Books and Social Media

I am going to try to post here at least once a week. I may not always succeed in that goal because sometimes I just don't have anything to say. Today, though, I want to talk about social media and books and the options available for sharing and discovering.

I have a Goodreads account. I have had one since before they were purchased by that giant behemoth in Seattle. I want to have a different option, and I do have "memberships" on LibraryThing, Riffle, Litsy, and Edelweiss, but none of them offer what GR does. LibraryThing is aesthetically unappealing and not easy to navigate, which doesn't make it easy to discover new-to-me books. Riffle is pretty, but it doesn't have a lot of users and the focus seems to be more on e-books than paper books. Which is fine, it's just not me as a reader. Litsy (which is now owned by LibraryThing) is basically what you would get if you pulled out the #bookstagram community from Instagram and gave them their own app. It's very visually-focused and not really geared toward reviewing. With Edelweiss, it's very clear that the social aspect was an add-on and wasn't (still isn't) a primary focus, which is fine, because that's not my primary focus in using it, either. It has been suggested that I employ a spreadsheet to track my reading, but that's not easily shareable, nor is it a tool for discovery. There just isn't anything out there that I've found that ticks all of my boxes.

What, then, would my ideal book tracking, sharing, and discovery tool look like?

• It would not be owned by Amazon, which should probably go without saying, but I'm saying it anyway.
• Nor would it be owned by a publisher or bookstore that would try to sell me things through it or use my reviews to try to sell things to other people.
• It would have a feed, much like the one on Goodreads.
• It would allow me to make my reviews viewable only to my friends.
• It would allow me to easily share my reviews to other social media platforms.
• It would have a rating system that allowed for fractions or decimals, so that a book that fell in between two ratings could be denoted as such.
• It would have different channels for the public and bloggers and book professionals. Or, and this may make me sound like a snobby arse, it would be open to book professionals only: booksellers, librarians, publishers, authors, etc. The reason for this is that I read a lot of Young Adult and I just can't deal with the plethora of GIF "reviews" and exclamation points and hating on a book before one has even read it that happens in the online YA-reading community. (Also known as: I'm old. Get off my lawn!)
• This is kind of a unicorn, but I am talking ideals here, so here it is: It wouldn't allow one to review a book one hasn't read. I don't know how it would be possible to verify this, but I'd love to see at least some effort made. It would eliminate at least some of the "OMG! Look at that cover! I CAN'T WAIT! Here's a GIF from a CW TV Show to show how happy I am!" and the "So and so is a cis-het, able-bodied, neurotypical white person who should not ever, ever be allowed to write about any characters who are not exactly like them and, therefore, this book is terrible and we should kill it with fire. No, I haven't read it yet, but I know it's the absolute worst."
• It would have a recommendation engine that wasn't just based on "People who read and liked this, also read and liked this." I get recommendations from Goodreads that make zero sense. Just because I enjoyed this Kids Graphic Novel does not mean that I would also enjoy that Erotic Shifter Novella (or vice versa) even if someone else liked both of those things.
• It would focus primarily on user interaction. Newsletters and author interviews are all well and good, but they don't influence my reading nearly as much as what my bookish coterie are reading and enjoying and recommending.
• It would allow the formation of groups so that I could hang out and talk Romance with my other friends who are Romance readers without my whole update feed being that conversation and boring my non-Romance-reading friends.
• It would look good and be easy to navigate. Keep the interface clean and uncluttered, but a little more fancy than text-only. And if I could customize my homepage, that would be ideal.
• And, finally, if I could easily link to IndieBound or an independent bookstore for anyone who wants to buy the book, that would be amazing.

I guess, in the end, I want Goodreads and Edelweiss (and a little Facebook) to have a baby that only had the best features of each of them. If you have the skills and the time and the inclination and want to make this happen for me, I will bake something for you.