For the last few years, I’ve been trying to get away from Amazon purchases whenever I can. But I also realize there are other places where Amazon has a big grip on the commercial market, namely in Audible and GoodReads. I have yet to figure out what to do about Audible – there isn’t a comparable market elsewhere yet (though I’m told Spotify is trying to get there). And this year, I began using StoryGraph alongside GoodReads to see if it was a viable option to switch.

Importing my books from GR to SG was a fairly easy process. I had to make a few tweaks afterwards, but for the most part, everything appeared correct. I wasn’t worried about stats for former years, as I never tracked my stats through GR – I mostly used it for shelving purposes, to track books read in which year, in which genre, etc. StoryGraph seems to be more focused on stats, and I’ve found that I’m actually quite excited by some of that functionality. SG (both online and in app) is also far quicker to use, without the enormous lag times and failure rate of the GR app and website. I find that I’m a little more accurate about which edition I have for SG, since that’s what it uses for stats, whereas on GR, I don’t care as long as the shelves and dates read are accurate.

I haven’t fully switched over to SG yet, though, because I’ve struggled with one specific thing. Y’all are going to laugh at me, because I came to draft this post with the intent to ask if I was just stupid and couldn’t find a certain function on SG, or if SG didn’t have it. Then while I was typing up the sentence about importing from GR, I realized I had a memory of functionality related to what I hadn’t been able to find for the last two months. So I went to look again…and I found it. So yeah. Apparently I am just stupid.

Not trying to be cryptic. The thing that’s most important to me in a book database is being able to look back at the books on particular shelves/tags. I want to be able to click on my “translation” label and see what I’ve read in translation. I want to click on my 2022 shelf and see everything I read in 2022. SG doesn’t have the ability to create exclusive shelves like GR, so my “tbr future” shelf and “to investigate” list all get lumped into the TBR pile, and I’ve just labeled them as “tbr future” or “to investigate.” I want to be able to see each of those lists as well. However, for months, all I’ve been able to find is my TBR pile. I couldn’t even see a list of books I’d read this year so far. That was driving me insane. But again, it turns out that I just hadn’t looked in the right place, and while drafting this post, I found it. I can look at all my Read books, or all my books under any particular label. I can search within those labels. All the functionality is there, it’s just in a place I hadn’t looked.

This makes me happy. I’ll be honest – when I suddenly had a couple dozen books to add to my investigate list after those visits to Nowhere Bookshop, I didn’t bother to add them to GR. GR takes forever to locate and add books. The code for their website and app desperately needs to be updated and streamlined, and I didn’t want to spend half an hour adding books there when it took all of 5 mins to do on SG. I’m still tracking books that I’m reading in both places atm – the goal was to do both for a year and then decide which to abandon – but I’m leaning toward giving up GR sooner than later. Especially now that I discovered (today…) the last piece of the puzzle I couldn’t figure out.

Is anyone else out on StoryGraph? I’m pookasluagh out there, just like everywhere else. At present, I haven’t added people and I don’t use any of the social aspects, but that was only because this was originally an experiment, and I’m pretty sure that I’m a convert at this point.