The StoryGraph is a new site and app for book lovers and avid readers to catalog their reads, review books, follow others in the community, and more. If you are familiar with Goodreads, StoryGraph has a similar concept. I’ve been poking around the site and decided to share my initial thoughts with you all.
After you make an account on The StoryGraph, you fill out a short survey about your preferences including your preferred genres, characteristics you like in a book, and things you want to avoid. These preferences curate a recommendations list for you that you can peruse, which is a cool thing that Goodreads was definitely lacking. It is a great way to find new books based on your own preferences that you can edit at any time.
Another really cool thing this site does is create graphs and charts of your reading. As you add books to your read list, it will start to generate these stats you can look through. It’s cool to see what you preferred across all time as well as in individual years. This is something I know people really enjoy seeing and The StoryGraph does it beautifully.
You are able to review book like Goodreads, but you have more options. You can specify details like the books pacing and if there are any content warnings. I’m sure this is how the site aggregates information for recommendations and partially for your stats. The community aspect of getting this information is interesting and also feels like you’ll get more accurate information.
You can still do challenges like Goodreads, and you can actually doe multiple challenges at once by the looks of it. I just added a simple 2021 reading goal but I think you can do more specific challenges as well. Another thing that is similar to Goodreads, but I think Goodreads does better, is community. There is a community tab and you can see what other users are reading and reviewing. You can follow users as well and those you follow will get their own tab. But that is it, which is quite limited in my opinion. There is also no notification system for when people interact with your activity so not sure what purpose the community tab has at all yet. This site is still being developed so I am sure more features are to come.
Overall, I find The StoryGraph to be a great alternative to Goodreads. Especially if you want stats of your reading and curated recommendations. Book lovers should definitely check it out and explore for themselves.
Do you use sites and apps to track your reading? Share your methods in a comment below.
I’m on Goodreads, but after reading your post I decided to give StoryGraph a try. So far it’s interesting, although I hope they expand their features a bit more in future. I’m bloodandpoppies on there, if anyone wants to follow me (I’m happy to follow back) 🙂
I know they are working on quite a few things still so I am hopeful.
Interesting! I’m a big fan of Goodreads / tracking what I read. I signed up, so I can play around with it.