Have you been overwhelmed with GoodReads and it’s outdated interface? Maybe you’ve been looking for good book recommendations based on what you’ve already read! Do you want to search books with specific tropes and genres in them? Do you want more content warnings on what you’re reading? Then I introduce you to…..The Storygraph!
Background
The Storygraph was founded by Nadia Odunayo. It is a free to use book reviewing and recommending platform. She wanted to create this platform because of what she found lacking on Goodreads: its recommendations, the interface, and other issues. Odunayo said that she wanted StoryGraph to be purely for books, though there is a community following feature. It doesn’t have comments or chatting or groups, but you can follow users. The focus is really on recommending books, as Odunayo said: “the biggest needs for readers [are]: better tracking tools and having one place to consistently find great book recommendations.”
The Features
StoryGraph has a very minimal interface.
The first thing you see with the site is a homepage. The homepage is very uncluttered, the biggest things to catch your attention is a large bar on top giving you book recommendations. Below the recommendations is your “To-Read Pile”, efficiently highlighting books you might also want to get to and read.
To the side, you have a box on what you are currently reading, and below that, what novels are popular. The Popular Novels This Week box is only the titles and text of the trending books, also helping with eliminate clutter.
The StoryGraph also has a menu on top, detailing: Stats, Reading Challenges, and Community.
If you are overwhelmed with the Goodreads dashboard and how the main thing it focuses on is updates from other readers, you will definitely love the personalized StoryGraph homepage. I love how the StoryGraph keeps the community page separate, because I want to track my own reading and reading habits first and foremost. However, the community and interconnectedness of an online book community isn’t eliminated either– Odunayo has achieved a happy balance!
My favorite feature of the StoryGraph is the Stats feature. Here, you can break down your reading timeline by month and year. The StoryGraph also breaks the stats down further, showing you how many pages and books you’ve read. We get a pie chart on which moods of books you are reading (EX: dark, emotional, lighthearted, relaxing, funny, tense, and more). Then, a breakdown on the pace of books you’ve read, how many are fast, slow, or medium. You also get a bar graph on the genres you’ve read, a pie chart on how long the books you’ve read are, the authors you frequent, and line graph showing you which times you peaked in reading.
On the Community page, the interface is similar to Goodreads. You get boxes showing updates from people you follow, as in whether they’ve finished a book, marked it as To-Read, or if they’ve reviewed something!
This segues me into the StoryGraph review formats. I think that this system is very unique and takes away a lot of the guesswork and work in general that it takes to write a book review! The StoryGraph provides you with prompts asking about the moods of the book, the pacing, diversity, if there is character development, and if the characters were loveable. You can also rate books on a 1-5 scale, with decimal ratings as well, going from .25, .5, to .75. Don’t fret though, there is also a text box where you can add any additional thoughts, along with a box to put in any content or trigger warnings for the novel.
Conclusion
Overall, I don’t think the StoryGraph is aiming to replace GoodReads, but it is an amazing alternative, especially if you want to get really personalized book recommendations and delve deep into your reading habits and what you should be on the lookout for!
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