Do People Still Use Goodreads in 2026?

It is January 2026. You just finished an incredible sci-fi novel that blew your mind, and the immediate itch is to tell someone about it, give it five stars, and add it to your “read” pile. You unlock your phone and your thumb instinctively hovers over that familiar, slightly beige “g” icon. But then you pause.

Didn’t we all agree years ago that this app was outdated? Aren’t there slicker, newer platforms out there now? It’s a valid question that seems to pop up every single year. If you look at search trends, the literal query “do people still using goodreads in 2026” is typed into browsers more often than you might think.

The short answer is yes. Massively, overwhelmingly, yes.

The long answer, however, is much more complicated. It’s a story about monopoly, user inertia, and a love-hate relationship that the literary world just cannot seem to shake. Let’s be honest about the state of the world’s largest book community as we settle into the mid-2020s.

The Dinosaur That Refuses to Evolve (Because It Doesn’t Have To)

If you opened Goodreads in 2016 and then opened it again today in 2026, you might be hard-pressed to spot ten significant differences in the user interface. In an era of hyper-optimized, AI-driven social media feeds, Goodreads feels like walking into a dusty, comfortable used bookstore that hasn’t rearranged its shelves since the Obama administration.

The search function is still finicky. The recommendation engine still thinks that because I read one cookbook in 2018, I want to see every new culinary release forever. The social feed is often clogged with automated updates rather than genuine interaction.

So, why on earth do people still using goodreads in 2026 put up with it?

The answer lies in its ownership. Since Amazon bought the platform way back in 2013, they haven’t felt much pressure to innovate. Why would they? Goodreads has achieved the ultimate tech goal: it is the default. It is the digital filing cabinet for nearly every book ever published. When you have that kind of market dominance and the backing of the world’s largest bookseller, you don’t need a flashy UI; you just need to exist.

The “Love-Hate” Loop: Why We Stay

Despite the complaints—and if you spend five minutes on BookTok or literary Twitter, you will hear complaints—the user base remains staggering. The reasons we stay are psychological and practical.

The Data Hostage Situation

This is the biggest factor. I have been logging my reading life on Goodreads since 2010. That is sixteen years of data: every embarrassing vampire phase, every highbrow classic I pretended to enjoy, every genuine five-star masterpiece.

Goodreads holds our reading histories hostage. While you can export your data, the process of migrating thousands of books to a new platform, ensuring the editions are correct and the dates match up, is a headache most people aren’t willing to endure. We stay because leaving is too much work.

The Network Effect

You can join the newest, shiniest book app on the market, but if your aunt, your boss, and your old college roommate aren’t there, it feels lonely. Goodreads is where everyone is.

When a massive bestseller drops in 2026, the conversation happens in many places—TikTok videos, Instagram reels, Substack newsletters—but the central repository for the reviews of that book is still Goodreads. It is the town square. It might be a slightly run-down town square with some cracked pavement, but it is where the crowd gathers.

The Challengers: Why Haven’t They Won Yet?

Over the last five or six years, we have seen valiant attempts to dethrone the king. Apps like The StoryGraph, Literal, and various indie trackers promised better data, cleaner interfaces, and ethical alternatives to the Amazon ecosystem.

Many of these are fantastic platforms. The StoryGraph, in particular, has excelled by offering incredible data visualization and mood-based recommendations that blow Goodreads out of the water.

Yet, the question remains: do people still using goodreads in 2026 outnumber users on those other platforms? Absolutely.

The challengers have mostly carved out excellent niches. The StoryGraph won over the data nerds and the anti-Amazon crowd. Literal won over the aesthetic-focused Gen Z readers. But none of them achieved the critical mass needed to become the new “default.” They splintered the community rather than migrating it entirely.

Furthermore, BookTok (TikTok’s bookish community) became the primary driver of discovery and hype, but it is terrible for cataloging. You find a book on TikTok, but you still go to Goodreads to mark it as “Want to Read.”

The Verdict for 2026

So, here we are. It is 2026. We have self-driving cars and AI assistants that can write poetry, but we are still using a book app that looks like it was built with HTML5.

If you are an author, you absolutely must have a presence on Goodreads. It is still the primary place readers go to verify if your book is worth their time. A book with fifty reviews on a competitor app looks obscure; the same book with 5,000 ratings on Goodreads looks like a hit.

If you are a casual reader, it remains the easiest way to track your yearly reading challenge and see what your friends are enjoying.

The reality is that Goodreads has become “too big to fail” in the literary ecosystem. It’s the infrastructure now. We might complain about the potholes on the highway, but we still drive on it every day because it’s the only road that connects everything.

When friends ask me, “do people still using goodreads in 2026 even though it’s so clunky?” I have to tell them the truth. Yes, we do. We groan about it, we threaten to leave every January 1st, and then we log right back in to update our progress on page 45 of the latest bestseller. It’s not perfect, but it’s ours.