Chris Aldrich

Otis,

First from your own Goodreads bio:

For me the value I get out of Goodreads is that it helps me read more. I have a theory that what gets a person excited to read a book is when they have a strong recommendation. Recommendations from friends are the best, but we don't always have the luxury of having those, so we've built a community of book readers and a top-notch algorithmic recommendation engine to help people find their next favorite read.

Next, I'll note that I've just started getting emails from Goodreads this week with headlines like "Chris, your Goodreads Deals for Saturday". I would probably care about the contents of these if they had ANY book I might actually begin to consider. Instead they appear to be cheap romance thrillers that I would never consider reading. Where did the top-notch algorithmic recommendation engine go?!

Because the "recommendations" in these emails don't appear to actually use any data you have on me at all, they're completely useless to me, and--I suspect--to everyone else.  These books aren't anything I'd be interested in, instead they're just cheap books that you (or perhaps Amazon is forcing your hand for some base profit motive) are advertising, likely on someone else's behalf to get higher margin.  This completely goes against the Goodreads value proposition and is thus killing your brand equity in the market place--it's certainly hurting it in my mind. I really love Goodreads, and these emails border on making me want to quit.

Instead of getting one of these completely useless emails every day, I'd far prefer you mined my "want to read" list or use the "if you liked this, you'll love this" functionality against my active lists for discount possibilities and send me just one email a week or even per month. You'll also be far more likely to get any kind of conversion. 

Given the data they have on me, my Amazon Kindle Paperwhite already does a horrific job of recommending some of the worst looking novels on the planet. It's so bad I actually want to pay the fee to make the ads go away. Please don't let Goodreads follow suit. Let Bookbub continue to be the bookspam in my email account that I don't read or pay attention to and allow the emails from Goodreads that I always open keep their Tiffany place in my heart.

Warmest regards,

Chris

Last week I wrote up "Some Thoughts on Academic Publishing" after reading “Who’s downloading pirated papers? Everyone” from Science | AAAS which made some heavy rounds in social media, particularly in academic spheres. Originally I began typing my thoughts/comments into the Disqus box on their website. After getting to the third graph, I began thinking, I should be writing this on my own website as a standalone comment/piece of content and just POSSE it over to their Disqus box.

Despite the fact that the editors/moderators of one of the most venerable science journals of our day will allow internet trolls like CPO_C_Ryback and CPO_C_Rybacks_Mother to go thirty rounds on nearly every comment on their featured piece for the week, my slightly more tempered comment is still sitting in their moderation queue untouched. 

Fortunately I had the foresight to have self-published it before hand, or the not-insignificant time I spent thinking and writing about the topic at hand would have been gone the moment I pressed send. It's one thing to get lost in the shuffle of hundreds of comments amidst trolls, it's another thing altogether to be moderated out of existence. The IndieWeb movement has prevented me from feeling like I did two decades ago after writing a term paper for hours only to lose it after discovering that I hadn't hit control-s to save what I'd written. The additional benefit was that I was able to post those same thoughts on multiple other networks effortlessly while still being able to own what I'd originally written.

The greatest irony of the whole affair is that in conjunction with the particular article I was commenting on, Marcia McNutt, Editor-in-Chief Science Journals, published a companion piece about the high costs and attention to detail and quality that journals try to maintain in their digital presence. Apparently this massive expense and terrific effort doesn't go as far as preventing internet trolls like those mentioned from running roughshod over their own site (which is "moderated" by the way) while keeping out commentary that may add to the discussion and community that they're apparently not attempting to foster.

#sciencecommunication #publishing #indieweb #academicsamizdat