Do you engage in and maintain more than one book platform/app?

For me, it's LibraryThing and GoodReads. I spend more time on LT now for a whole number of excellent reasons. But I can't quite give up GR because of the friendships I've made there. That's no small thing.

Since August, I've been running parallel with my libraries, although I am getting sloppier over on GR, I confess. I'm thinking about closing down a major "library" aspect of my GR. It's too much trouble to keep up both libraries. Now I need to decide what I want to keep over there, if anything. Books I've reviewed is probably a definite yes not because of the social benefit there. But all my TBRs, my To Buy list and so on? Probably not.

Does anyone have a similar situation (not necessarily GR, could be any other book app) and any pointers or perspectives you'd care to share about using two platform/apps?

>1 DebiCates:

Not other than my Chicago Public Library account. I theoretically have a Goodreads account, but haven't used it in any significant way since I found LT more than 20 years ago.

Not truly. I pop over to GR to leave a rating after doing it here, primarily because there's a quick link, so its easy and no bother. Also pop over to check reviews for a specific book occasionally. There's a fair number of people I followed before jumping ship whose fiction reviews I value. Not so much for non-fiction, but if there aren't any here, I check there. That's pretty much it.

Have an account on Storygraph too, but I'm less and less enthusiastic about marking what I read since I haven't found the recs I get based on it of much use so far, and that is the only point of using it.

I opened a StoryGraph to test it out and see how it compares to LT, and I keep meaning to copy reviews over, especially for indy books, but I never quite get around to it. I don't find that it works well for most of the reading I do, but more reviews helps authors...

I do keep up with my Overdrive and Jax Public Library accounts, but those are definitely strictly TBR and wishlist.

I made a concerted effort to add all my books, owned and read, to StoryGraph a little over three years ago because a friend was using it. And partially because I knew it had chards for reading dates.
Within a week of me finishing that effort LT added the "Charts & Graphs" pages...

The pages read at SG is better than tracking here, and allows charts of pages (or minutes) per day to be graphed. There isn't really anything else there that I prefer to LT.

Data integrity here seems better, Common Knowledge especially, and it really seems like SG took the series info from here to set up that feature. But with only one series per book.

I've tried other sites/apps besides LT, like StoryGraph and Hardcover, but I never like them nearly as much as LT. I love the control I can have over my own data here.

I do use another app called Bookly, but I use that only for tracking my reading time. It reminds me to read every day, tracks my streak, estimates how much longer it will take me to finish any particular book, and tells me how much I need to read per day to finish a book by a particular date (very useful for library books and book club books).

I use LT every day and Litsy most days. They suit me well. I also have an account on Babelio (the French GR) and GR, but I could never find my place there, and none of their databases have all my titles in both French and English, so even before I stopped using GR, all I did these last few years was export my catalogue from LT, and import my latest titles there a couple of times a year, to maintain some kind of presence.
I also tried StoryGraph for the whole of 2023 to give it a fair shot, but it was clearly geared to monolingual English readers of genre literature, so not really for me. I started again this year when it looked like many people I follow on Litsy were jumping ship from GR to SG. It has improved, but it still can only be a secondary platform for me. And I don't like their reliance on inane AI-generated recommendation texts. What I like is their monthly wrap-ups. I wish LT did those, and quarterly wrap-ups too. And that they had a bit more granularity for fiction: most of my reading gets lumped in General fiction.

Wrap-ups sound interesting. You could post that idea to the Recommended Site Improvements group and see if it catches on.

For a few years I had a Goodreads account as keeping a track on my reading (as opposed to cataloguing) was easier than on LibraryThing. When Storygraph started I changed my Goodreads account to that as it is even easier and quicker to track my reading. I don't find the reccommendations from SG useful but I don't keep up my rating and reviewing there so that may account for it. It is useful for the dates of stopping and starting and reading/listening daily rates but I still keep those records on LT as well, although I often copy that information from my Storygraph entries!

>7 Dilara86:

What do you mean by "wrap-ups"?

>8 jjwilson61: Oh, I'm not brave enough!

>10 lilithcat: I meant something like LT's Year in Review: https://www.librarything.com/stats/MEMBERNAME/year , generated not just at the end of a calendar year, but also at the end of each month and quarter.
StoryGraph's looks like this: (and I think LT has the potential to create something much better)

>11 Dilara86: You can see your own monthly stats in Charts and Graphs by using “Custom” for the collection to display and typing in the month of interest in the “Read in” field.

>12 Charon07: Thanks, that is nifty! I didn't think I could type anything other than a year in this field.... (Note to self: use the YYYY-MM format)

Yes, Goodreads and LT.

LibraryThing.

current reading flow:
- ebook > Calibre (for metadata) > Kobo (ereader) > LibraryThing (catalog books)
- physical book > LibraryThing (catalog books)

awaiting the upcoming Kobo x StoryGraph integration...
if it's successful, works as stated, and easy to use, my new reading flow would be:
- see above > LibraryThing (catalog books) > StoryGraph (reading progress tracker)

totally want a Kobo x LibraryThing integration though!

Back in the 1980s, my work project was creating a data manager program on a BSD UNIX platform. In need of test data, I decided to enter the books I had read that I only tracked in a notebook. My book database remained my test data for over a decade, used to test data migration to commercial DBMS as they became available on the platforms we used. Eventually it got migrated to to a MS Access database on my home PC, where I still maintain it. It doesn't have nearly the functionality of LT, so it's more like a personal back-up now. I had thought I would replace it with Shelfari, but then Shelfari went away. I tried another (short-lived) system in between, but finally the Shelfari data ended up on LT and became my primary book data repository.