Saturday, 7 December 2013

Goodreads Does Indeed Suck


I had been debating buying Book Collector, a book database program that's full of lovely bells and whistles and the most important thing, provides me my own copy of my collection of over 2600 books on my computer as well as cloud storage etc.. etc...    So, I went ahead and bought it.  

Now, two months ago, I opened an account (link in the sidebar if you're interested) at Booklikes for my book blogging and imported my collection from Goodreads.  Now I love Booklikes, but it's newish and growing and it doesn't have an export function yet, so... I used my Goodreads export to load up my Book Collector.  I sure wasn't going to add all 2600+ books one by one AGAIN!   Once was enough.  :)  

Anyway, in doing this, I have realised how Goodreads has totally fucked my books and shelves.  I had taken the time when originally adding my books into Goodreads, to find the proper ISBN numbers, the correct covers and editions etc...   Then Goodreads was bought by Amazon.  They "cleaned up" their database because no one using it had books any older than 10 years old, right?  *eyeroll*  Now I have ISBN numbers that don't match the books I own, covers have gone missing all over the place, even books have disappeared from shelves.  Add in their censoring of reviews and peoples shelves and all the other bullshit from the past 6 months, and I'm CONVINCED I did the right thing in moving to Booklikes and buying Book Collector.  

I have sorted the author names (you wouldn't believe the mess of the import) and now I 'm about to dive in and do covers and series.  It's going to be FABULOUS once I'm done.  :)

But DAMN, Goodreads used to be the PRIME way to catalogue books, but then Big Business got involved and it went into the shitter.  And it's made me so very pleased I don't own a Kindle.  :)   Now, if only the Kobo Aura HD will go on sale....  I'm due for an upgrade. 
 

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