What: Just added a personal reading log (only for books) to the blog:

https://blog.brunobuss.dev/reading/

Why: I have been using Goodreads for a long time and earlier this year I started to use StoryGraph too, exported my data from Goodreads there and have been adding new entries to both sites until last month.

Looking at my own data is fun. I do enjoy setting reading goals for each year and see slowly the bar filling up during the year; I do enjoy seeing how many books/pages I did read month-over-month and year-over-year; I do enjoy looking at publication year scatter plot to see which times I was more into reading new books or more classic ones.

I do enjoy all that, but unfortunately Amazon (Goodreads’ owner) also enjoy having all this data 🙃

This is something that had been in the back of my mind for awhile, but I think it started nagging me more and more when I finished reading “Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism” by Yanis Varoufakis:

https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/451795/technofeudalism-by-varoufakis-yanis/9781847927279

(Also, not that it feels Amazon has been doing a great job with Goodreads’ either. The whole thing feels in life-support mode, good enough to collect the data and that is it. Many times the site crawls to a halt or have simple stuff - like adding dates when you started/finished a book - being completely broken for days.)

At that point I started to move my data to StoryGraph, which is a cool project and I really appreciate the fact that they are a small business/team. They have their own cool set of data visualization with moods, pace, book size and genres!

But there is one thing that StoryGraph does not have yet: my friends there (aka the social network); and I like to know (and show support to) what they’re currently reading, what they’re interested in currently (some may argue that you solve this with actually talking with your friends now and then 😤).

So yeah, I was not really keen on keep using Goodreads but finding it hard to make StoryGraph part of my habits. So I decided to just put stuff here in my blog for now on 🤷

PS: Another maybe helpful thing of moving away from Goodreads/StoryGraph for a bit is that those websites really didn’t helped me at all to control my ever-growing-already-infinite “to-read” list!