Amazon has owned Goodreads since 2013. In the years since, the core experience has stayed much the same. The interface still feels dated to us. Ratings are still a single five-star scale. The stats still revolve around one year-end recap.
Meanwhile the company that owns it sells books. Think about what that means. The largest bookstore on earth runs the place where millions of people decide what to read next.
We didn't want to file a complaint about that. We wanted to build the alternative. So we did.
Who "we" is
Seekquel is two people. My wife and I built it for our own shelves first. Nothing out there tracked reading the way we actually do.
I write the code. She runs the testing, the community, and every support reply you'll ever get. Message Seekquel and a real person who reads answers you. There's no support queue routed through a corporation that would rather you bought a Kindle.
That scale is the point. We're small enough to answer to readers, and we plan to stay that way.
What we believe
A reading tracker should answer to readers. Not to a retailer, not to advertisers, and not to whichever publisher paid the most this quarter.
That belief shaped every decision in Seekquel. Three promises sit underneath the whole product, and we mean them as commitments, not slogans.
Seekquel will never show you an ad. No banners, no sponsored shelves, no "readers also bought." Not on the free plan, not anywhere. We don't sell that space because the moment we do, your feed stops being yours.
Seekquel will never promote a book or an author. No publisher can pay to climb your recommendations. No title gets a boost because a marketing budget pushed it. What surfaces is what fits your actual taste, and nothing else gets to jump the line.
Seekquel funds itself without ads. Pro subscriptions give power readers deeper tools. We may also earn a commission when a reader buys through an optional bookshop link on a book page. Here is how those links work. Neither payment changes which books appear in recommendations. Your reading history isn't for sale.
Why those promises hold
Anyone can claim "no ads, ever." Most apps say it right up until the funding runs dry.
Here's the difference. Seekquel is independent and bootstrapped. No investors, no board chasing a growth chart, and no exit plan that ends in selling your data. The two of us answer to readers. Pro subscriptions and optional bookshop commissions keep the app running without selling places in your feed.
Hold that against an ad-supported platform owned by a bookstore. The difference is the entire point.
The gaps a serious reader hits fast
Walk through what a committed reader actually wants, and the cracks show.
You give a sweeping fantasy epic four stars. Last month a forgettable thriller got four stars too. On Goodreads they look identical, even though one kept you up until 3 a.m. and the other you finished out of stubbornness.
Seekquel rates on five separate axes, each on its own scale, with half-stars built in. A book can have gorgeous prose and a plot that falls apart, and your review can finally say both.
Those five axes adapt to what you're reading. Fiction gets writing, characters, plot, atmosphere, and impact. Switch to non-fiction and the axes shift to fit it. Pick up a romance and you get a separate spice rating. The heat level gets its own field instead of hiding in a note.
Power readers can go further. Flip one toggle in settings and ratings move in tenth-of-a-star steps. A 4.3 and a 4.6 stop pretending to be the same book.
You set a book down at page 80 and never pick it back up. On most trackers that read just vanishes. Seekquel has a Did Not Finish status, with a reason attached. You'll remember whether the pacing lost you or the timing was simply wrong.
You want to see how your year is going in March, while it's still happening. Goodreads centers its stats on a year-end recap. Seekquel keeps a live dashboard running all year. Pace, formats, genres, a reading calendar, all of it filling in as you go.
Readers deserve to know what they're opening
Some people need to know what's inside a book before chapter one. A trigger, a theme, a hard scene they'd rather skip.
Goodreads makes you dig through reviews and hope someone mentioned it. Seekquel puts content warnings out in the open, so you decide on your own terms before you start. That's what reader-first looks like in practice.
Discovery that comes from your shelf, not a sponsor
Here's where the no-promotion promise turns into a feature you can feel.
Every rating you leave feeds something we call your Reading DNA. It maps the genres, moods, pacing, and themes you gravitate toward. Over time it learns the difference between the books you admire and the books you love.
That profile drives what Seekquel suggests next. The recommendation engine reads your history, not a media plan. When a book rises to the top of your discovery feed, it earned that spot. It matched you, full stop.
Search works the same honest way. Look by mood, by vibe, by trope, by the feeling you're chasing this week. A rainy-Sunday comfort read and a gut-punch literary novel are different requests, and the app treats them that way.
What it feels like when the tool gets out of the way
Good software disappears. You finish a chapter, log it in a tap, and you're back on the page before the moment cools.
That's the part we care about most. The stats, the badges, the bingo cards are there when you want them. They vanish when you'd rather just read. Track print by the page, audiobooks by the minute, the rest by percent or chapter. One progress bar shows all of it. Start a reread and it opens a fresh session while keeping every past read in the timeline.
The small frictions get attention too. Scan a barcode to add a book in seconds. Capture a quote from a paper page with your camera. Drop into a focus timer with ambient sound when you want an hour without notifications.
Reading is social, and Seekquel treats that as a feature instead of a popularity contest. Buddy reads sync progress with a friend. Book clubs nominate and vote on the next pick. There's no review-bombing, no performance, no pressure to perform a reading identity for strangers.
Your data walks out the door whenever you want
A platform that respects you lets you leave. So Seekquel imports your full history from Goodreads or StoryGraph, ratings and shelves and dates included. If you ever want out, you export all of it cleanly.
No lock-in. No hostage-taking. We'd rather earn the next year than trap you in this one.
Come read with us
Goodreads has stayed much the same for years. The company that profits when you buy more books owns it. We think the place you track your reading should want one thing for you: a better next read.
That's the whole reason Seekquel exists, built by two readers who wanted it for themselves. Bring your Goodreads library over in one import, keep everything you've logged, and read on your own terms. Start free. Upgrade to Pro the day you want the deeper stats. The shelf is yours again.