Nadia Odunayo by no means deliberate to tackle the mighty world juggernaut that’s Amazon, however for a lot of e book lovers, she has change into the hero they didn’t know they wanted.
For 18 years, bibliophiles have been capable of catalogue their studying, depart opinions and star rankings, and get suggestions for his or her subsequent learn on Goodreads, which was arrange by two Stanford College alumni from California.
In 2013, Goodreads’ founders bought it to Amazon, and the already massively widespread website skyrocketed. It now has an estimated 150 million customers.
A kind of customers, since 2012, was Odunayo, a software program engineer and developer from London. Six years in the past, she sat all the way down to create what she imagined could be a companion app to Goodreads.
After constructing a demo for a number of pals, she rapidly realised it was extra prone to be a competitor, providing readers’ monitoring instruments and developments – utilizing AI – that might assist advocate their subsequent e book. And as of this week, The StoryGraph has 3.8 million lively customers, lots of whom have ditched Goodreads.
In a blogpost entitled “Leaving Goodreads in 2025!” simply earlier than Christmas, a blogger and reviewer going by the identify Books With Bunny wrote: “I don’t love that Goodreads is owned by Amazon. There’s a lot concerning the firm that I don’t agree with … Goodreads feels outdated. Its interface appears clunky, and the options are restricted … I’ve discovered Goodreads’ suggestions underwhelming and closely skewed towards widespread titles.”
Bunny introduced she could be utilizing The StoryGraph going ahead: “I’ve been loving it to this point! Not solely is it woman-owned, nevertheless it additionally gives so many implausible options.”
A Goodreads spokesperson stated on Saturday that in 2024 it “welcomed hundreds of thousands of readers and we noticed sturdy year-over-year development in e book monitoring with our neighborhood including lots of of hundreds of thousands of books to their wish to learn, presently studying, and skim cabinets”.
Odunayo, 33, stated: “I believe folks love the several types of information we give. We simply have loads of actually cool options, and the buddy read-alongs.
“However I believe the primary factor, if individuals are evaluating us with Goodreads, is that loads of folks do go: ‘It’s simply not owned by Amazon.’”
Goodreads has struggled with a notion that there could be malicious reviewing and even private assaults on authors from customers. In 2023, debut author-to-be Cait Corrain was dropped by her writer, Del Rey, and her deliberate publication was scrapped after she admitted creating pretend Goodreads accounts to spice up the rankings on her personal work and assault different debut authors with books due out concurrently hers.
Within the wake of the Corrain incident, Goodreads launched an announcement saying that whereas it welcomed each optimistic and unfavorable opinions, it “prohibits opinions that aren’t related to the e book, harass readers or authors, or try to artificially deflate or inflate the general score of the e book”.
It added: “We proceed to put money into enhancements to rapidly detect and reasonable content material and accounts that violate our opinions or neighborhood tips.”
The StoryGraph has tried to move off such issues by not permitting non-public messaging or feedback on opinions. Odunayo stated she needed to keep away from a state of affairs “the place anybody can simply remark in your overview and also you’ve acquired to take care of being scared to place opinions up there”.
Odunayo by no means had ambitions to work in tech when she was youthful. She studied philosophy, politics and economics on the College of Oxford and had a suggestion to work for Deutsche Financial institution.
However after profitable a contest for a spot on a coding course for ladies – “only a good ability to have in my again pocket” – the tech business grew to become her residence.
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She considers herself lucky. “I’ve been within the tech business for a decade now, and it’s closely white male-dominated, however I’ve been fortunate with my colleagues and the businesses I’ve labored with. Even going to Oxford, there weren’t many individuals round that appeared like me,” she stated. “So I know not everybody like me has that expertise.”
The StoryGraph, regardless of its climbing consumer numbers, remains to be run by Odunayo, who places movies on Instagram and social media, speaking concerning the app and her personal studying, and solutions direct messages personally.
However given the speed of development, can that proceed? And what if Amazon comes calling with a briefcase full of money to purchase out its Goodreads competitor?
“That’s not one thing we’re all for,” says Odunayo. “We had zero funding in The StoryGraph. It’s a totally bootstrapped firm. Something can occur in life, clearly, however proper now we’re completely happy and we’re having fun with it. We see The StoryGraph as our life’s work.
“I don’t assume there’s a restrict to how large we will get and keep what we’re doing now. I simply need extra folks to learn about us. I need us to be the preferred e book app on the earth.”
For Odunayo, the rationale she began all this within the first place – the books – is extra essential than ever. “I bear in mind a good friend posting on social media that he’d had a busy 12 months and solely managed to learn 45 books,” she stated. “And I used to be considering: ‘Wait a minute – I’m single, I don’t have any youngsters, the corporate I used to be working on the time was a 9am till 6pm state of affairs, and I’ve solely learn 13 books this 12 months.’
“So I set myself a goal of 30 or so books a 12 months. It’s humorous, as a result of folks at all times say to me: ‘Your studying will need to have plummeted since you arrange The StoryGraph, being a one-woman growth crew’ – nevertheless it’s shot up.”
In actual fact, Oduyano now reads 70 or 80 books a 12 months, cut up between nonfiction and novels. Her present learn is The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley. “I used to be uncovered to so many extra books by interacting with readers that I used to be like: ‘Oh, I have to learn this; I wish to learn that.’ However I’m now the CEO of an organization that’s a studying monitoring app. So studying is now a part of my entire identification.”
