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My primary two hobbies are gaming and studying. My third interest is popping these different two hobbies into homework. That shouldn’t be sarcasm; I like managing wishlists, browsing suggestions, and visualizing my stats with sortable spreadsheets and colourful pie charts.
With gaming it is simple. I dabble in spreadsheet logs sometimes, however I primarily lean on Steam to handle my gaming library and wishlist. Hobbyist studying apps, nonetheless, nonetheless go away loads to be desired. Honestly, they might all study a factor or twenty from Steam.
Reading for enjoyable, particularly fiction, has been in a increase for the previous 5 or so years. For some folks it was a pandemic interest. Others bought indoctrinated by Booktok (the e-book facet of TikTok) and nonetheless others had been gripped by the rise of the romantasy subgenre. The chemical response of that many new nerds in a distinct segment induced an explosion of companion apps.
I’ve tried fairly just a few of them: the previous trustworthy Goodreads that was mainly the one choice earlier than all this fuss, stats-focused Storygraph, social media platform Fable, behavior trackers Bookly and Bookmory, and others. The extra upstart e-book apps I attempt, the extra I feel we as players do not realize simply how good we have got it with Steam.
I sometimes give Steam a tough time for its crowded interface and have bloat. And inevitably everyone complains when the interface slightly changes. But I have genuinely enjoyed a lot of the new features we’ve gotten in the past ten years.
The library redesign with dynamic collections totally changed how I browse my own digital shelf. The recommendations queue, though I don’t often use it personally, is a genuinely good way to leverage heaps of data to put games in front of interested players. Heck, just using combinations of user-applied tags on games to deep search for my niches always works better than I’m expecting it to.
Best-selling fantasy author Brandon Sanderson said a while back that book publishing has a lot to learn from gaming and that’s true here too.
Goodreads is the closest thing we have to ‘Steam for readers.’ It’s a massive legacy database with a user-review focused platform owned by a huge digital distribution retailer (Amazon), with not enough competition in the space to incentivize it to improve its aging interface. It’s even analogous to Steam in that the Kindle reading app, which Amazon also owns, is a launcher for all your digital products.
But Amazon doesn’t make all those database entries and user reviews nearly as useful to readers as it could. I can click on a genre like “fantasy” but then that takes me to a big list of all new releases in that genre and lists that other random users have made of fantasy books. Why can’t I filter by two tags at once, “fantasy” and “historical fiction” maybe? Why has it buried its book recommendation feature in a dropdown menu? Why does the main Goodreads dashboard heart studying progress updates from different customers as if that is primarily a social media platform?
If Goodreads took even a pair pages out of Steam’s playbook it would be an enormous enchancment. It might show my very own present reads entrance and heart whereas additionally selling huge new releases in my favourite genres, books by my very own highly-rated authors that I’ve not learn but, and its suggestions software. It might give me the facility to truly browse and search all these many user-applied tags simply the way in which Steam does. Seriously, simply rip off Steam’s dynamic collections function for my library and I’d be completely happy. Instead Amazon invested in Goodreads this yr by…changing its logo and nearly nothing else.
Unlike Steam, Goodreads has a lot of competing apps cropping up around it looking to attract all these new readers. StoryGraph has a good grasp on stats visualizing and a recommendation algorithm, but the interface is so bare that it doesn’t feel like a destination and is only the place I go to track my daily page count. Fable is way too much social media for me—we all have plenty of that already—and the others are too focused on creating a reading habit that I personally already have and don’t need help gamifying, thanks.
Steam has already stitched all these use cases together in a pretty ideal way. It’s embraced the power of its database and given browsing power to players, and made a platform that feels like the real homepage for my gaming PC.
The hobbyist readers of the post-pandemic boom are a stats-loving bunch, voracious for recommendations, and ways to manage our own libraries. We deserve a sleek app that feels like a real destination, not just a utility. We deserve Steam, but for books.
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