The Evolution of Science Fiction discussion

I'm not encouraging anyone to leave for another service, but with a new interface in the works, some may get frustrated & leave anyway. Still, we want to discuss books, the evolution of SF in particular, so some may migrate to a different service. If so, let us know where to find you & what you like about it.

You're here on Goodreads (GR), but do you also use Librarything (LT) or another service? If so, why?

How tough is it to keep up with both services or do you use them for different things?

How are the groups on LT? Are there any good SF groups?

Can/have you ported your books & reviews from GR to LT?

This may seem like a strange topic for the moderator of a GR group to pose, but GR has been demoting the importance of groups for some time & the frustrations are mounting. It's getting especially difficult for moderators to do a proper job since we're hamstrung by thoughtless security 'fixes' that don't consider our needs such as only allowing us to create 3 new topics per hour & breaking communications with the group members.

In another topic...
Oleksandr wrote: "It is an interesting case - Goodreads keeps their highest ranking readers site by number of members, even if other sites like LibraryThing have much better utilities for members"

Really? I bought a lifetime subscription to LT a decade or more ago & I've tried it several times. I always found it confusing & never liked the way it shelved books. I spent quite a bit of time porting my books over (2500 back then) & trying to tag them correctly, but never was satisfied. I didn't care for the groups nearly as much. Maybe I'm doing something wrong. Any tips?

I tried LibraryThing once. It was impossible for me to understand. I also tried Wordpress for reviews, but I gave it up.

I came to GR after posting my reviews at Amazon itself for a number of years. My reviews got wide exposure there (good for egoboo), but Amazon treated their volunteer reviewers with such obvious disdain that I gave up. I occasionally still post there, mostly by request from Independent book publishers, but have stopped posting original book reviews there. Occasionally I will post a product review, for something I bough there.

Perhaps I should add that, prior to Amazon, I posted most of my reviews at the Usenet newsgroup rec.arts.sf.written Usenet never really recovered from the mass-migration to the WWW. A shame in many ways, as that was the last forum where readers and writers interacted daily. Of course it was a ferocious time sink. As if this isn't? I still miss it, and still turn up the odd early review or comment that never got migrated to here. The newsreader software was far more flexible and intuitive than the web-based stuff that replaced it.

Goodreads is good enough for me. The only other apps I use for reading are a phone Kindle app, where I can get discount books or upload pdf’s, and Libby, which connects up to my local library well. I also have Audible but I only use the monthly credits, I don’t buy anything else. And I use WWE extensively to set goals and challenges.

Here is an article about alternatives:
https://bookriot.com/goodreads-altern...

GR is fine for my main purpose: keeping track of what I've read. For my "to read" lists, I make lists both on Amazon and my library web site more often than here.

For a "sense of community", there is more of that on here. But it is still a very small number of people I interact with regularly.

I've tried StoryGraph, but I'm not impressed. It is still in beta, so it may improve.

I use the French site Babelio occasionally, but mostly I'm too lazy to read in French!

Ed wrote: "Here is an article about alternatives:
https://bookriot.com/goodreads-altern......"

Interesting sites. Bookly looked interesting at first since it also mentions movies & I could use a better system to track them, but the free version is limited to 5000 items & I don't want to pay $100/year. There are other databases available much cheaper.

I've never used Instagram & didn't realize it had a book corner. I think it would be more like Compuserve's threaded conversations - am I right? I really like the structure of GR's groups & ability to quickly find older topics in well structured groups, though. (A better search function in GR has long been on my wish list.)

Jim wrote: "I'm not encouraging anyone to leave for another service, but with a new interface in the works, some may get frustrated & leave anyway. Still, we want to discuss books, the evolution of SF in parti..."

I moved to LibraryThing when Goodreads was bought out by Amazon, and find that it is a much better cataloguing site, which you can use to manage different collections, such as books, music, films, etc.

It does have active Groups, though with less in-built functionality than Goodreads. On the other hand, the discourse tends to be somewhat more literary in my experience, and with much less spam (I hardly ever see that, probably because LT has deliberately made its website closed to Google searches).

I do use them for different things - LT for my catalogue, GR for interactions with other readers (though I'm now getting more of that through the LT-owned Litsy app). I'd probably have left GR altogether by now if it weren't for the My Quotes function, which I use for referencing and reflection.

Also, LT has just released a whole suite of graphs which you can use to analyse your book data, if you're interested in that :-)

Thanks, Michael. I'll see about the shelves. I might change them to movies/TV shows.

Jim wrote: "Thanks, Michael. I'll see about the shelves. I might change them to movies/TV shows."

GR shelves become tags in LT; LT collections are a level above tags, so you get more flexibility and control, if you want that.

Michael wrote: "GR shelves become tags in LT; LT collections are a level above tags, so you get more flexibility a..."

I saw that when I ported my books over years ago. I think that ability was one reason I did it. I've often wished GR had subshelves, but I got used to their flat system & now have something like 3500 books shelved. Changing them around would be a huge job & I have my spreadsheet to think of. Every year I export my books from GR & update a new tab in it. Then it's summarized in the final tab so I can see how many of each book I've read. Changing that would be an awful lot of work.

I like StoryGraph for the book recommendations it offers; they work much better than the ones you get here from the algorithm. I'm not much into tracking metrics of any kind, so can't comment on those features.

Kellie wrote: "I like StoryGraph for the book recommendations it offers; they work much better than the ones you get here from the algorithm. I'm not much into tracking metrics of any kind, so can't comment on th..."

I like to see how many books under each shelf I read. For instance, what the balance is between fiction & nonfiction, text & audio, or other things like that. GR's reports don't do a good job of separating them, so I wrote some Excel macros to break things out for me. They're primitive, but manage to do the job. I'd really hate to try to recreate them, though.

Thanks for all the comments, guys. For all its flaws, I'll be sticking to GR for now, unless the new UI is a total disaster. I will say, my record on making suggestions to mgmt is approx ZERO

Jim wrote: "Ed wrote: "Here is an article about alternatives:
https://bookriot.com/goodreads-altern......"

Interesting sites. Bookly looked interesting at first since it also mentions movies & I could use..."

Instagram has a book corner? wanders off to sink more time into social media
...

Jim wrote: "Ed wrote: ".... (A better search function in GR has long been on my wish list.)"

A worse search engine is hard to imagine! I just did a search for 1984. The first result was "Obrazy a sny", which seems to be a Czech translation of Jean Cocteau's poems. Thanks search engine!

OK, for lack of another place for it: here's a curious Blast from the Past about "audiobooks" from a half-millenium ago:
"Tirant lo Blanch" , an early chivalric romance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chivalr... first published in 1490 (this is the book mentioned in "Don Quixote" as "the best book in the world"). It was tremendously popular then, evidence that reading for leisure was already widespread in the late 15th century. The custom of the time was to read the book aloud to others (not least because printing was not yet widespread). Fast-forward to the 21st century, when many 'readers' also prefer to listen to audio-books! The more things change.....

So, Jim, you are carrying on a 500-year-old tradition, updated to modern comp/recording tech. Easier & cheaper than hiring a dedicated Reader to follow you in your daily rounds, no?

I'm sure almost all of us had parents who read to us when we were little kids. Dim memories of that, and I'm not sure when I first learned to read. Well before I started school! And the joys of my first library-card. Followed by being allowed to check out Adult Books!! Mainly, the ones with the spaceship stickers!
OK, Dr. Asimov's wonderful science books, not too long after. I was in school by then.

Jim, if you want to promote this to a "My Little Pony" first-book discussion -- I'm ready!

I know that no one has posted in this discussion for a year. But for what it’s worth, I post my reviews in both GR and Library Thing. I like the LT interface. I have not explored the groups there. If you have a LT group you like, I would like ti hear about it.

I have an acc there, export by reviews, but after checking groups there [not recently] I found them less active than here

LT: Thanks for the info, guys.
I still check my reviews at Amazon now & then, but I haven't posted a review there in a year or more. I used to post positive reviews of new books by authors I like, to help them sell books! But, well, no-one has sent me anything to review in awhile. Just as well, as I'm terrible about doing Required Reviews. 😞

This is an interesting subject. I have had a lifetime LibraryThing subscription for a good long while, and a Goodreads account for many years as well. Recently I decided to give Groups a try again, at both sites, and it has been an interesting adventure. There are good active groups at both sites; and some that seem promising, and that I give a try, but for one reason or another don’t work out for me.

There are also groups based on excellent topics that have been dormant for a while, and I am trying to fan the flames back into existence in some cases.

I should qualify all that by saying that I’m mainly interested in open discussion; I don’t do group reads, buddy reads, challenges, games of any kind, prize predictions or speculation, etc. So in that sense I am a bad candidate for almost any of these groups! 🙂 But I get the urge to write a few sentences, and it seems OK to put them out there if I’m careful about it.

GR is free and easy to use. I have no interest in paying for a platform that is identical to GR and wants to charge me for the privilege.

Nobody has mentioned isfdb.org, which is not a place to discuss the contents of a book, but rather to geek out about publishing meta data. It's a community driven place to catalogue your collection with the exact edition/printing.

I'm like Patrick in that bought a lifetime subscription to LibraryThing long enough ago that I don't have any idea what it cost. I still use it, but mainly just to keep track of what I have read. It gives me the ability to download my library into a spreadsheet. Goodreads is much better as far as social aspects go.