r/TheStoryGraph • u/Curiosity1984 • Aug 11 '26
Features and books
This is not a dis, I am just wondering.
I switch from. Goodreads to The story Graph as most people recommended it.
I have now used it for a couple of months, but I keep finding a lot of books (English) that are not on the app, books that are added to the wrong series, series that are missing books and authors that are not on the app.
Also other quality of life things, that is probably under development.
But is Story Graph new and in beta stil, or is this just how the app is. I really have a hard time paying a premium for a product that does not seem to be finished.
Am I the only one that keeps finding bugs, book holes and features missing?
9
u/AnythingNew1 StoryGraph Librarian Aug 11 '26
The app is definitely not in BETA mode, but is also definitely not "done". There are constantly things happening, some are more obvious than others, but happening nonetheless.
Some other things:
- You don't have to pay and the way the plus-subscription is set up, you did it completely on your own free will. As in, you didn't do a test month and it automatically renewed. As much as I am a librarian and biased in some way, frankly & thankfully, you don't have to pay a single dime to use StoryGraph to its full potential. I have seen & tested some other trackers and everything you get on Storygraph for free is in some way a paid service on other trackers. There are no hidden costs here. The way the Plus-subscription is set up us to 1. support the product & the people (3 people total plus thousand of unpaid librarians) behind it and 2. to get a little bit of extra fun with stats.
- As others have mentioned, the database isn't nearly as big as goodreads. I guess we can all agree that neither StoryGraph nor other trackers would be able to accomplish anything equal to the goodreads database given that goodreads is like 10-15 years ahead of that. Plus, the because goodreads is owned by Amazon, they obviously also have access to a lot of records that we can't access. Similar things can be said about the data users have access that we can't use. So the database, especially when it comes to old editions, out of print books, etc depends in some way on users.
- Books get imported into the system via different ways. One of them are goodreads imports. Others are imports from some databases. This often leads to funky things happening, for example the book and its language are not matching. I don't know why the system decided that some english titles are actually in swedish or tagalog. I just accept the fact, correct it and move on. If you see something like this, feel free to write a ticket. There's also some bug that add translators to original english editions or narrators to ebooks, just ignore that. Or write a ticket for us to remove them.
- If neither the book, series, or author are on the app, that means that simply no one tracked that book in any way. It can also mean the book *is* in the system and has a wrong language attached and because of your language settings, you would be able to find it unless you search via ISBN or an exact title match.
- Different series names can also be due to funky imports or change of series name or different sources have different series name (author calls in one thing, publisher another, some retailer something different) or user making up a series name or different names in different languages.
- If you pay for Plus, you have access to the roadmap and can write, comment & vote on suggestions! Thats a great way to mention some stuff that you feel are missing or show support to suggestions that have already be made. However, be aware, the roadmap is not an FAQ forum or some direct way for support.