July 6, 2026
Booked, bothered, and paywalled
Craig Mod built his own Good Reads
He made a private Goodreads clone, and the comments instantly split into hype, shrugs, and side-eye
TLDR: Craig Mod built a members-only book site called A Good Book as a nicer alternative to Goodreads, focused only on favorites. Commenters immediately fought over whether that makes it clever and cozy or too private, too limited, and not a real replacement at all.
Craig Mod says Goodreads is a hot mess, so he built his own book-tracking space, A Good Book, inside his paid member community after a few days of tinkering with Claude, an artificial intelligence tool. The pitch is charmingly picky: this is only for books you actually loved, not every disappointing read you dragged yourself through. Cute tabs, shelves, quotes, whimsy — very boutique, very anti-chaos, very "what if Goodreads went to a nice design retreat."
But the comments? That’s where the real plot twist lives. One camp was instantly skeptical, pointing out that a private perk for paying subscribers is not exactly the people’s champion of book websites. Another went even blunter with the devastatingly short “Who?” — the kind of comment that lands like a sitcom record scratch. And then came the purists: if you only log books you liked, is it even a Goodreads replacement, or just a digital brag shelf for favorites?
Others tried to cool the drama by adding context, saying Mod is part of a more “ethical” online creator world, while one helpful commenter swooped in with an alternate suggestion: BookWyrm, a non-corporate social reading site in the wider social web. That opened a second mini-debate: is Goodreads already half-abandoned anyway, with attention drifting to TikTok book hype? So yes, Mod built a cozy little book haven — but the crowd is still arguing over whether it’s a bold fix, a niche club, or just Goodreads for people who don’t want bad vibes
Key Points
- •Craig Mod says he built **A Good Book**, a Goodreads-like tool for his SPECIAL PROJECTS community, using Claude over five or six days.
- •The product was created to preserve book recommendations discussed on *The Good Place*, where posts disappear after a week.
- •A Good Book is designed to track only readers’ favorite or best books rather than everything they read.
- •According to Mod, the community had already added hundreds of books by the time of publication.
- •The newsletter also mentions a *Things Become Other Things* fine art edition reprint, a forthcoming small product, and a July 19 members-only board meeting.