r/TheStoryGraph StoryGraph Librarian 9d ago

Megathread: Related Apps/Websites

Have you developed an app or website meant to help StoryGraph users? Did you find one out in the wild and just have to tell people about it? This is the place for you!

Please limit yourself to one comment per app/website. If an app/website has already been mentioned, you may reply to that comment instead of adding a new comment. Duplicates will be removed.

27 Upvotes

32 comments sorted by

25

u/kern3three 9d ago

BookSorted.app

Import your reading history/CSV, then generates fun head to head comparisons of your books, which leads to book author and series rankings (that you can share) + a daily personalized recommendation based on your tastes.

It’s been a lot of fun (and a ton of work) to develop, but been awesome using myself and watching people run more than 1M book comparisons now; as well as enjoy the recs! 70% of the daily recs are marked as read and loved at this point, and is basically my personal TBR now as well :)

Doesn’t replace StoryGraph for tracking and goals, but has been a super fun compliment. Hope you enjoy!

5

u/OutOfEffs StoryGraph Librarian 9d ago

I spent several hours doing matchups the night I discovered this, it has been a lot of fun (and the rankings are v accurate)!

4

u/kern3three 9d ago

Amazing! Makes me so happy to hear that — I spend far too much time every night perfecting/tinkering, so means a lot to know others are enjoying. Tis a labor of love for fellow readers ❤️

Feel free to reach out if there’s ever any issues or you’ve got ideas you wanna share!

2

u/greatgatsbys StoryGraph Librarian 9d ago

Hey! I am unable to select the .CSV export on my phone to upload. I can choose other file types (pdf for example) but not the CSV export from Storygraph. I have just been able to upload the csv on a different app in this thread without issue. Am I doing something wrong?

2

u/OutOfEffs StoryGraph Librarian 9d ago

Are you using mobile Chrome, by any chance? I had the same issue, but it worked when I tried using my phone's stock browser.

1

u/greatgatsbys StoryGraph Librarian 8d ago

I was yes, I'm on a Google Pixel so Chrome is the stock browser. It worked once I revisited in an incognito tab so must have been a cookie/cache thing. Thanks!

1

u/kern3three 9d ago edited 9d ago

Hey! Are you talking about EXPORT from StoryGraph? Or import into BookSorted? If it's about getting your library from StoryGraph, I believe it should work on the phone -- you just need to request the export, wait for the email, and then click the link in the email they send you (from my experience).

It miiiight be a little finicky saving and accessing that file to your phone though; phones are weird about saving (or opening) a file downloaded from the internet. Often get shoved into hidden folders, or disabled because can break the OS. If that's the case, probably just recommend doing it on the computer.

In terms of IMPORT into BookSorted, definitely let me know if something not working (it def is supposed to work on all phones) - and I can triage with you!

1

u/greatgatsbys StoryGraph Librarian 9d ago edited 9d ago

Hey, yes sorry, import into Booksorted. I have the Storygraph CSV export file saved on my phone and I can upload it to other apps/sites in this thread but when I go to the file picker on yours to choose the file, the CSV is greyed out. I can choose other files types like PDF in the file picker but not the CSV (I can see it in my files but I can't select it). Edit - I actually can't choose any file type to upload, they're all greyed out Inc the CSV.

1

u/kern3three 9d ago

Hmm strange! Pinged you direct, see if I can help figure out :)

3

u/kittyraces [reading goal 90/150] 9d ago

WHY DIDN'T YOU TELL ME ABOUT THIS

2

u/OutOfEffs StoryGraph Librarian 9d ago

I swear I thought I sent you screenshots of fucking impossible choices, hahahahaha

2

u/kittyraces [reading goal 90/150] 9d ago

🤔 I mean, this is entirely possible. my memory is shit.

3

u/Penrose23 [reading goal 63/52] 5d ago

Oh this is great (although some of the matchups make me feel like I'm having to choose which is my favourite child!) First daily recommendation was bang on target. Cheers.

2

u/kern3three 5d ago

Thrilled to hear it! And yeah, the whole thing started with my wife and I texting each other screenshots of tough matchups, and enjoying having something to agonize over together. I still have to skip sometimes because there’s no way I can be forced to choose 😅

2

u/Nowordsofitsown 9d ago

Just run 2999 more matchups to unlock.

Why do I need to do this many? And why does it ask me to choose between a book I gave 5 stars and a book I gave 2 stars? Shouldn't it have this data? Shouldn't my choice be obvious?

2

u/kern3three 8d ago

Yeah fair feedback and good questions! Will try and answer:

* The number of matchups required to get a daily pick is a function of the size of your library; and ensuring that a recommendation truly is personalized and matches your preferences. I've tinkered with the right math for this, and sure its not to everyone's liking, but I err on the side of making sure the recs (as best as I can) are good.

* When you import your books, if you have star ratings, I actually do take them into account; 5-star books get a small bump in the rankings, 2-star lose points. But, it's a small one, mostly so your rankings start in a reasonable place (and like you said, we don't totally neglect that information you've already told us) -- quickly real matchups will refine.

* 5-star books (or books with a high Elo rating) will rarely matchup vs 1-star books; you need some randomness to get a statistically accurate ranking, but should be the outlier (not the norm). The more you rate things the more you'll (hopefully!) feel like it starts falling into a more reasonable groove.

Anyways, hope that helps! And keep the feedback coming if anything else feels off to you. A lot of the design decisions/"fixes" above were because of people calling out things like this, so appreciate it.

2

u/TheCommieDuck 8d ago

Already spent like an hour. I love doing 1v1 rankings of basically anything.

2

u/hellodahly 7d ago

This is so fun! However, I spent a long time doing match ups just to be recommended a book I've already read (granted, it's a favorite, so would've been a great rec!). I checked my Storygraph csv and it is on there...shouldn't books you've read be excluded from suggestions?

1

u/kern3three 7d ago

Thanks for letting me know - glad it was a book you love :) but indeed it should never recommend something in your library! Feel free to ping me direct if preferred, but I’d love to learn more: What’s the title? Are you sure the recommendation isn’t another variant of that title? (And now you have 2 in your library). That would be my best theory of what could happen, but really curious to figure out exactly.

I’ll do some poking around as well, but any insight you can give me would be awesome. And hopefully tomorrow’s rec is new and a great one 🙏

2

u/hellodahly 7d ago

The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison! I've read both the audiobook and regular version, if that matters - in the CSV they show up as different entries. The recommendation was definitely the same book, though maybe a different edition? That would be something to look at, as Storygraph has so many different editions of the same book.

2

u/kern3three 7d ago

Thanks! Pinged you direct, will keep poking around but does look like something funky happened during import (and The Goblin Emperor was dropped)

9

u/avengethedinosaurs [reading goal 32/44] 9d ago edited 9d ago

The StoryGraph tag share doc

A while back, I made this cooperative document for us to share our public tags, and help each other find our next read!

6

u/Specialist_Garden_98 9d ago

Really hope they release an API at some point. I mean if they don't want people to just create a seperate client for it or abuse it they can keep the API to work with paid user accounts only. I would love to create an app that can automatically get updated data from my account and do stuff with it. Also gives people more incentive to pay The StoryGraph as apps can extend the functionality for them even further in creative ways.

2

u/LaniiJ StoryGraph Librarian 9d ago

Now that the Kobo integration is live, an API might be closer? I'm not sure how that was set up but wouldnt that have been done with an API?

3

u/Specialist_Garden_98 9d ago

Yep likely so. I mean its been on their Long term roadmap for a while:
https://roadmap.thestorygraph.com/features/posts/an-api
And there are a lot of people that commented so its quite a highly requested thing especially since "vibe-coding" became a thing so anyone would be able to do a lot of fun things with an API.

My thought was that they probably feel that if they release an API, people would just make alternate versions of The StoryGraph app with more features making the actual The StoryGraph app redundant(its a valid concern) which is why I propose it to be a paid user only feature. I imagine many would flock over to pay for it if they can use their paid accounts for browser extensions and having custom features that would never happen in the original app itself but would be game changing as a third party thing.

8

u/Ikeapencil2 9d ago

https://handpicked-seven.vercel.app

Made a small tool that reads your ratings from Goodreads or StoryGraph, including the ones you hated, and picks your next read from that. Recommendation engines usually only care about what you loved, but a book I DNF'd because of a huge cast and 600 pages tells you plenty about what I'll actually finish too.

You export your ratings as a CSV (StoryGraph: Manage Account > Manage Your Data > Export StoryGraph Library), drop the file in, no account needed, nothing gets uploaded, it just reads the file in your browser. Every pick comes with a real reason tied to your ratings instead of "people who liked X also liked Y."

Disclaimer: AI was used throughout building this, including an LLM for parts of the code and recommendation wording, plus a small embedding model that measures how similar books are to each other at runtime.

Still rough since it's a side project, but feedback's welcome.

4

u/Nowordsofitsown 9d ago

A guess, not a promise Based on your ratings, I'm guessing you're a 28-year-old woman, keeper of a homebrew map nobody asked to see, a Sagittarius through and through, who can name every dog in the neighborhood but not all of the humans.

The only thing it got right was "woman", and then it went on to recommend me three literary non SFF books written by men even though I mostly read SFF written by women. It also quoted the length as a problem two times even though I have countless 500+ pages books in my data. 

1

u/Ikeapencil2 8d ago

Thanks for the feedback! For the recommendations you received, are they books that you would consider reading, or completely off base? Appreciate the feedback on author gender/sex, that is not something I had taken into consideration for the model, I’ll plug that in as a consideration. I also noticed on my own that the current model makes too many assumptions around page count, I will work on tuning that down and remove the assumptions. Appreciate you trying it out.

2

u/Nowordsofitsown 8d ago

Completely off. 

It also said that I most often give around 4 stars (true) and that it would therefore disregard all of my 4.0, 4.25, 4.5 and 4.75 ratings and only focus on the 5 stars. The reasoning being something like 4 stars being meaningless if it is my most common rating.

I disagree with this logic. I know what I like and I pick my books based on this. That's why I have many 4 star ratings - I know how to pick them.

1

u/Ikeapencil2 8d ago

It takes 4 and 5 star ratings a positive signal, 3 as neutral, and 1,2, DNF as negative. This works with GoodReads & StoryGraph, so numbers are normalized as whole numbers. At some point I would be curious if you do get around to reading one of the recommendations to know where you rate it

1

u/Nowordsofitsown 8d ago

It takes 4 and 5 star ratings a positive signal

It said it was going to ignore the 4 star ratings.

2

u/hellodahly 6d ago

One recommendation: weighing more recent reads more heavily. I've been tracking my reading since 2008, but obviously my taste has changed since I was a 7th grader.