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Changes during 2024 (part 2)
Goodreads to The Storygraph:
I came across The Storygraph in February 2024, when I started looking for a Goodreads alternative because I was fed up with its clogged interface and buggy app that used screen real estate more and more for ads and promoting their social engagements, reading challenges and "eventing", precisely everything I DO NOT use in book tracking app. After all, why turn something that is supposed to be enjoyable into a contest judged by number of pages / number of books!? That's so beside the point of whether or not a story is enjoyable - a great text is to be savored and then reading speed can slow to a crawl because of that!
Anyways, Storygraph (AKK). They're financed via subscriptions and thus their app and web interface (of the app) are ad-free. And while reading clubs, challenges, etc. do exist, but aren't constantly shoved into your face. If you are all about tracking your reading and your books, their free account is totally fine. Other than GR, they provide a questionaire alongside free form text for reviewing the books read, allowing not only for better statistics, but also an easier way to categorize and browse books based on reviews. Subscriptions give you more customization (esp. regarding reading statistics and customer service, iirc). Importing my csv-exported GR data went well, given the messy data-export file that GR provided. Overall, less than 2% of the book entries needed attention afterwards.
Two of the big pros I found are that in Storygraph you can structure the "currently reading" list into "active" and "paused" so that you can keep it neat even when attention drifts to different books for a while (same goes for "to read", which has a "up next" tier), and that it tracks audiobooks in hours and minutes heard, which is a lot more intuitive than any of the audiobook workarounds I had to do on GR. These pros are enough that after 10 months using the service now, I'm considering the subscription tier. Not because I need more statistics, but because I would like to support the service.
