I’ve been looking for alternatives to Goodreads for a long time now. I found Storygraph, but to be honest, I couldn’t make it stick. As much as I hated entering my password into that Amazon auth screen, I kept going back to Goodreads. I needed those star reviews, despite having zero faith in Booktok hype. I enjoyed the UI, despite the 0.8em font size. Things felt familiar on Goodreads, even the chaos.
I loved the curated lists, even though the book titles were either new releases, prize winners, or more Booktok garbage.
Storygraph, bless its heart can’t seem to compete with its current setup. I’m not even sure how or if its database is regularly updated because I get some seriously dated recommendations, most of which are self published. Not to say that self published books aren’t good, just that I have suspicions about the relevancy and extensiveness of it’s book title database.
So anyway, I joined Discord in an attempt to find something better than Goodreads and while Discord is great and all, the emotional investment required to for a community is steep and deep. Though, through this Discord group, I was introduced to Pagebound.co
Pagebound has it all. Though a little slow and clunky in its user experience right now, it’s got the perfect amount of Gen Z reader aesthete, an inexhaustive database, personality and most importantly, the forum. The forum was the straw that broke the back for me. I migrated all my shelves from Goodreads and made myself comfy in Pagebound fairly easily and quickly.
The Pagebound forum,
The forum, I realized, satisfies a critical aspect of a reader’s experience. To discuss. To have discourse. This is how a reader can lattice new information into their existing knowledge framework.
By having discourse, we make intangible concepts into a shared experience. Discord attempts to do this and for many (with time resources), it is enough.
Since it’s not real-time, Pagebound allows you to find other readers at the same reading point as you and to engage in discussion at your own pace. It allows you to be deliberate and gives you the time and space to form coherent thoughts and perhaps even make a new friend.
Though it looks essentially like a slightly modded comment section, its separation from the review section makes the experience more organized. More purposeful. Sometimes I just need to find someone who is also at 24% of the book, thinking “wow, I feel pretty mind blown right now.”
The takeaway?
Discourse is well known to be an important aspect of learning and pedagogy so I began to wonder how much of reading enjoyment comes from discourse.
Incidentally, in the midst of this Goodreads to Pagebound transition period, I was researching digital game based learning for digital textbooks and came across the SDT framework which postulates motivation, autonomy and relatedness of learning as cornerstone concepts. Thus I arrived at the query of what would occur if I were to lattice discourse based on reading exercises into the SDT framework… but then quickly got deluged by an armada of other (more important) work that I was procrastiworking out of and so have already given up at the hypothesis stage.
Maybe I’ll get back to it someday.
Anyway, point being. I’m really enjoying Pagebound. Add me and let’s forum it up!