Hello, fellow bibliophiles!
I’ve been on the hunt for a decent Goodreads alternative for a few years now and was curious as to what the fine folks of the Lemmyverse thought of Bookwyrm.
There are so many GR alternatives that are clearly trying to be “The New Goodreads”, though the whole reason I wanted an alternative is because I’m sick of GR and its devolution into a commercialized, biased, and messy shithole. Like, if I wanted recommendations and feckless reviews straight from the putrid inner bowels of Tiktok, I’d go to Tiktok. And most of these alternatives seem to quickly turn into the same thing. I refuse to believe that GR and its copycats are our only viable option.
Bookwyrm seems promising. It’s been a bit clunky and I’m still figuring it out, but I’m enjoying the utter lack of sponsored or “pushed” content. So, thoughts? Opinions? Suggestions?
Open Library - open source, mainainted by your friends from archive.org
I use Bookwyrm and it works for what I need: track reading, rate books, view reading lists of people who have read the same books. My partner uses StoryGraph which does seem a lot cleaner and more polished, but I haven’t felt the need to switch yet.
Is there any way you can import your book shelves from Goodreads into Bookwyrm?
I’m curious about it (and tired of the sluggishness and outdated look of Goodreads not to mention Amazon in general), but have a lot of data in Goodreads that I would like to preserve.
Yes you can. Goodreads has export instructions. On BookWyrm you upload the export file. It maintains ratings, shelves, read status/dates, etc.
Just be careful when you import: some of my titles were matched to completely wrong titles. For example, “The Color Purple” was matched to some other random book with the word Purple in the title. Fortunately, as part of the import process:
- it tells you which books it could not reasonably match and lets you manually match them, and
- it lets you edit any matches it made automatically.
Every book I had in Goodreads was available to add to my shelves on BookWyrm, even if they didn’t all happen automatically. Overall though, compared to how many books I had on shelves, only a handful were not handled automatically/properly.
@133arc585 @brand I found that when I imported I had to manually add lots of missing books and then import again. I think the import might have improved since then - adding books definitely has, as it usually finds them to import now (when I joined it was a purely manual process)
I’m finding Goodreads very clunky as well. Is Bookworm a lot worse?
I think it’s still in need of some development, but it does the job well. And I love the lack of useless bells and whistles.
