goodreads – Only Mostly Dead

So I’m sure you’ve seen the news that Amazon is buying/has bought Goodreads. I caught up with it on the various book-related sites I read – the main one being Goodreads itself. I was surprised the degree to which this created upset/anger/panic – or maybe that’s just because I read the feedback threads on GR. You really would think the world is going to end.

So I get that people feel betrayed. It’s less than a year since GR was forced to remove a lot of Amazon-sourced metadata from their site. Whilst this was reasonable in my opinion – they weren’t prepared to abide by Amazon’s API TOS, which would have meant not linking to other book vendors – it did mean that it created a lot of work for the site’s librarians, who are unpaid volunteers. So aside from the usual web 2.0 stuff about user content they quite literally had worked to make the site what it was.

Unfortunately for them they never noticed that Goodreads was always intended to be a commercial venture. Never noticed or didn’t care because they trusted Goodreads and it “felt like” a community?

For me Tim Spalding, founder of LibraryThing, a similarly purposed but different in tone and fiercely independent site, put it well:

Unless I’m quite mistaken, Goodreads was not hugely profitable as itself. With 30 employees, many of their engineers and in Los Angeles, he was probably burning upwards of $3 million/year on salary and benefits alone. When you do the advertising math, there’s no way he was making lots of money–not the sort of money that justifies a $150m valuation. (I don’t for a second believe the $1b number.) My guess is that he wasn’t even cash-positive. A number of people in the industry share my assessment. Unless the company itself is very profitable and very, very large, there’s no chance of going public, hence no way for the investors to cash out.

So he had to cash out. And he pretty much had to sell to Amazon.

So I think it was always inevitable they would cash out. I was one of those thinking they’d start selling through the site – which no doubt would have elicited some equally vociferous howls.

Personally I’m not fearful and I’m not jumping ship yet. I’ll wait and see. I am slightly sad that we don’t have a source of reviews and data about books that’s as big as Goodreads but also independent.

I’ve just spent a ridiculous amount of time getting my Goodreads book shelves in order. I did this in order (really) to answer one simple question:

how many unread books do I have?

I’ll come to why this is important in a second, first let me explain something about Goodreads shelves. Shelves are a way of organizing your books and when you open a Goodreads account it comes with 3 already set up: Read, Currently Reading and To-Read. These are exclusive – a book can’t be both Read and Currently Reading at the same time. You can set up other shelves which aren’t necessarily exclusive in which case they act like tags.

Anyway if you search for a book, or someone links to it (like this say) then you can click the “add to my books” button and it will give you the choice to add to one of these special shelves. Now my list in Goodreads is quite complete in that it contains all the books I own, read or unread and a lot that I’ve read but no longer own (but not all by any means). It also contains a few that I intend to read but haven’t purchased or obtained yet (they may be out-of-copyright books).

So this brings me to why I want to know that number. I have a feeling of always adding to the metaphorical mountain of books waiting to be read when I already have more than enough to keep me busy for years to come. What I now intend to do is track my “TBR” (To Be Read) number and only acquire new books when I have reduced it by reading some, hopefully I’ll read more than I acquire and that way some sense of sanity will prevail.

The problem is that when I come across a book I’m interested in or may read at some point I can only really add it to my To Read shelf, so my To Read shelf is a list of unread books I possess and ones I may get at some point.

So I have created a “My TBR” shelf and a “Wishlist” shelf. I have spent the last couple of hours sorting my To Read shelf into those two categories. I also cross-referenced with my list of actual ebooks in Calibre and physical books – which meant some physical sorting and added in any that weren’t already there.

And the number is 181. I have 181 unread books, most of them ebooks. I’m going to make a rule that whatever my TBR is at the beginning of a calendar month it must be the same or less at the beginning of the next. Which means I can only get new books after reading existing ones. Otherwise they go on the Wishlist – which currently stands at a wimpy 14. (I might at some point add a rule about what proportion of new books can be completely new as opposed to off the Wishlist – but I might not, some things are too anal even for me)

UPDATE: I have discovered, whilst making this post, that most of my effort today was UTTERLY POINTLESS!

*takes deep breath*

OK, it turns out you can make any shelf exclusive like the original three. Not only that but once you do it’s one of the options on the “add to my books” button. So all I really needed to do was this:

Create a new shelf called Wishlist (which I did anyway)
Go through my existing To Read books and add any to Wishlist which I don’t actually own.
Make Wishlist exclusive. At this point it removes these books from To Read.
From now on put new books in To Read or Wishlist as appropriate.

OK. Actually that would have still taken a while as I would still have had to compare calibre/physical books against my To Read list to identify the Wishlist items. But it wouldn’t have taken so long to co-ordinate three shelves on Goodreads – especially trying to make the numbers add up (because To Read should = Wishlist + my TBR)

Oh well. It was sort of relaxing to do even if some of it was wasted effort. Now I’m off to delete “my TBR” and after that there may be alcohol and chocolate in my near future!