One of my first online tasks of the year was to update my Goodreads reading challenge. I aimed for 50 books last year and fell just short, but one of my new year’s resolutions is to waste less time goofing around on-line and to spend my leisure time more productively. So I am aiming for 75 books this year—and while I do enjoy using Goodreads to track them, there are a few tweaks Amazon could make to the site which would make my tracking even easier. Here are my top three most-wanted Goodreads features. What are yours?
1) Ability to set a default format. Since I only log ebooks, I’d like to filter out the paper copy search results. I find that, especially when I am using the mobile app, it’s too hard to find the ebook or Kindle version in the maze of search results. Often, I have to choose a hardcover or paperback, then go back and modify the version when I go in to write the review. If I could set it to only show the Kindle or eBook format, it would make data entry much faster.
2) Ability to set a book as private. I actually read a few books Goodreads didn’t count in my tally last year because they were on—ahem—sensitive topics, and I didn’t care to broadcast those book titles to everyone on my Goodreads friends list—my boss and sister included. I’d have liked a way to log that book so it could count in my tally, but mark the details for my eyes only.
3) An expanded stats section. The stats section has the potential to be really interesting, but it’s buried several screens into the browsing, and it’s limited. I would love to see expanded stats options. What about a stat that sorts your books by Amazon sales rank? By country or origin of the author? The Beloved is a baseball fan and those people have stats for everything. Why can’t we book people have that?
I aimed for 30 books last year, I got to 37. This year, I’ve bumped it up to 50.
I agree Joanna on the stats part.
I like the end of year review with number of pages & year of publication. It was interesting to see that I some of what I read were real outliers there.
Country of origin would be interesting.
Comparing Dead Trees to digital would be eyeopening for some people I think.
Check out librarything.com. I’m pretty sure they can handle points 2 and 3, and they may have a way to do 1 as well.
Aimed for 100 and got 107. Bumped it up to 120 for this year. I also aim for 30 non- fiction and got it. Bumped the non-fiction to 34.
Instead of just the number of books I would like to see an accurate page count as a gage. A 900 + page history or biography is, in fact, probably more reading than four or five pulp crime novels. As is, if some one wanted to game the system they could read a lot of short easy books. Of course that is sort of like cheating at solitaire.