[wdencker]

While it's a very difficult problem to crack, I do think there's a way to serve both the bookmarking ("single player") and recommendation ("multiplayer") use cases with one product. Fred Wilson has a good article from 2015 on this dilemma [1].

My personal opinion is that Goodreads and other similar services have failed to do this because they don't make their user-generated content a first-class citizen. The focus is on rating and making lists of books, not their users' thoughts and annotations on those books (which would tie content creation and consumption into a much tighter feedback loop).

I'm working on Trove [2] because I think this is a problem worth solving — we recently did a Show HN [3] you may have seen. Would love to hear if anyone has more ideas on how to tackle this.

[1] https://avc.com/2015/11/lists-2/

[2] https://trove.to/

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26582658

[fellInchoate]

Interesting that you see things that way. I think the biggest hurdle to any Goodreads competitor for me is that it would be without GR's massive amount of user-content.

My reading loop is like this:

I start a book on my kindle ; it's automatically added to my GR collection.

I highlight as I read, on my kindle ; those highlights are transferred automatically to my GR account.

I finish the book, give it a lame 5-star rating ; its status and rating updated automatically on my GR account.

I write my own notes & thoughts about the book (pen and paper style in my own journal).

I go to GR to read what others have thought about the book. There are always a couple decent commentaries (and I read a lot of somewhat obscure translated fiction, sometimes only 100 or so other readers of it).

I just don't see any other service pulling me away, no matter how slick the interface.

[wdencker]

Yeah, for your workflow here I don't think there is any better solution, especially because of the Kindle / Goodreads integration (which Amazon will never open up to other services).

As the Fred Wilson piece I linked above notes:

> I wonder if listmaking is really a vertical thing instead of a horizontal thing. That would suggest that there will be successes in verticals like food, travel, shopping, reading, film, music, etc but that each will be its own thing and not part of some meta listmaking community.

With Trove we're trying to build something closer to the "horizontal" thing, but I suspect power users of a particular vertical (e.g. "power readers" like yourself) will still flock to vertically focused and integrated solutions (like Goodreads for books).