[zem]

their search and filtering mechanisms are abysmal. they have essentially taken tons of valuable user-supplied data and locked it up behind a useless interface. some simple examples - i cannot find humorous fantasy books by searching for books tagged both "fantasy" and "humour". i cannot do a search that returns hundreds of results and then sort them so that the best ones go to the top - and i'm not even talking about some magic relevance algorithm, just sorting by explicit data. i cannot even organise my own read, unread and to-read books easily. all in all it's a usability disaster and totally wastes the labour people have put into building up the database.

[danShumway]

Given the rulings around LinkedIn and public data, is it feasible for a competitor to scrape some of that information? Would they get sued to oblivion if they tried?

Not needing to start from scratch would make building a competing service a lot easier. Sites like Stackoverflow have reasonably open licenses on user data, so you could theoretically use that data and build an alternative if the site fell apart. I'm guessing that's not the case for Goodreads though, at least for things like reviews.

But even pulling in basic category information would be easier than starting from scratch.

[zem]

i would love to see that happen! i have occasionally wondered what it would take to reboot a goodreads clone from scratch but importing the data is definitely a plan with a higher chance of actually replacing the site.