Goodbye Goodreads

Goodreads is a wonderful community of book readers and great for maintaining your book updates. But I’m starting to see a problem using it.

Recently I found myself concered with how many books I have read rather than enjoying the book I’m currently reading. And Goodreads is encouraging that behavior. This is terrible. I was sometimes running through a book just so I could finish it.

Goodreads sends mails which encourage running through short books to meet your yearly book target.

You can set a yearly reading challenge on Goodreads. This does me more harm than good because everytime I open Goodreads and see my progress I feel like running through the current book I’m reading just to get done with my yearly target.

Recently I even started marking books I read halfway and gave up as read. I told myself that I did this because I was done reading the book because I was bored or the book wasn’t relevant and can thus mark the book read. But I did this just to get closer to my reading challenge target. eg. I haven’t fully read Mastery or So Good They Can’t Ignore You, but I marked both as read.

I’ll still be use Goodreads for checking out reviews of other books. But I definitely won’t use it to track my book updates or participate in Reading Challenges.