"People forcing themselves to excessively partake in an activity in order to impress strangers find they're having a miserable time". A very shocking discovery
Meanwhile those of us doing things because we enjoy them haven't even heard of these "influencers" or their games. "We" is a lot smaller than those in a bubble think
Though perhaps I'm being a bit disingenuous, since people who are more interested in being visibly "A Book Person" than actually reading have been a phenomenon since way before the internet, and is obviously part of a much broader category of posturing that's presumably existed as long as language has. As with most things, the internet has just amplified basic human flaws in a feedback loop
I struggle with understanding other people on this topic.
I read books I enjoy. I put down books I find dull or bad. I don't feel bad for not finishing a book. I don't track which books I've read or pages I've completed.
I don't even consider myself a book person.
Some people get consumed in the act around a hobby. Where collecting tools and supplies and materials is the actual focus opposed to the actual act. Painters with their paint and brushes, guitarists with pedals and amps, programmers with their environment and ide, book people collecting books they will never read.
I understand it to an extent and its perfectly okay. I'm sure this preparation has helped in a lot of hobbies. I'm also sure other people get just as much fulfillment and accomplishment and results without all the prep.
I find it hard to deliberately leave a book unfinished even if I’m not enjoying it.
I think it’s because there are definitely books I’ve slogged through the first half of, but ended up loving by the end. Perhaps this new book I’m not really enjoying is one of those?
I was that way until I took up the "Mission Earth" series by L Ron Hubbard. I did make it through a few books before it just got too terrible and I was like, "why am I doing this to myself?". And I say that as someone who rather liked "Battlefield Earth".
Lately I've been forcing myself to finish books since I'm learning a new language and half the point of reading the book is practicing reading in that language. And in this case the struggle might just be related to lacking language skills.
I was curious how one gamifies the printed page, and it turns out this article isn't so much about books as it is social media. Turns out, if you interview people who are obsessive about social media, you end up interviewing some pretty strange people:
> Internet culture reporter Kelsey Weekman was inspired by bloggers like Emma to “become a book person.” She’d read a few dozen buzzy books between 2017 and 2021. But in 2022, she tore through 390. By mid-May, she’d already made it to 200. She achieves such numbers by reading some six hours daily — before work, on her lunch break, as soon as she clocks out. “I’m a binge reader. Very obsessive, very intense. The same mindset that I used to have towards scrolling on the internet, I’ve replaced with books,” Weekman says.
> I don’t want to lose the experience of reading a book I’d never heard of but found on a stoop, or rereading a book even if it doesn’t count toward an annual goal. I don’t want every book I read to be a mappable point in the fated conception of me and what other things I might like (to buy).
> Perhaps I should try something: read a good, random book and tell no one.
Writing an essay about how you are disenchanted with your habit of using social media for performative reading, and ending by declaring you're going to read a book non-performatively, well, seems seems a little superfluous to the stated goal. You can just skip writing the essay and just read a book.
I don't doubt this person's experience, and perhaps this essay will give other people with similar feelings a useful nudge towards introspection towards the conflict between stated and unstated reasons for reading books, but reading this made me feel sympathethically icky.
And if someone wants a non-gamified source of inspiration for books to read, I cannot recommend highly enough a subscription to a literary review, like the London Review of Books or the New York Review of Books.
> I was curious how one gamifies the printed page, and it turns out this article isn't so much about books as it is social media.
I've a little exposure to gamified reading: Last year my girlfriend got sucked in to some reading app (from an ad on fb or ig), the gist being that it serves up chapters of (apparently) never ending romance novels, specifically crafted to drag the reader in and end each chapter on cliffhangers of one form or another to entice them to get the next chapter and continue. Naturally, it functions on in-app currency and gives you a certain number of tokens up front before you have to start paying in. And yes, she shoveled a good amount of money into it to gobble down chapter after chapter.
You can read for enjoyment and you can read for self-improvement; either is fine by me as long as you aren't deceiving yourself. Imbuing a recreational activity with moral heft can devalue both recreation and morality, and I think that's one component of the tension the author of the article is wrestling with.
> And if someone wants a non-gamified source of inspiration for books to read, I cannot recommend highly enough a subscription to a literary review, like the London Review of Books or the New York Review of Books.
I've found myself paying for a good bit more media and media curators since reddit sort of went down - The Guardian, the Irish & Celtic Music Podcast, and the sign language lesson system and YouTube channel Lifeprint.com. It's been really engaging and nice.
390 books in a year is an impressive figure. I have a hard time reading 12 books in a year. Somehow I think her definition of “reading” or “book” is different than mine.
I don’t imagine she’s reading Ulysses, Faust, or A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu. Point being, if you read lots of trash yes you can put away lots of books in a year, but what have you learned or gained from that effort? Other than social media “cred”?
I think it would be more beneficial to read five really really good books per year and try to understand, internalize, and recall them.
Some people are just incredibly fast at reading. I know people that can read a book in a day and lend it to me. When I'm finished a week later we can have a conversation about it. I think it's just about finding time.
I don't find it hard to ignore all the social and gamified aspects of Goodreads. I use it solely for keeping track of what I've read and want to read, and for finding similar books to ones I've liked. And nothing else.
I'm older than the article's author, though. They mention they've been using Goodreads since their teens, whereas it didn't even exist until my mid-late twenties. I wonder if that has something to do with it? Perhaps if you start using it when younger, you get taken in by the social and gamified aspects?
I feel the same. Mainly use it for a platform to track what I've read. I do enjoy giving short reviews for books that call for them, but I don't make it a priority after completing a book. I'm a huge fan of the discovery (sci-fi/fantasy) for the next books for me to read, but there's been a number of times I've been interested in the summary only to be turned off by the reviews to the point where I'm reading review less and less. I feel like I've found joy in books others have not and to be influenced prematurely is a loss.
Will say I like the yearly reading challenge, if only for myself. Says the average challenge is 61/year, which, even for myself as a fast reader, seems high. Believe I'm ~30 books. I initially put my goal at 22 books.
I used to do reading challenges based on books read, but I found a better alternative: pages. If you focus on pages read, you don't have sunken cost while reading a book and you can stop reading if the book stops being interesting. Pages read is less satisfying, but I've found it gives me a better reading experience.
That's a great point. I did get into the Murderbot Diary novellas this year and it's unfair (by page count) that they count as full books in the challenge.
I will say, when I'm using my e-reader, I use a percentage as guidance for progress versus page count, so I almost no longer ever know how long my books are.
Those are awesome book, but short. From the time I started the first page of the first to the time after I finished them all and pre-ordered the next was maybe 9 days.
I've been aiming for 12 books a year for the last 5 years or so. Sometimes I'll go months without picking up a book, and the challenge is helpful for getting me back into it.
Same. I was already reading for 20 years before I saw Goodreads.
I love that I can compare my favorite books list with other people on GR. I like to see what books my friends on there are reading or use the site for info about what book to read next. It's really very easy to ignore the rest... the entire article reads more like a personal problem, though obviously GR has tons of issues.
It's not about age. I'm in a good few reader and author groups on FB, and the median age is closer to 40 than 20.
The most popular books are series of undemanding mass-market fiction, usually with some repeating branding in the titles and/or cover art that makes it clear they're related.
People don't just read them, they collect them. And then post photos of their collections. And also post how well how they're doing on their hundreds-of-books-a-year reading challenge.
It's a world I never knew existed, with a very unfamiliar culture.
I think it's really more about conspicuous consumption than reading for pleasure or enjoyment.
Goodreads in particular. The reviews there are so often breathless exultation of supreme magnificence for something they clearly did not read and which could not possibly have had an editor because one would have buried it as a service to humanity as a whole.
So, like, Amazon reviews but for books. How could this have happened.
It seems like the entire point of online communities are to gameify whatever the community is about. I noticed it around 2008 and its only been getting worse.
Creating Internet points (likes, shares, retweets, karma, w/e the system) was a huge mistake for humanity. I'm starting to appreciate forums and chatrooms again where everything doesn't have to be a competition and people aren't trying to min/max everything they come across.
I find it weird how we live in such a centralized world now. All the forums and blogs and fan sites I grew up with are gone, buried under seo spam, so we turn to a few mega-centralized sites/apps now to connect with other humans. Everything else seems to be content marketing, or soon-to-be ai spam (coming soon)
What if you don't like Goodreads? I mean, almost every book on there has between a 3.5 and a 4.1 rating anyway, whether it's some fanfic or a 200 year old classic, the ratings don't really help you pick a book. Where else would you even go to get aggregated ratings and rankings, amazon? Not an actual alternative, they're the same company. Indigo/book seller sites? Most books have zero ratings. Blogs? Bloggers can only read so many books.
I like discord and substack lately, it's where I'm discovering new things, eg, reading clubs. They won't stay good forever. Substack Notes is a bit of a bummer for me, and what does the future hold for discord? Which tech giant will acquire it and shape it into something else? How long until everything you type into discord gets sold to train ai for example?
Pretty soon I'm going to have to, like, leave the house and arrange in-person events to connect with anybody without a weirdo tech company getting in the way. What would that world even look like?
I know it's weird, but go to your local library. Walk the stacks of a subjects/section that appeals to you and then just pick books up and check them out a little, maybe even take one home!
Slight snark aside, I think you have the the idea right, to go for the person, human, connection.
If you want every book to have a rating, then the site needs to have a ton of users, and if there are a ton of users then most books will converge to 3.5-4.1 "most people like it but some people don't", as you've observed.
Other than talking to people in real life, you can also look for curated lists. https://shepherd.com/ is a good site for this.
I think lists like these are better than numeric ratings and stack rankings, which don't really make sense for books and other art. The only useful ratings are "don't recommend", "recommend", and "essential, you have to read this".
Yeah, in looking at ratings I think you have to keep in mind that people don't randomly select books. People pick things that they think they will like, and they are generally pretty good at it.
This is especially true for authors of series. The great bulk of people reading volume 7 are going to have read books 1-6, so the rating will tell you almost nothing about the objective quality of the book, and a lot about how it comes across to people who liked the first 6 enough to get through them.
Personal anecdote: In order to find interesting books for my children, I tried everything online but to no avail. In the end, the solution that worked best was to get recommendations from the local bookstore owner. It goes without saying that she is an excellent bookseller. But all it took was telling her, my son likes such and such book series for her to say: in that case, I think he will like this series. As a result, he read three books in three weeks. Ten more to go.
It's similar for movie review sites. The audience reviews are so wide ranging they provide almost zero value.
It would be amazing if you could filter a site with a sort of prompt: "Hey Goodreads, pretend I'm a stay at home mom with 3 kids and born in 1980, show me what I would likely think of this movie"
> I don’t want to lose the experience of reading a book I’d never heard of but found on a stoop, or rereading a book even if it doesn’t count toward an annual goal. I don’t want every book I read to be a mappable point in the fated conception of me and what other things I might like (to buy).
Somewhat OT but this is maybe my biggest gripe with digital game stores as well. It’s anathema to what I look for when reading as well as playing. Alas on Nintendo Switch at least there are still physical games to be found and not everything is a damn metric by now.. (“82.2% of players have this achievement”).
> Prettier than Goodreads, it repeats the strange effects of reading for pleasure in an age of digital surveillance, while claiming that it isn’t.
The cat has been out of the bag for a while now. We have amplified the baked in (and notoriously unchecked) in/voluntary surveillance aspects of our modern information systems by continually trying to map them to well proven social concepts. The result being the sheer pervasiveness of this post privacy world, now also clearly affecting the people who were and are still claiming to not having “anything to hide”.
Amplified and scaled up functions of this (“surveillance / software at scale eating the world”) partially at play now everywhere with much increased and lamented acts of the performative, loss of substance and depth, loss of connection, etc.
I’m of course trying not to think of a pink elephant nor any potential upvotes at all right now…
Maybe going increasingly / pragmatically “organic” is a good way forward (backward)? Ironically that’s one of the very few things Elon Musk has helped me with so far as I have only really started to question / lose interest in “social media” in general since his strange quest for the destruction of Twitter.
Hyperbolic edit: maybe that was Elon’s plan all along (!?)
Not just when you rent/move. It's nice to be able to routinely read 1k+ pages long books, holding them in a single hand without straining your wrist, being able to comfortably do it on public transport, without a table etc.
I buy paper books when I have to, but e-readers are fantastic. No reason to avoid them for the vast majority of novels which don't have weird formatting or tons of footnotes.
I think all the benefits you listed also apply to a kindle. You can get free ebooks via the library, it’s portable, and there’s no online BS to distract from your reading (I turn off the “show commonly highlighted passages” feature)
> The Jeff Bezos-owned site can be an ugly place to be.
Jeff Bezos doesn't own Goodreads. Sorry to be pedantic, but this has come up a couple times recently, so it's becoming a pet peeve. He stepped down as CEO two years ago, and does not own a majority of Amazon stock. He is executive chairman of the board, but there is no factual sense in which you can say that he owns (or even exerts direct control over) Goodreads or any other Amazon company.
But he owns massive amounts of Amazon stock, so he does "own Amazon" technically in that he owns a large part of it - it said "Jeff Bezos-owned", not "Jeff Bezos-solely-owned" - so I think the sentence is true both in letter and in spirit.
You believe the spirit of what the author meant was that because Jeff Bezos owns a lot of shares in Amazon, he controls the product design for Goodreads? Because otherwise that sentence is a total non sequitor and should have been removed. I'm also a shareholder of Amazon, am I also responsible? I disagree, I think the most likely explanation is that they didn't know he wasn't CEO anymore, and they believed that when he was CEO he micromanaged Goodreads, both of which are mistaken.
I largely stopped caring about anything on Goodreads as a signal when I learned how much harassment of authors it enables, in particular fake-review-bombing of books that haven't even been released yet. Amazon doesn't seem to care much, if at all.
Who is "we"? People addicted to this lunatic method of social book consumption like the author? I don't use Goodreads. Nobody I know has ever mentioned Goodreads in conversation. I learn about new books and authors from the websites of authors and publishers I already like and word of mouth. I have zero interest in knowing what strangers are reading or in having them know what I'm reading. If I have an extraordinarily strong opinion about a book I might post in a subreddit to see if anybody else thinks the same. I don't have the slightest damn idea how many books I read last year and I'll keep it that way, thanks.
LibGen and SciHub are absolutely utopian projects, and are more reminiscent of the "old internet" than anything offered by any major platform today: Practical, no frills, no pandering, no "gamification." It's nice that there are still places on the internet where you can be treated as an adult.
I've been doing the "goodreads challenge" since 2018 -- really I just use goodreads to keep track of books I've read, so the site is an adjunct to an activity I'd probably do anyway. I read 20-30 books a year and it's a sobering thought that the number of books I'll get to with the rest of my life is probably less than a thousand.
The toxic gamification is probably where booktok or goodreads become the primary activity and book reading is what you do to achieve goals on those sites. I guess I never had to deal with that since I'm middle aged and these sites weren't around when I was a teenager.
Disagree with the negative outlook of this article on "Gameification". Like in industry, fighting new technology for the old is a losing battle. Think about the value proposition of reading against tiktok or youtube or videogames from the perspective an average child: why should they pick up a book? We need to find new ways to have them engage with reading in a way which competes with the computer on it's own terms. Feel indignant about the state of reading as much as you like, but I'm looking for a solution which puts books in the hands of more readers.
Even much earlier in Goodreads, I could already feel social pressure.
For example, back then, the great woman I'd recently started dating tried to get me to join Goodreads. But I avoided it, specifically because she seemed to think I was smarter than I was, and I didn't want to disillusion her with my post-Web abysmal literary activity.
Now it sounds like Goodreads social pressure is being leveraged by a megacorp, both to promote product consumption, and to sell the attention of its users.
Speed reading a good book is a tragic loss. Read it slowly and work your imagination. Speed reading formulaic novels, though, is about on par with binge watching a TV series.
When I was a kid we had readathons. You would compete to read the most books and gain sponsors to raise money for the school. This gamification totally worked. Kids ended up reading way more books than they would have. I assume this type of thing still exists.
I think it's awesome we live in an age where people are, for the most part, able to free their minds from the banal realities of survival, and fret about reading too much or 'for the wrong reasons'.
i hate "gamification" with a burning passion, the CEO of my company can't STFU "gamification" of our healthcare staff scheduling software and it drives me up the gd wall
Meanwhile those of us doing things because we enjoy them haven't even heard of these "influencers" or their games. "We" is a lot smaller than those in a bubble think
Though perhaps I'm being a bit disingenuous, since people who are more interested in being visibly "A Book Person" than actually reading have been a phenomenon since way before the internet, and is obviously part of a much broader category of posturing that's presumably existed as long as language has. As with most things, the internet has just amplified basic human flaws in a feedback loop