Why some book fans are leaving Amazon-owned Goodreads in wake of the U.S. election

Hold onto your book reviews, because X isn't the only app that some users are ditching in the wake of the U.S. election.

Some readers say they've left Goodreads, a popular platform for tracking and reviewing books, in favour of The StoryGraph, which bills itself as an "Amazon-free alternative."

The app, built and run by CEO Nadia Odunayo and chief AI officer Rob Frelow, saw a surge of new subscribers the week after the election, up to nearly 25,000 in a single day by Nov. 12 — which is 10 times more than usual. In a blog post, Odunayo said that by the end of the week, the app had surpassed three million registered users and was a spot ahead of Goodreads on the U.S. App Store chart for the top free iPhone book apps (though Goodreads has since surpassed it).

Odunayo attributed The StoryGraph's surge to several popular social media posts.

Some on BookTok (the reading community on TikTok) called the switch a small act of resistance, "to feel a little better about the mess we're in."

"Community and uplifting each other is going to be so vital, even more so, over these next few years, and this is something that so many of us in the BookTok community can do right now,"  said another TikTok user in a video with nearly a million views.

Suzanne Skyvara, vice-president of marketing and editorial with Goodreads, told CBC News in an email statement that they've "welcomed millions of readers signing up for Goodreads this year."

"We see strong year-over-year growth in book tracking with our community adding hundreds of millions of books to their Want to Read, Currently Reading, and Read shelves," she added.

CBC News has also reached out to The StoryGraph for comment. 

How the U.S. election outcome ties in

Amazon purchased Goodreads in 2013. Jeff Bezos founded the retail giant in 1994 and was CEO until 2021. He remains the company's largest individual shareholder.

Bezos also owns the Washington Post, and in the lead-up to the U.S. election, the billionaire defended the newspaper's decision not to endorse a presidential candidate as "right" and "principled." He pushed back against any notion that he had ordered it up to protect his business interests.

That decision to end the decades-long practice of endorsing presidential candidates reportedly led to hundreds of thousands of people cancelling their subscriptions, and protests from journalists with a deep history with the newspaper.

The Post's editorial staff had been prepared to endorse Democrat Kamala Harris, according to reporting done by the Post, before publisher Will Lewis wrote instead that it would be better for readers to make up their own minds.

WATCH | The Washington Post loses 10% of subscribers: 

How the Washington Post lost 10% of its subscribers in 5 days | About That

26 days ago

Duration 11:38

Less than two weeks before the U.S. election, the Washington Post's owner Jeff Bezos said the paper would no longer endorse a presidential candidate, resulting in a loss of hundreds of thousands of subscribers. Andrew Chang breaks down Jeff Bezos's argument for ending a long-standing tradition at the Post, and explains why fact-based publications give their opinion at all.

After Republican Donald Trump's win, Bezos congratulated him "on an extraordinary political comeback and decisive victory" on X. 

The move away from Goodreads for some is a smaller echo of what's currently happening with Elon Musk's X, whose main competitor Bluesky exploded in popularity after the election. Bluesky said in mid-November that its total users had surged to 15 million, up from roughly 13 million at the end of October.

The influx appears to be driven largely by former X users, upset by Musk's campaigning for Trump and the president-elect's naming of Musk to co-head government efficiency.

'Just because I'm Black'

As The StoryGraph CEO Odunayo pointed out in her blog post, many people said online that they were leaving Goodreads for her platform because they wanted to support a business owned by a Black woman.

But she added that she was struggling with that reasoning.

"Of course I'm grateful for all and any support, and I love inspiring and rallying people, especially those who look like me, but I do struggle with the idea of people feeling like they have to use StoryGraph just because I'm Black," Odunayo wrote.

"I decided to deal with it the way I did when we exploded a week after George Floyd's murder [by police in 2020] and there was an outpouring of support for Black creators: Don't worry about why they came initially."

Odunayo launched The StoryGraph in 2019. Goodreads was founded in 2006 and has more than 150 million members.

As of Monday afternoon, The StoryGraph was No. 14 for books apps in Canada, and Goodreads No. 4, behind Audible, Kindle and Libby. In the U.S., Goodreads was No. 5, and The StoryGraph No. 12.

WATCH | Could X become a hard-right platform?: 

Will a user exodus turn X into a hard-right platform?

11 days ago

Duration 6:44

X, formerly known as Twitter, saw its largest user exodus since the Elon Musk takeover after Donald Trump’s election. The National asks two social media experts to break down whether X is becoming a platform for the hard right, and what happens when people only interact online with people they agree with.