It's nice to see what my friends are reading, but it's always trying to recommend me books, sell me things, etc. It makes sense (it's why Amazon bought them) but it I found it mostly got in the way of what I wanted out of it- a spreadsheet with pre-filled information. Also it's dumb, but I wanted to rate books on a 4-point scale, and theirs is out of 5.
I used to use a gSheet for this (with columns for title, author, day start/end, and review), but I wanted a way to source rich info. So I combined Zapier, the google books API, and an npm package I wrote to count the words in an epub (https://github.com/xavdid/epub-wordcount/) and fed all that info into Airtable. It sounds like a lot of work, but I set it up years ago and it's been happily humming along.
Now I have exactly the tracking system I want, and it's not at the whim of decisions on any product roadmaps.
