library.
- The book "Zone" by Mathias Énard seems to be completely impossible to find via searching, despite existing on the website (https://kaguya.io/books/zone).
- Adding a feature that allows clicking on 'Read Books' or 'Want to Read' on a user's profile to directly view their complete library in that category would be nice.
- Only five "Similar Books" seems rather low, would love to have a "See more >" option there!
- A "Neighbours" feature similar to what Last.fm has for finding other users would be great.
- This is a minor nitpick, but the grey box that represents a missing book under "Favourite Books" on a profile is taller than the actual covers.
The best part of Goodreads for me is the communities. You can join a group with monthly book reads, and participate in their forums. Do you have any plans to do something similar?
Sure we do. I'm planning to have reddit-like forums for each book over 500 ratings at the bottom of the page like IMDB used to do. Also, I'm considering forums for genres like romance, fantasy.
Forums per book is a good start, but I find that the groups are a bigger draw in Goodreads. They have a more personal touch and allow you to discuss broader topics and get recommendations from accounts you know and trust. For example I'm in a group called "Evolution of science fiction" and have learnt a lot from joining in their monthly novel / short story reads.
Do users create and moderate the group themselves? It seems like a subreddit, but for book related topics?
Yep, each group has one or more moderators. Like Reddit I guess but no up/downvotes. There's some automated moderation as well - it doesn't let you post links (which is mad) and I read that at one point there was a censoring of mentions of Storygraph.
What are your plans for the longevity of this? How are you ensuring there are enough funds and time to go around for maintenance? What are your contingency plans for when you realise there is indeed not enough funds and time to maintain it? These are questions I'd like answered before I commit!
I love the initiative but my experience tells me these things tend to die out after 2–5 years, and I'd hate to lose my reading history then.
I just use Librarything. The web site has more features than any other tool out there, and the community and admins are better. Plus, it's completely free. I've been using it since 2007, and can't say I've ever had a bad experience.
Indeed. Except for the UI, it has most of the features OP wanted since at least 2011.
It looks nice but like any social network the value is in the user base. I saw one book on your site (the order of time), and searched for it on Goodreads to see more reviews.
I agree. I hope we keep growing and one day reach that level. People also bring in their reviews when they import from goodreads. So it's not gonna take that long.
I would love a simple feature where I can get suggestions based on what's on my shelf. I'd even love to explore other shelves and see how people stack their books.
I guess at this point if you want to do something new/modern, go for 4- or 8-star rating rather than 5- or 10-star rating. It'll force people to choose something other than middle. I hate to find 3/5 book which really deserves 2/5 but people didn't want to leave somewhat negative feedback.
Maybe out of context, but the real value of Goodreads is the sheer number of content (books, reviews, lists, users, etc). If something _works_ there's not always a reason to break it and/or update it just for the sake of updating. Look at hardcore Salesforce tools, they look like they're from 90s, but they work perfectly fine. If that's your only motivation, it's impossible to win me over as a user.
Side-note: create a new book list and call it DNF, add the books that you didn't finish to that list and get it done with.
Your competition is not Goodreads, but https://joinbookwyrm.com/
I've joined Storygraph, LibraryThing, and I think a few others. Never heard of Bookwyrm before.
I still use Goodreads almost exclusively.
Goodreads is still the competition. If you mean competition specifically between alternative to Goodreads, I think LibraryThing is the most popular by a fair bit. After a quick look around Bookwyrm, it definitely doesn't look like the one I'd choose. I'm mostly seeing "some rando's list of books they read in 2025" and "some rando commented on some random book".
Maybe once it finishes importing my Goodreads list it'll be more useful, but it's taking a while (kaguya was very quick), and my initial impression is that I'm not impressed.
Bookwyrm is built on ActivityPub, you won't have any single server, but a constellation of them
However, its strongest point on it's favor is that anyone creating content on AP automatically has a potential reach of a few million users.
I'm an avid reader and platforms expert who would love a reason to migrate away from goodreads. My first three impressions: 1. I want to know your business model and ownership structure. Moving is costly, give me a reason to try you as opposed to others. That reason should include a long-term incentive, above and beyond new features or better design. 2. I searched the android app store but the only thing I found was anime character-related content. You probably have the wrong name. 3. I like your features ideas! But I don't have enough information right now to motivate me to import my goodreads history, much of which is deeply personal.
Most rating systems suck because the rating is relative to the reviewer but the interpretation is relative to the reader. And of course the rating relative to the reviewer at that time.
After decades of reading, there are probably only four fiction ratings for me:
Recommend - to a specific reader or genre
I read it multiple times over years
It's OK, but at this point it's bookshelf filler
I sold it.
There's usually a good thing in every book. I mean, the first 8 Stephanie plum books were fun...but it gets old. The hobbit/LOTR? I'd never recommend those today. I loved thr Thomas Covenant stuff back in the day, but today? No. But The Black Company and Garret PI series are the gifts that keep on giving.
Capturing that in a one dimensional measure is impossible...but it's been Good Enough for years. But you can try to make it better.
Nice. I would love to import the metadata from my Calibre Library. Calibre is great, but it is ancient and its evolution is glacial.
> UI still looks like it's from 2005
I don't mind this at all, but I do mind the extremely slow servers backing the site. It's overloaded, either through inadequate hardware or poor software or both.
> 10-star rating system (More nuance than 5 stars)
10 star rating is an anti-feature. I just don't have that level of granularity in how I feel about books. The only real feature you need is data migration / portability -- if I can't get my extensive records out of Goodreads, there's no point.
> Import your library from Goodreads/StoryGraph
So that's good. Does it include ratings? Can you continue to sync over time or is it a one-shot?
I generally ignore 1 and 5 stars on Amazon or anything without a comment or username.
Interesting to see the deep tagging system as the categorizations for books are tricky (as an author I know this from a few failed attempts to pigeon hole my first book in kindle) so say If an amazing romance book was accidentally categorized as an adventure or Sci-Fi as it had a bit of action or future tech in it, it would likely get 1 star from the romance genre readers, and vice versa if it was categorized as Sci-Fi or adventure. It is why you rarely get well rated cross-overs. A better category manager would be good for readers.
I don't understand why we don't have a "Discuss Anything" universal app, operable on literally every tokenizable piece of human content, searchable by similarity in embedding space, and discoverable using titles, concepts, or vague impressions. Let people create threads and discuss everything, forever, with versioned references to the original content (like a website), as long as it's legal.
A browser extension called Dissenter briefly allowed this, got too popular too fast, had a data leak, and then they rolled it into a spyware browser. It also only had popularity among one extreme of politics.
I once built a prototype to a "Goodreads but for classical music", e. g. playing Chopin on a piano. I have thought about doing something like what you are talking about. My concerns are:
1. Moderation: you need to moderate content that people create and moderation is hard. If you don't, the service will be abused.
2. Order: Goodreads has "Librarians" to create some order in the chaos. I think that a meaningful search through "every tokenizable piece of human content" is very non-trivial and would require much work.
3. Monetization: ads are possible. Are they sustainable? I don't know enough of profitability to say something about that. The more specific the type of content is, the more options you have for monetization. For classical music scores my ideas were to make deals with sheet selling companies and make ads for (classical) concerts.
4. Market share: isn't Reddit pretty much a superset of this, minus a built-in rating system?
> Would love feedback. What do you think? 1) It looks very nice.
2) However, the UI density is not good for me.
I have a 23" monitor and I can only see 2,5 items of the "Trending Review This Week". I should be able to read 5 of them (even though there are only 3 items displayed).
The "landing screen" is also too big, I should be able to see some content that make me want to have a look and sign-in, not just sign-in to have a look.
3) As a personal opinion I prefer Bad/Neutral/Good rating system + review for the nuance.
I'm definitely the target audience for this: I hate Goodreads and I still use it on a weekly basis.
A couple questions:
- where do you get your book data from? To my knowledge Amazon has a de facto monopoly on this and there's nothing more frustrating than missing latest or niche books, its covers, etc. or having wrong data/duplicates.
- do you plan on offering a migration path? I've got years worth of data on Goodreads.
I like it. Very clean UI. I don't think "UI still looks like it's from 2005." is a bad thing (nor do I know if that's true).
I'm working on importing my library from a simple checklist app I made years ago. I posted one review.
Any idea why The Metabarons (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metabarons) isn't in the library? I guess comic books aren't in the data source.
Yeah, we don't have comics and graphic novels currently. I wanted to keep it simple for launch.
Makes sense.
Is there a reason Pandemic (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/710698.Pandemic) and The Rift (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/271167.The_Rift) aren't in Kaguya?
They're there. Looks like our search needs some improvement. We'll add a dedicated search results page too.
https://kaguya.io/books/pandemic-6 https://kaguya.io/books/the-rift-1
Hah, I was just going to go back to these after I had issues with the Shadowmarch series by Tad Williams and The Wizard Knight series by Gene Wolfe. I had figured out that the books are on the authors' page even though the search wasn't serving them up.
Thanks!
I'm very old for the audience here, but really miss another Amazon acquisition and destruction: CD Now. I use ratings as a discoverability mechanism, and don't need some absolute rating based on unknown foundations as much as linking new content to known content. I find myself re-reading authors every few years because I struggle to find new authors and works that might appeal to my appetite.
There was a a time Jeff Bezos believed he needed to own platforms where people reviewed things, since it would make the Amazon Store better. Then Jeff discovered he could just charge the sellers on his platform for placement. Money talks.
Ever since then, Amazon has cared very little about all the things it bought related to the old strategy.
I'd also like to recommend https://literal.club/ as a Goodreads alternative.
I read ~4 books a month via Audible, and tend not to find the time to add to Goodreads (maybe there's an auto connection I'm missing). I love the idea of systems like this (your design is beautiful) but there's no way I'm going to try to reimport all my ratings for 300+ books.
Is there anyway to sync with Audible? Even if it's a hacky chrome extension reading off the audible website?
Does it support ActivityPub? Bookwyrm does. That seems to me to be a basic requirement for a social network at this point.
I've been looking into neodb, have you compared them? https://neodb.net/
I dream of a good recommendation system because Goodreads is completely terrible. I just want to know two things: which books are similar and which books I would like, beyond typical recommendations. Something akin to what platforms like VOD, YouTube, and Netflix offer. For me, this is the most important killer feature.
We’ll definitely have this at some point. A good recommendation system needs a solid base of user data, so it’s only possible once we have a larger user base. I really wanted to have this for the launch since it seemed so important for a book tracking platform but we didn't have the data to train models to make recommendations.
I mean, not really you don't need user data; I was doing something related with LLM (simply asking it) and planning to use vector databases for various tasks, like semantic search, similarity matching, clustering, and topic modeling. Later pivoted to doing something for podcasts (analysing transcripts).
I wish ratings were a slider from Skip It - Good - Great - Life Changing or whatever. Sliders are great for stuff like this. Odd comment I know but sliders are instantly understandable, accessible and doable. So, great UI.
If possible a "Reading challenges" feature would be really great, my girlfriend loves that!
It would also be nice to be able to record when you read the book so that you can go back and see like a history of the books you've read chronologically!
I would be much more interested in a Goodreads alternative that focuses on articles/substacks/newsletters etc.
There isn't a good way of sorting through all the stuff out there and I feel like I am missing a bunch of content worth reading as a result.
Out of curiosity how did you initially populate your site?
That's a really good idea. The only trouble would be keeping the astroturfers away, it's much easier for articles - a company I used to work for would send out company-wide requests to upvote their articles on HN.
But if someone could make this work in a way that it's like a "if you liked this you might like" version of HN/lobste.rs it could be really useful.
I like the design of the landing page and the book pages a lot! Well done.
I didn't use Goodreads, but I'm considering Bookwyrm now, because it supports ActivityPub, which is awesome, because I want to avoid vendor/network lock-in if possible.
I really like it, it'd be nice if it had a letterboxd type feature to see what your friends are reading, that'd be pretty sweet
I'm curious about the origin of the name. Kaguya-hime no monogatari? Kaguya-sama?
Mostly the former. I wanted our website to celebrate storytelling, and naming it after one of the oldest Japanese stories felt fitting. Plus, I did love Kaguya from the anime—so that's a bonus. :)
Is there a way to import your Goodreads library after profile creation? I skipped it because I couldn't get it to download on mobile, but will probably only use the site if I can import it later when I'm at my desk.
Hi, yes! You can import it anytime from Account Settings → Import Books.
The arc of every book-reading software engineer is to attempt a goodreads alternative.
They're always nice, and always have an achilles heel: the moat of kindle integration. Goodreads is unassailable.
Small bit I noticed: when signing up you can import from goodreads or story graph.
Its probably my device specifically, but the way the screen rendered, it wasn't immediately obvious I could scroll to see a skip button
The only rating system you actually need is binary (or "the binary")
Is it good or bad? Would you eat it again or not? Are they hot? Would you? etc
Every thing else can be expressed with words on the side.
How did you get a DB of all books?
I’d like us to converge on one book tracker. I’ve been using hardcover and quite like it but I keep going back to goodreads as that’s where friends are.
Am I asking too much to request a way to preview the site without establishing an account? A short demo video? Even just screenshots?
You can view the website without registering though? Just click the link and browse without registering.
Thanks! Got it.
Off topic perhaps, but what annoys me about Goodreads is that the rating system just doesn't work. Everything seems to be 4-5 stars.
You're relying on a whole mix of people, from tweens to teens to old goats, who may, or likely don't, have similar tastes.
A pointless exercise imo. Similar to going to reddit for reviews. It's not what you really want.
Hmm interesting; I wonder what a sort of weighted rating might look like, where the more similar another user is to you, the more weight their rating/review gets. That way everyone sees a custom rating, that's more akin to "what you're likely to rate this after reading it".
What was the name of the site again?? Other than that, ehh small detail, it seems pretty ok.
Is there any way to add/request/suggest books that aren't currently in the index?
Not yet, but we’re rolling out a way to add missing books later this week!
Your site is down. What is the starter kit for sharing your website here with it exploding?
How do you add a book to the database?
The book I'm currently reading does not appear when searching.
We currently don't have that on the website. I'm planning to add it soon though, probably next week.
I came here to ask "how is this better than StoryGraph", but before I could hit send, it occurred to me:
This doesn't need to be better than StoryGraph. This just needs to be different, cater to different persons, needs. Maybe not even that. It can just be there next to StoryGraph.
My gripe with GoodReads is not that it didn't evolve, or that the UI is dated. My gripe is that it's owned by Amazon. So to the new kid on the block: Godspeed.
Thanks!
DNF seems useful to me. The other deficiencies you mention don't matter much to me, though the Goodreads UI is bad. (Don't care if it looks old, but right-clicking on things often doesn't work because they're stupid JS link, and it's way too focused on being a social feed.)
As far as features, the things I value about Goodreads / would like from replacements:
* I can see what my friends have read and rated books. (I specifically care about a tiny handful of friends who I know have similar tastes to my own.)
Obviously, this will be very hard for you to replicate.
Note that I do not care about the social feed. It doesn't matter that my friend is currently reading xyz. All that matters is that when I look at book X, I can see that [friend with very similar taste] read it (don't care when!) and whether they rated it highly or poorly.
* Goodreads recommendations are bad.
Related to the above point. Goodread's "Reads also enjoy" wavers from "moderately useful" to "fundamentally broken". Lists are okay, but broad lists are dominated by super-popular books that came out post-Goodreads, and there aren't enough specific lists (or not specific in a useful way; so many pointless lists for "books with an X on the cover".)
After importing my Goodreads books to Kaguya, and checking the recs on my latest read, you have roughly the same issue that Goodreads has with obscure books: the "similar books" are...other recent books I recently read. (On Goodreads I'll see this when my brother and I read an obscure scifi novel and something 100% unrelated. He and I will dominate the data set for that book.)
I recently discover that LibraryThing's similar books system is actually much better than anything on Goodreads for finding similar books. That's the thing to beat. I suspect they're able to do better because they've built up a large dataset from deep tagging similar to what you're planning. A tagging system isn't enough; you'll have to tag things! That requires a lot of users, copying an existing data set, or some clever LLM use. (Maybe not so clever; it's probably been trained on a lot of these books.)
* Libby integration
I have a Chrome extension (Available Reads) that will hit the Libby API for each book on a page. This lets me quickly see which books on my To Read list are currently available as ebooks or audiobooks at my local library. It's useful enough that I open up Chrome (not my primary browser) just to use that extension from time to time.
* Filters and sorting on genre
I have a big "want to read" list. When I want to pick my next book to read, I usually am thinking "I want to read scifi" or "I want to read about history" or whatever. In Goodreads, my Want To Read list doesn't even let me filter or sort fiction from non-fiction.
What would be cool would be if I could filter "1980s scifi that I haven't read that my brother has read and rated at least four stars". Or "middle-grades scifi that I read 10+ years ago and rated 4+ stars" for when I want a nostalgic read.
The "more stats" I think could be interesting, albeit not particularly useful. I do like the "date read / date published" graph on Goodreads stats. (The "date published" axes gets squashed to uselessness if you read "The Odyssey", though.)
Thanks for the detailed comment!
1. Friends reviews on book is actually not that hard at all. We will implement it right after we get the friends and follow system working.
2. This one will take a decent number of users and ratings. We need a lot of data before we can make recommendations using ML.
3. Noted.
4. We will add that in the next few weeks. Filtering TBR seems to be a common request.
> 1. Friends reviews on book is actually not that hard at all. We will implement it right after we get the friends and follow system working.
I mean it's hard because you have to get my friends to join. Goodreads has the network effect going for it.
No offense, but you're completely missing why Goodreads is still relevant.
People aren't sticking around for shiny features or slick UI—they stay because Goodreads has a critical mass of users and reviews.
The value isn't in half-stars or fancy shelves; it's in the network effects. Unless you have a way to bring over millions of active reviewers (and their reviews), you're just building another pretty ghost town.
> UI still looks like it's from 2005.
Are you sure this is a problem?
I like the interface its easier to use compared to goodreads.
Anything is better than Amazon
No "Source code"
https://www.thestorygraph.com/ is another alternative to Goodreads - it's a one-person software project.
How does this differ from say StoryGraph?
I want to move on from GoodReads, but one thing that it does have is polished recommendations. I did my best to “import” a lot of my reading history into TSG and then asked for recommendations and it gave me a bunch of -extremely- similar choices, very homogenous, and narrow.
I adore this. Thanks for sharing!
I do like the look, though GoodReads' UI doesn't bother me.
What will make a site like this useful though is:
1) How many people use it -- for this usage needs to be as frictionless as possible. You might want to consider at least being able to view it (though perhaps not post reviews, to avoid spam), without signing up for an account.
2) The quality of the reviews. If they're Amazon product level garbage, they become useless. One thing that might help is being able to filter by range of reviews -- i.e., see 2-4 star reviews only; or filter by books with an average rating computed _without_ taking 1 and 5 star reviews into account.
3) Not sure about 10-star rating system. I think that's harder for users to keep in their head. I'd suggest 5-star but allow 1/2 star ratings.
How would you say this compares against StoryGraph (another GoodReads alt I’ve been using recently)?
Honestly, Goodreads is bothering me since it is Amazon. Was looking for some simple service to track books I'm reading. This is nice!