First impressions of The StoryGraph

In another post I mentioned the negative image of Goodreads because it is owned by Amazon and considered as not the right platform for book lovers by some. The StoryGraph was proposed as an alternative for quality seekers. I decided to check it out as I am not a big fan of Amazon myself mainly because of how they treat their workforce. Unfortunately I have to say the user experience of The StoryGraph so far has not been excellent. Signing up and importing your Goodreads data is easy enough although it took a few hours for my books to show up. Once they were there I was a bit disappointed with the user interface. My books still to read are easily accessible but looking for my books already read was not intuitive for me. Some features like stats page with interactive pie charts showing different genres of books read are nice though. Something else I found out fast is that the database with books is more limited compared to the one on Goodreads, at least it seems to be for Dutch books. And then there are all the plus features that link to the stats and analytics but they require a 4 euro per month payment. This helps the app stay independent and add free with developers continuing to improve the app. Probably this is a fair price to ask but for me as a reader of mainly non fiction books about mathematics and physics the app is not really suited for my needs. The recommendations, supposedly a strong point of the app, are really not very interesting for me. Same goes for the giveaways. I will keep looking at the app every now and then but I will not abandon Goodreads just yet. I console myself that as a Goodreads user I am a cost to Amazon and not a profit as I never buy anything on Amazon based on what I see on Goodreads. Sometimes I pick up a title here or there from their books of the year lists but it doesn’t mean I buy them on Amazon. For me Goodreads is just a way to keep track of what I read when with a very rough score given to each book. I could really do the same in an Excel list but then I would have to enter all the data like ISBN, cover art etcetera manually.