Literature Needs A Letterboxd

The Problem with Goodreads

The same story occurs whenever I discover a friend has Goodreads. I’ll ask for their username to add them, and then they’ll look at me bewildered: ‘You can follow people on Goodreads?’ When I show that I’ve followed them, they laugh at me, as if I’ve informed them you can trade Clubcard points on the Tesco app. For a platform supposedly designed first and foremost as a social space, this shouldn’t happen, and yet experiencing Goodreads has become a solitary endeavour, just one step above the Notes app. Whilst there’s nothing wrong with keeping your books to yourself, it’s indicative of a broader failure to the wider literature community, one now blatantly apparent via comparison.

Goodreads has been around for a while. The platform launched in 2007, six months before the first iPhone, and yet, in eighteen years and across sixteen iPhones, almost nothing has changed with Goodreads. Opening the app feels like time-travelling to a clunkier, adolescent internet: the bland taupe and white colour scheme, the impractically small book covers that make subtitles illegible, and the abyss of a shoddy user interface that looks like it was designed by a coding hobbyist on a long weekend. When purchased by Amazon in 2013, users were assured that the thin silver lining to an act of blatant vertical integration was the company’s limitless power to improve the platform, but Amazon has been content to treat Goodreads like forgotten leftovers in the back of the fridge to sit and rot indefinitely. As Goodreads users, we’ve put up with this aesthetic vacuum of a platform for years, withholding our complaints and appreciating what we had. But recently there’s been a lot of noise next door, and in peeking over the fence, we’ve discovered Letterboxd — its users having precisely all the fun that was promised to us.

In an act of poetic irony, Letterboxd began with the concept of creating a “Goodreads for film”. As of today, however, the two are hardly comparable. Whilst Goodreads lives in the past, Letterboxd is interviewing celebrities, getting curated lists from Martin Scorsese, and running a platform that grows more renowned and beloved with every passing day. It seems almost everything Goodreads does wrong, Letterboxd gets right. It’s visually appealing. It has an intuitive user interface. It gives you lists of the most watched and highest-rated films on the app and tells you how many of them you’ve seen. You can rate films with half-stars (Goodreads, please, I’m begging you). And reviews aren’t confined to five thousand-word, peer-reviewed theses — you can easily find both earnest responses and light-hearted one-liners, making the act of leaving a review much more approachable.

All of this makes returning to Goodreads feel like going from a music festival to an actuarial convention. Even as a simple database the platform falls short. When searching for a book, dozens of results often appear, all with their own ratings, reviews, and book covers, despite all being the same text. Yet Goodreads paradoxically makes no distinctions for translated works, lacking the option to log a text under one translation over another — not to mention so many of the displayed book covers are unflattering and poorly chosen.

But perhaps you’re in the minority: you use Goodreads with your friends, and you enjoy it as it is. You find its dated design endearing, and you don’t want it tainted by the grubby hands of the already stereotypical Letterboxd-bros with their bloated ravings on Marcus Aurelius. But a well-designed literature platform, where Stephen King gives his four favourite books and users leave silly reviews for Virginia Woolf, could be just what that guy needs to escape his own box. Beyond offering film a perfect social platform, Letterboxd has demonstrated that Goodreads has failed the modern literature community — it has all the power of the internet to further democratise books, and yet it’s happy to stay as accessible and inviting as a warehouse. In the search for that ideal platform, we might have to look beyond an Amazon-shackled Goodreads entirely, to wait for that ‘Letterboxd for books’ that the literary sphere needs and deserves, to light a spark in a world that sincerely seeks to be well-read but can’t achieve it alone.

Illustration by Sandra Palazuelos Garcia