The Decline and Fall of Goodreads?

It looks like Goodreads is losing the confidence of publishers, according to The Guardian, because of problems like review bombing. As one author quoted in that article puts it: “In the last couple of years, because there’s been so many dumpster fires on Goodreads, it’s pretty evident now to publishers that this isn’t a platform that they can trust 100%.”

As The New York Times recently noted, “Goodreads is broken. What began in 2007 as a promising tool for readers, authors, booksellers and publishers has become an unreliable, unmanageable, near-unnavigable morass of unreliable data.”

I lost confidence in Goodreads myself back in 2017. That’s when I contacted Goodreads to let them know that this top-ranked quotation by George Eliot is bogus:

It is never too late to be what you might have been.

Yes, you’ve seen it attributed to Eliot everywhere: Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, t-shirts, kitchen magnets, mugs, bookmarks, tote bags, tattoos. But there’s no source.  None. That’s because she never said it or wrote it.

I read George Eliot’s novels in college religiously and read biographies about her as well because she was a major inspiration to me as a budding author. So the first time I saw the quote it felt off to me: a bit too peppy, more like something from a Hallmark greeting card.

I poked around the Internet, and though this quotation is inescapable, there’s no source. Nobody who knew Eliot records it as a comment she made; it’s not something she wrote in her diary or in a letter; and it doesn’t appear anywhere in her writing. That’s been proven by Eliot scholars, as reported in The New Yorker. It’s also been researched by a great web site, Quote Investigator, which shows a long history of misquotation.

Eventually, someone at Goodreads asked me to post on the “Librarians page” and said the team would investigate. I did, including all the links I had found, but what was there to investigate? That had already been done by scholars who I imagine have more expertise than the intrepid Sherlocks at Goodreads. The Guardian reports that the site was not started by “book people.”

The bogus quote is still there at the top of the Eliot quotations page even though it shouldn’t be. When I noted this, a Goodreads "expert" emailed me to say that Goodreads doesn't take down quotes even if they’re fake.  In a tiny font, it's now listed as “misattributed” and "source-unknown" which is just plain wrong: The source isn't unknown, it's nonexistent.  But the "quote" makes great click bait.

Lev Raphael is the author of Writer's Block is Bunk! and 26 other books in many genres. During and since the pandemic, he has published over sixty flash, memoir, and travel essays in a wide variety of lit mags. His latest essay publication is "Streetwalker Stew” at Oddball Magazine: https://oddballmagazine.com/oddball-stories-with-lev-raphael/

Photo by Art Lasovsky on Unsplash