Why I moved my book collection list to Goodreads

I’ve been using LibraryThing for a long time to keep track of what I’m reading, since 2006 in fact. But recently I decided to make the move to Goodreads instead. I like LibraryThing alot but I’ve been wanting to do more with my list of stuff and there are little features that LibraryThing is missing.

I kind of feel bad that I moved especially since all my data didn’t come across just right. So I’m going back and making corrections using the nice spreadsheet I exported from LibraryThing.

LibraryThing and Goodreads are quite similar but for me Goodreads has a couple advantages: RSS feeds for everything and a more robust read and write API. Why does that matter to me? Well mostly because I like being self reliant and having feeds and APIs allow me to build neat things off of my book data. This isn’t something I can do as easily with LibraryThing. Yes, LibraryThing has some nice read APIs but it doesn’t have any APIs for writing data which makes me sad. I was hoping to be able to keep both tools but I’m not sure I can because while I can get feeds of the latest items I’ve added or read in Goodreads, I have programmatic way to push this data over to LibraryThing. By the same token, I could push new things I’ve added to LibraryThing to Goodreads using the Goodreads API because LibraryThing has a feed of items added. But I can’t can’t seem to get a feed of a particular collection of things from LibraryThing which would allow me to update in both LibraryThing and Goodreads when I finish reading something.

So I’ve given up maintain both for now until perhaps I find a better way to keep them in sync. In the meantime, I have the mindless task of making sure all my tags, ratings and read dates are correct a head of me. On the bright side, I’m working on a nifty little app  that uses my Goodreads data in my spare time. I hope I’ll have something cool to share in January that is if I can eek out a little bit more coding time.