2025 Goodreads Reading Challenge Update

Part of the reasons why I read so many books last year was that it was a shared experience, thanks to the Goodreads Reading Challenge. Several friends did it at the same time and I got inspired by their achievements. I would see people setting their annual goals, completing them, and would occasionally check their progress, motivating myself to read more.

Goodreads decided to revamp the reading challenge this year.

• They removed any possibility to see other people’s reading challenge
• They replaced the gallery of books with a simple list
• They added a bunch of new challenges, monthly and genre-specific

I think this series of changes highlights a common problem in software engineering, which is not seeing the product from the point of view of the people who use it:

• Not seeing the friends’ challenges is not a problem if your Goodreads account has no friends who do the challenge or you don’t do it yourself. In that case other problems appear more prominent, like can we have a single address for the reading challenge? What should it be?
• In case your personal challenge has some artificial data, like 3-4 books added for tests, it’s not a problem that the new list of books can only fit 4 books on desktop and is 95% white screen.
• The artificial test account with 3 books would also only have 2-3 of the visible 7 months where we are challenged to read one book per month. It would look great, some challenges accomplished, other not accomplished. Less adequate if you read 5 or 10 books per month and have been consistent over a period of many years.

I hope Goodreads recognizes the issue and iterates on their mistakes. They could follow the example of the Reader Council and ask the community when things are not certain how people use the service.

I’m not yet sure an alternative to my usage of Goodreads exists. Tried Storygraph but it needs time to import my data. Also tried Bookwyrm but it didn’t quite work for me.

Part of what makes Goodreads great is the community – lots of librarians maintain the various editions. It might be difficult to replicate elsewhere.