"What should be a cosy, pleasant corner of the internet has become a monster," writes Sarah Manavis in New Statesmen. "Goodreads sucks, and is just shy of unbearable."
Goodreads today looks and works much as it did when it was launched. The design is like a teenager's 2005 Myspace page: cluttered, random and unintuitive. Books fail to appear when searched for, messages fail to send, and users are flooded with updates in their timelines that have nothing to do with the books they want to read or have read. Many now use it purely to track their reading, rather than get recommendations or build a community. "It should be my favourite platform," one user told me, "but it's completely useless."
This seems like a good opportunity for someone to make a book readers' site that works. Or does one already exist?
