📚 Time to switch to BookWyrm
EDIT: Fairly incredible that this article should appear on WaPo, which is owned by amazon.
I just tried BookWyrm. It imported all my stuff from GoodReads. So far I’m loving it.
Have you figured out how to get it to recommend you a book that you’d even consider reading? I sure haven’t 😳
It doesn’t do algorithmic recommendations like GoodReads or Storygraph. Its much more of a feed-based system of finding books via observing what others are reading. It takes some work to curate a following list that fits your tastes, but if you go to your favorite books and actually follow the people who feel similar to you, then over time you will start to get some wild recommendations by seeing the stuff they are picking up or marking as “to read”. I much prefer it to algorithmic recommendations because it adds a human level of complexity - for instance, an algo isnt going to recommend a book that was published 40 years ago that has almost 0 online data about itself, but a person I really respect could say its one of their all-time favorites and now I have a new book that I literally never would have heard about anywhere else except for that one person.
My only problem with that is that what people read is, for many at least, all over the place. So me finding a person that likes a few of the same books as me (no small feat, by the way) is no guarantee that they’ll read anything else that I’ll be interested in.
I get the concept, just wouldn’t mind some educated guessing by an algorithm as a supplement.
I may be strange on this, but I have never felt like I need automatic recommendations, and any I have gotten feel more like a nuisance.
I have my list of books on BookWyrm and sometimes I look at it and go like “oh I wonder what this author has been up to” and I look it up, or I participate on some online discussion about what people have read and if something sounds interesting I add it to my BookWyrm list.
I’ve also added a couple of books from people I follow there, who have interest in common but sometimes add this entirely unexpected book and I get to explore it.
I have a feeling that has more to do with the quality af the algorithms you’ve been exposed to than the base concept of them.
As a for-instance, I gave ChatGPT a list of 2 books¹ I was happy with a few days ago, and asked it to recommend similar stuff. It gave me a list of 5 books², 3 of which I’d already read, and very much liked. Asked it to add those 3 to my input list and recommend some more, got 5 new ones³ (one I’d already read, and liked).
Så far I’m on book 2 of the recommendations, very much liked the first one, almost done with the second and it’s great.
I probably won’t get that level of recommendations from Bookwyrm at any point, but it would be nice to have something based on all the data in pumping into it, instead of having to guess which stranger to follow and hope they read something good, and that I’ll actually be there to notice.
——————
- input books
- first 5 recommendations (® for already read, ®® for read after recommendation)
- The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón ®
- The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco ®
- The Picture of Dorian Grey by Oscar Wilde ®
- The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker
- The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova ®®
- 5 recommendations more (® for already read, ®® for currently reading)
