scijessreads

Most of us who read a lot tend to have some way to track what we’ve read and what we think about books. As evidenced in my own sidebar here, I have been using Goodreads as my main book review and comment site (if you want to follow me there, click here for my info), as for a while that was the only thing around (other than a physical journal or tracker). Recently I was introduced to Storygraph (you can find me as “scijessreads” there if you want to add/follow me) as an alternative. It is more book focused than community-focused, but I do like the clean interface as compared to Goodreads.

Pros of Storygraph:

• Can mark books as “owned” without having to make a separate tag.
• On the review page, there are options to mark the type of book, and some major focus points, as well as write a text review.
• Clean interface.
• Ability to see stats on genre, personal tags, pages read, hours listened, and book type by year, month, or all time.
• Easy to mark books as audio, digital, and print (by clicking on the editions – can also switch editions easily if the wrong one is marked).
• Can join reading challenges.
• Can import your library from Goodreads (this will also show up in the cons list in a moment).
• Has more nuanced star ratings (you can do X.25, X.5, and X.75 in ratings rather than 0-5).

Cons of Storygraph

• Can be tedious to add a back catalog of books.
  • You can import from Goodreads, but not everything comes over and sometimes the editions are wrong. You can spend a lot of time correcting the inputs, or just start from scratch. If you have a huge Goodreads list, this could be time-consuming.
• Less community engagement (this could be a pro, depending on what you want out of the site).
• Not a major site yet for reviews if you are an ARC reader (most still want Goodreads and Amazon and major retailers).
  • You may be adding reviews to both sites because of this.

In the end, the use of Storygraph comes down to what you want in a book tracking site. At the moment, I am using both Storygraph and Goodreads. I do still read ARCs, and Goodreads is still a major site. I am slowly adding my back catalog to Storygraph (at least the star ratings and tags). And in the future, I’ll be copying reviews to both sites. I love having the stats that Storygraph provides, so for me the double-up in usage works. Goodreads just doesn’t have the stats features at all, and I did not like having to calculate them myself when I do book wrap-up posts.

Question… Do you use any book review/tracking sites? A physical journal? Multiple options? Nothing at all?