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.

  • antonim@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    1·
    19 hours ago

    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…