If you haven’t read my post on Amazon yet, you should probably read that first.
GoodReads is a pretty nice site for the bibliophile.
Well, the UI is a hot mess, but it’s a good place to get book reviews and connections to other books you might be interested in. Amazon owns them and it’s a useful complement to their site as we know we cannot trust reviews on Amazon anymore. There’s specific incentive for third-party vendors and authors even to pad the reviews (or flame competitors).
GoodReads provides an alternative place for reviews without the financial incentives so the reviews are often complete sentences and everything. When I joined the site, I started out trying to provide useful reviews. But, I read books faster than I am moved to write a review, so the queue of books to review got too large and started to weigh me down so I stopped. Now, I just use it as a way to track the books I’ve read and I participate in their annual book reading challenge as a way to keep my reading pace high.
| 2016 Challenge | 36/100 | Perhaps a little too ambitious? |
| 2017 Challenge | 56/52 | More like it |
| 2018 Challenge | 65/52 | Steady progress |
| 2019 Challenge | 49/52 | Meh, fell off the pace |
| 2020 Challenge | 80/52 | Pandemic year, plenty of time |
| 2021 Challenge | 46/65 | Currently +4 (as of 01 Sept) |
In any case, GoodReads too keeps a remarkably large set of data on you, your devices, and your reading habits. And, like Amazon, they’ve put in links to comply with the CCPA though they hide it pretty deep. To find the links click on your picture (or blank icon), select Account Settings, select the Settings tab and scroll all the way down to the bottom, past even the “Save Account Settings button.” There you will see two lonely links as shown below:
Clicking the link initiates the same sort of process I described in my Amazon article. After about a week, you get an email notifying you that your data is ready. Unlike Amazon, you get all the data in a single zip file, which is nice.
Cracking that open reveals 44 files:
253,534 activity.json
172 ads_preferences.json
917 ad_click.json
313 author_following.json
7,282 author_following_suggestion.json
1,459 comment.json
247 facebook_user.json
726 fanship.json
288 favorite_author.json
364 favorite_genres.json
23,805 friend.json
293 friend_request.json
142 genres.json
1,008 giveaway_request.json
439 invite_token.json
252,665 kindle_logs.json
122,214 kindle_logs_user_logins_by_day.json
1,197,918 kindle_logs_y2018.json
266 likes.json
2,462 message.json
3,364 newsfeed_update.json
311 new_release_genres.json
21,398 notifications.json
1,753 notification_setting_collection.json
3,669 poll_vote.json
840 README
494 recommendation.json
1,084,147 request_logs.json
1,270,993 request_logs_archive_activity_y2018.json
557,623 request_logs_archive_activity_y2019.json
2,084,108 request_logs_archive_activity_y2020.json
32,933 request_logs_user_logins_by_day.json
39,597 request_logs_user_logins_by_hour.json
10,881 social_recommendations.json
7,840 suggested_list.json
46,755 topic_view.json
179,681 track_book_origins.json
2,904 user.json
609 user_address.json
2,441 user_not_interested_work.json
450 user_origin.json
3,573 user_preference.json
27,908 user_social_graph.json
910 user_subscription.jsonHowever, you will notice these are not spreadsheet friendly CSV files like we got from Amazon. Instead, they are JSON files. Personally, I find this format a bit more useful, but then in my programmer days I used JSON a bunch.
JSON is not hard to comprehend, but Windows doesn’t have a default application association for them so your average user probably doesn’t know how to open these files. Fortunately, GoodReads helpfully included a README file that explains that you do have an application that will open JSON files, any browser. A text editor will also do in a pinch.
So, File->Open, pick one. Here is the beginning of kindle_logs.json from my data set (in Firefox): 
It is 7759 lines or 408 “rows” of data.
Helpfully the 0th element (programmers…) contains a line that describes what data the file contains. This one isn’t as interesting as request_logs.json. That one contains every click you do on the site either with your Kindle or on your PC via a browser. They save your entire HTTP request. Every. One.
Again, it sort of depends on your comfort level. Their stated policy is that they don’t sell your info. You can be sure Amazon already has it though.
If you’d rather they didn’t, there’s a link below the one you used to request the data called “Delete My Account”. Seems rather drastic. I wish there were options between “Big Brother is Watching” and “Nuke it from Orbit”, but, alas, there are not.