Confessions of a Bookworm: Goodreads Recommendations

Hi all!

My name is Chiara and I am a Bookworm.

Another little confession today, or maybe this is a complaint, a way to air my grievances.

I presume a lot of you Bookworms use Goodreads and for the most part it is good … until you get to the recommendations tab in the app.

I rely on bookstores and Goodreads, especially when I can’t leave the house like at the moment, for finding new material to read. Browsing through books on Goodreads is almost as good as browsing the shelves in Waterstones, and a lot better for my wallet. Sick pay is not very generous.

I flick on to Goodreads and browse through the recommendations tab. I can choose which genre I like and on recommendations I have chick-lit, contemporary, romance, YA, fantasy, mystery and children’s.

I don’t think I realised this till I was on my second or third time going through all the recommendations but they don’t actually update, and they certainly don’t seem to take into account what sort of stories I actually like, or have read. Even worse than that the same books appeared on every topic, like they were all the books that were programmed into the algorithm.

Goodreads seriously needs to update whatever piece of programming allows absolutely no books that would interest me to appear in their recommendations.

And, yes, I’ve tried updating my setting, favouriting authors and books and trying to tell them exactly what I like but it is no use.

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Since having a problem with recommendations I have found that if you go to the bottom of my books you can choose a genre and see books based on that genre and there books that I like and have read appear.

This solves my problem but the recommendations still needs to be fixed or it is not worth having there. It isn’t ‘fit for purpose’ as my dear old dad would say.