bagofbones

Apart from the interface, in what ways is Librarything better than Goodreads?

Quick question - why is "displaying lists of books" a hair-on-fire problem?

The metadata itself is not a moat. ISBN APIs allow for easy access to primary data attributes of a book.

The social data that Goodreads aggregates is definitely a moat, because it powers their SEO efforts further.

I love the curation of topics - it's exactly the way people would think about discovering niche books.

Curious to know - how did you curate these?

This is the billion dollar question, but having the right answer at the outset may not be necessary. In fact, most successful business go through multiple iterations on monetisation opportunities before they strike gold.

It is more important to build a product that solves problems that Goodreads doesn't solve right now, and find a way to acquire customers that doesn't rely on Google SEO.

All of: 1) assembling a usefully-large initial dataset to gain traction,

2) keeping it updated, and

3) content moderation & anti-spam

Seem super dull and tedious for project that's probably going to fail.

^i would say these are problems if you start off building a Goodreads clone. There are other go-to-market strategies to get to network effects.

lol. my strong hunch - it will only be a mission-driven founder who will take this to it's righteous end.

This is a very valid argument. You have implicitly invested effort (in form of lists) in Goodreads, and wouldn't want to lose them. It's another reason why a challenger can't rely on book tracking as the primary feature to drive adoption.

I think private shelving/tracking is an important feature to have in a product that serves the larger business opportunity of book social networks.

agreed. if affiliate were to the only revenue stream, it'd be quite a small opportunity.

I hear you. It's not broken. It does serve the primal use cases like shelving, reviews/ratings, meta-information pretty well. But there is also so much more to the experience of reading. Is Goodreads really the best we deserve?

It's hard because of this reason. But I'm certain alternate acquisition channels/go-to-market could exist. It's a matter of understanding the customer's journey and capturing them at a stage other than "discovery" or "search".