De-Influencing Bezos

In my effort and experiment to get away as much as humanly possible from mega-corporate, billionaire-owned companies, I know that Amazon is going to be the most difficult to quit—especially Prime.

*shakes fist at the sky*

Although I can’t say I’ll never use Prime again, I can at least try to seriously curb my Amazon enthusiasm by cutting the cord on anything I personally consider non-essential, like Amazon Music, Kindle Unlimited, Audible, and… the bane of my bookish existence, GoodReads.

This is a tough ask, since I work in publishing. But in my personal life, I really want to try book tracking and reviewing platforms that aren’t superglued to Amazon. All the better if the app is small business owned, takes privacy seriously, and isn’t going to commodify my data much, if at all.

Out with GoodReads, In With…?

I researched various bookish apps and was torn between *Fable and StoryGraph. Then I saw Margins in the app store and something about the analog aesthetic in a digital setting made me purr. I think it was the handwritten look of the app icon. I love that vibe—in case you couldn’t tell by my website design! 🤓✒️

So far, I really like the Margins app a lot. It’s pretty minimalist—just a place to log what you’re currently reading, what you want to read, what you own, and ways to catalog genres and themes… all of the stuff we wannabe librarians like to use on reading apps.

I also love the reading timer on Margins. You can start it when you’re doing a reading sprint, and program it to be like a screentime/focus app, protecting your sessions from notifications and itchy, doom scrolling fingers. Something about it also makes me look forward to reading in the mornings and logging my time. I can’t explain why, it just helps me shut out the world and get highly absorbed in my book—far more than when I use a timer and focus/screen time.

When You Wish Upon a Half-Star

There’s also a place to add ratings and reviews, and guess what? You can add half ratings, something GoodReads has never allowed—nor has Amazon, for that matter—no matter how much we end-users have requested it.

It looks like there’s a community feature, but it’s more “invite your friends” in style, not really a follow-back, discovery-based way to “connect.” But the app is new, with more developments in the works, so maybe that aspect will grow? Then again, if I don’t want to be on social media all that much anymore—which I truly do not—it feels freeing to have the app be more private and reader-out, than community-in. With all of the book community drama I’ve witnessed over the last five+ years on social media, yeah, I think I’d rather cultivate my community in the most organic sense, rather than continuing to be match-made by algorithms. At least, that’s how I feel at the moment! We’ll see how it goes.

Krampus the Yule Lord: Finished in 2026!

Bookish Aesthetic AF

My favorite part of the app is the beautifully-formatted stories it adds as I update my activity. See how cool Krampus looks now that I’ve finished him? 🐐📚👉🏻

Finally, yes, the app did give me the option to stylize my profile pic in the Margins hand-drawn aesthetic, which I couldn’t resist. I just think it’s a super cute, aesthetic, but helpful app, and a breath of fresh air compared to GoodReads.

I will report back in later on how the app fares, but my first impression is that it’s a keeper.

Just wanted to share my notes!

QUESTION:

GoodReads, StoryGraph, Fable or Margins: which have you used and do you prefer?

Or do you use something altogether different? This bookish mind wants to know. Feel free to add your notes in my comments below! 🗝️🎶

*I will likely do a Fable/Margins mashup in the near future since I also watch a lot of TV series, and Fable catalogs TV shows too. Would be fun to catalog the rebuilding of my physical TV-shows-on-DVD library on the app, as well as what I’ve been streaming/bingeing.