Just here to shed some light on BookWyrm, the Fediverse equivalent of Goodreads. I’ve been doing some more reading lately, and I like to keep track of what I read and also I like reading other’s review, suggestions, etc. Now I boycot amazon and others big tech as much as possible, so for me Bookwyrm is the place to be. It’s steadily growing I think, but I thought it deserved some more attention, therefor this post. Same goes for BookBrainz and to a lesser extend IA’s Openlibrary. OpenLibrary is, among other things, a place where people catalogue book-metadata, and if a book is not on Bookwyrm yet, it can often be imported from OpenLibrary. Problem with OpenLibrary is that the data is often messy and there are a lot of duplicates. That’s where BookBrainz comes in, the book-equivalent of MusicBrainz. They’re not that big yet, but what they do very well is that they have got very clean data. I feel like BookBrainz has the potential to be the perfect source of data on books, for other apps to use as they please, similar to how MusicBrainz is already functioning. It just needs more contributors, but I’m sure it’s steadily growing. I just started doing my part, adding the books I read on all three.
Would love to hear thoughts on these platforms, as well as other platform suggestion if you’ve got any.
Edit: changed Bookwyrm.social to BookWyrm, since people should pick an instance themselves.
Trogdor the Bookinator
I like getting audio books from Libro.FM. It’s all DRM free and some money gets donated to a bookstore of your choosing.
I ditched my goodreads account once I learned about bookwyrm as an alternative, I’m liking it so far
I tried bookywrm a year or two back. It was nice that I could import my goodreads history. But something like 70% of my books just weren’t in the database.
And I am not just talking kindle exclusive authors. It was (not necessarily one of the books but at the same level) seminal works like Lois Lowry’s The Giver.
These days I am checking out Storygraph. Import was very smooth. Not super huge on the excessive amounts of AI but AI generated premises that (theoretically) cater to my own interests seems like a good use of the devil’s silicon.
I tried to use Bookwyrm for a while but ended up having to add nearly every single book manually looking up isbn codes finding cover links etc.
Just gave up on it after a while.
Is t it a community effort though and does it not pull in info from other BookWyrm instances?
At least you have done something nice for the next one, looking for those books 😁
It does but it didn’t have any of the books I was reading. If it’s going to work it needs to be a lot easier to add Books at the minute it wants about 15 different mostly irrelevent pieces of information anyone adding needs to hunt down manually.
While I was looking for an alternative to Goodreads, which was widely known to be horrible long before the recent push against these big corpos, I tried BookWyrm (my first contact with the fediverse). I like their approach and wish them success, but what put me off is exactly what you say, the data they use is messy and lacks a lot of info. E.g. one of the things that makes (or at least made) GR satisfying is the visual aspect, you get these cool charts with the book covers, but Open Library doesn’t have covers on so many books. So should I go to Google Images and add covers for 80% of my “library” of like 500 books? Lots of work.
For comparison, TMDb, which is the source of data for Letterboxd, seems to have about as high-quality if not better data than IMDb that it is an alternative to (idk if it’s FOSS though?).
I’ve manually added many dozens books to Goodreads, so I’m not against assisting a site I use and enjoy. (Ofc at this point I regret improving that garbage site.) But the lack of data on BookWyrm was just too much even for me.
So in the end I just switched to the simplest solution: LibreOffice Calc. But we do need an alternative to GR. I came across BookBrainz a few years ago, it was still early in development. Today it might be better, I should give it a shot and maybe add some data there…
Thanks so much for sharing this Bookwyrm is on my radar to try (currently use storygraph). I’ve been looking for ways to contribute to the open source community as a non-coder so def going to check out bookbrainz. Freedom of information is one of my biggest passions and this goes hand in hand with those goals as they form the backbone of meaningful archival efforts.
I also use Storygraph and like it well enough. Is there a good reason to switch to Bookwyrm?
I’ve only started using Storygraph recently (which I also like) but I’d consider a federated alternative. Does anybody know whether its possible to migrate the history from SG to Bookwyrm?
I was just looking into that and found that, apparently, you should be able to migrate your data quite easily. I already did so from Goodreads to Storygraph, and it was easy enough.
Calibre integration?
EEEEEE WW ccc sss
What don’t they understand about consummate Vs?!
guy wouldn’t know majesty if it came up and bit him in the face
i LOVE bookwyrm, i don’t read so much right now but it was just. so easy to work with <3
I am currently using Storygraph, but I might switch to Hardcover. Their app is really good looking, if a bit slow, and it is very letterboxy, which I like. They too have lists feature which is a lot better than just tags, in my opinion.
I like storygraph a lot but… I have been using it for around 3 years and in that time nothing substantial changed on that website. They still don’t have normal author page.
How do I use this? Let’s say I would like to find highly reviewed SF detective books. How can I do that?
I never started a goodreads account because amazon, but always wanted one. Signing up.
I’ve been using Bookwyrm since I learnt about it - not long after I joined Mastodon. Migrated my GoodReads history over. @[email protected] if you want to follow!
I’ve been trying to use both BookWyrm and Storygraph. I prefer Storygraphs UI and they have a larger library of books (it seems). However I would like to mainly use BookWyrm to help with the network effect, as well as to contribute with adding books
