Old, but just in case folks don’t know about this…
EDIT: I was stunned at all the upvotes this got, and from a two-year-old article to boot! I hope I didn’t do anything to overload their servers. When I posted about the Instagram/Pixelfed import tool, I was kind of surprised at how many folks that were on Lemmy didn’t already know about Pixelfed, which is why I posted this, also from We Distribute. For a long while, IIRC, the Fediverse pie chart was taken up almost entirely by Mastodon (which it probably still is) followed by a small but visible sliver of Pixelfed–Lemmy hardly registed at all. Just goes to show how fast we’ve grown!
EDIT EDIT: I see that some of you were a little bit disappointed with BookWyrm, but I hope you will stick with them because I think they can be an important member of the Fediverse. The sense that I get is that they’re stretched very thin, and could use some support, monetarily of course, but especially from other developers.
Oh, neat. I did a lot of librarian work on Goodreads over the years but I eventually wore out when I realized I was working for Amazon for free. I’ll take a look at this and see if any of the old librarian itch still needs scratching.
It uses OpenLibrary and Inventaire as it’s sourced apparently. I don’t know if it contributes upstream though.
I just wish it had a Calibre plugin, I tend to forget to update services like these and rely on syncing with calibre to do it for me.
I’m using it but I’m a bit disappointed that I have 500+ books that didn’t import and I have to do it manually. They will need to implement something like the librarians role there because the editions are getting messy already, I would be down to help as I did on GR before being bought by Amazon. Well, I’ll keep loging what I read of course and I hope it grows and gets better.
I went through the export from GoodReads and import to Bookwyrm, and was also disappointed.
I only had 2 books that wouldn’t import, but once I was in, the lack of filtering and data-based lists was very meh. Maybe I’m missing something?
- how do I browse books by category? I can only find user-generated lists.
- how do I sort lists by popularity/rating? I can’t see a single filtering option.
- no recommendations? Granted, GoodReads sucks at this as well, but I would really like there to be an algorithm that was somewhat capable of looking at what I like and suggesting similar things.
I know that recommendations require some data that might not be there, but there should also be data available already that is workable for a rudimentary Recommendations system:
— Sort my Read Books List by My Rating as List W. — Select top 5 books from List W, sort by Book Rating, as List W¹. — Book X is the top book in List W¹, and is classified as being in Category X. — Find Book X in other libraries as List Y. — (if data available, sort List X by some sort of metric, e.g. amount of list Likes). — Select top list in List X as List Y. — Look at other books in List Y, select any that are in Category X. This is List Z. — Sort List Z by Book Rating, return top 5 books as Recommendations.
I know Bookwyrm is open source, but I don’t have the skills to write something like that 😕
(I’ve tried editing the horrible formatting of my suggestions, but they don’t seem to be saving. I’ll try again later)
Besides Goodreads, Amazon also, unfortunately, owns or has stakes in Book Depository, Abebooks, BookFinder & LibraryThing.
Unfortunately, yes. Sometimes buying from them is unavoidable, since they seem to have more books listed than anywhere else. I recommend alibris, not as big, but not owned by amazon. Sometimes if I find a book on Abe, I’ll check and see if the same seller is on alibris, which they often will be. Alibris also actually lets you rate the seller unlike abe!
Thiftbooks is my goto for used but I’ve always used Abe as a backup. For new I use bookshop.org. So disappointing. I will check out alibris. I know the name, but have never used the service.
I highly recommend Storygraph
Is Goodreads bad? I use it a lot, but would it be better/more ethical to change like with reddit?
My son is an author and in the community apparently goodreads is known as the place where hopes and dreams die
Could you elaborate? I have used Goodreads for a while and have discovered books there that I would never have without the site…
I think it’s more that Amazon hasn’t done anything to improve it since purchasing Goodreads years ago. Some minor design changes, but the algorithm for recommendations is arguably worse and there have not been any significant features added.
God the recommendations based on my shelf are completely worthless. I gave the Fellowship of the Ring five stars and now all my recs are totally clogged up with art books and behind-the-scenes stuff about the movies. Oh yeah, please keep showing me audiobook versions of shit I already read!
It’s absolutely absurd that in 2023, the largest tech company in the world cannot find a way to not show me recommendations for books it knows I have already read.
I also get irrationally enraged anytime Goodreads gets confused about multiple formats of the same book. Oh, I have read the paperback version of The Way of Kings, but surely I need to be recommended the Kindle and leatherbound editions, too, as those are completely different books!
