Thanks Facebook for making me aware of this book, fascinating read.
Careless People
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Category Archives: Books
Goodbye Goodreads, Hello StoryGraph
Since 2012, I’ve used Goodreads to track what I’ve read, what I’m reading and what I want to read.
I’ve tracked over 280 books read and more than 300 in the ever-growing pile of stuff I want to read.
In 2013, Goodreads was sold to Amazon, and whilst the site soared to 150m+ users, it’s stagnated. There are no new features of note, and it’s basically just feeding the algorithm of stuff for Amazon to recommend to me. It’s not useful anyway as I prefer physical books, usually borrowed from the local library or purchased. And then there are many little annoyances. If a book is missing, you can request its addition, but I’ve had it take months! Sometimes, the information on a book is wrong, like page count, cover, and category – but it’s so hard to change.
Recently, on Mastodon, I read about a new service called The StoryGraph. Just like Goodreads, but it doesn’t suck. 😝
First, it can import your Goodreads lists. It’s easy to add books yourself. You can update book covers and so on. There’s basic AI description and recommendations and lots more reporting than Goodreads.
The StoryGraph is the work of a single developer, Nadia Odunayo, and there is a paid tier to help pay the bills.
If, like me, you find Goodreads annoying you more and more – check it out!
A City of Mars
Fascinating and humorous read looking at space colonisation – whether we’ll ever really achieve it and the myriad problems that space billionaires haven’t even thought of.
One to go
Set myself the goal of reading 20 books this year, bit ahead of schedule and just one to go.
Sadly, not too many Pratchett books left unread now though.
Sir Terry Pratchett 1948-2015
Sad day. Since learning Sir Terry Pratchett had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s it is the day fans of his work had long feared. Small comfort is that he was such a prolific writer, he seemed to be able to write them faster than I could read them! I still have a few adventures on Discworld to look forward to yet.
I was very fortunate to meet Sir Terry at a book signing at the Galaxy bookstore in Sydney way back in the 90s. Stood in the rain for an hour, such was the line to meet him. I mumbled a few words about how much I enjoyed his work and was there any news on a Discworld film? He lamented that there still was none at the time, although there have since been a number of adoptions.
Sir Terry was also a regular on the Internet in the early days, sometimes even answering questions on his own books in newsgroups from his personal email! Back when the Internet was all still so innocent.
His obituary, posted on Twitter was very touching. He’ll be greatly missed.
