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?
I am on GR but don’t rely on it much, just to keep track of read books, and a wishlist.
I used it to pick the best rated Daniel Silva book and was disappointed as o didn’t like it. I’d agree that reviews on GR ale not reliable, most people have different taste. What’s most annoying is how most reviews there start by summarizing the book which inflates the bloat you have to go through before you get to the review.
I only just checked out bookwyrm now, but i can’t find the book I’m currently reading there (the poet by Michael Connelly). It doesn’t look like it has as much content.
So true about the long-winded reviews nowadays. I feel like they’re one of three templates lately: grade school book report ; “omg yas best book ever” with descriptive gifs ; or pure vitriol. I miss when GR reviews were actually helpful.
As for Bookwyrm, that was one of the main reasons I made this post, because it didn’t seem like there were many users, but the app itself is slowly growing on me.
I use storygraph, though don’t care to do anything more than track reads, set goals, and share with my wife who uses that and gr.
It’s nice though! and let’s me split content by the exact edition/format pretty easily.
The developer also seems like a super person. She had a great interview about building storygraph on the remote ruby podcast
I love storygraph but its UI could be better, especially the reviews section.
Yeah, there’s a lot of times where I’m trying to figure out how to get where I want for way too long. I don’t know if I don’t use reviews because I don’t care or if it’s bad, but it’s likely the former as I don’t go to any of these apps for recommendations. I do like their granularity as that can be helpful from time to time!
Both storygraph and bookworm are good, if you just want tracking. If you also use goodreads for recommendations, ratings and reviews, then GR is the only option. No other place has the same user base
Literal.club is probably my favourite. Cleanest interface of anything I’ve tried, and a really great API to use if you’re a developer. It also recommends profiles with a similar taste to yours, which can be helpful for discovering new books.
Edit: I looked into Bookwyrm and it turns out you can get book lists (e.g. currently reading) as JSON. For example, bookwyrm.social/user/mouse/books/reading.json. For anyone who wants an API, this might be enough.
