Like GoodReads, but tired of Amazon? BookWyrm might be what you're looking for.
Old, but just in case folks don’t know about this…
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Besides Goodreads, Amazon also, unfortunately, owns or has stakes in Book Depository, Abebooks, BookFinder & LibraryThing.
Not AbeBooks!?! 😲😭
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.
There really is a need for some kind of exchange trade site. If you’re familiar with boardgame geek “math” trades, this is what I mean. Imagine a site like ebay, where you upload your books that you would like to trade away, and you can “like” books that you want in return. Then somehow there is a market value or score assigned to items so that they can be traded amongst many users automatically.
Now imagine this for everything. We could go back to a bartering economy while cutting waste and cost.
I am familiar! (as an owner of too many boardgames) I think this could work for a lot of things!
Is Goodreads bad? I use it a lot, but would it be better/more ethical to change like with reddit?
Owned by Amazon!
My son is an author and in the community apparently goodreads is known as the place where hopes and dreams die
Amazon bought goodreads a while back, and it’s basically stagnated ever since then. They only notable change they made was to shutdown the API.
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.
I signed up a few days ago. I never used GoodReads much. Last activity I had there was in 2013 and I kinda fell out of the habit of reading. But I picked up a book this week (and finished it in two days, haha), Recursion.
It let me import my GoodReads data and I’ve been slowly adding books to read to it. I think for me, the mental hurdle I had was the paralysis of choice. I decided to just pick a sci-fi book that was available for instant borrow on Libby and go from there. I currently started The Big Door Prize because I loved the first season of its TV adaptation. Happy to be reading again.
I read Recursion a while back, it was a really strange book. I had to re-read the last parts to get a decent grasp of what was going on at the end.
Lol how appropriate considering the context of the book 🤣
I feel that choice paralysis a lot. My reading moods fluctuate, so sometimes I want to read one genre or sometimes another, but I also have a massive TBR so I struggle determining what book I should read. I’ve learned to just let myself start something, and if it doesn’t work out, then I can stop and maybe pick it back up later. For instance, I just finished Prince of Thorns by Mark Lawrence, a book that I had tried to read three times prior. This was the first time my interest stuck, and now I am finishing the trilogy. But getting over that initial hurdle of “what should I read” can be difficult.
Awesome, thatnks for sharing, liked the idea of food reads but I’ve been put off by it being Amazon.
I really like the idea, I’m going to have to try it again sometime soon.
The last time I tried, their database was missing a lot of books. When I imported my goodreads history, some books got dropped. But, worse, some of the books they didn’t know about were incorrectly matched to completely different books in their database. So my my reading history on bookwyrm.social is currently kind of a mess. I messaged someone on mastodon, who directed me to file an issue on github. I did, but no one ever responded to it.
I’ve been meaning to check this out! It sounds so cool and possibly interacts with other fediverse things?
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.
You can also import your Goodreads data for what it’s worth. It’s a bit wonky though, but I mainly use(d) Goodreads to track what I want to read and not to meticulously track the exact edition of every book, so it’s pretty ok.
One major improvement would be to able to install Bookwyrm as a PWA or if there was an app.
Is there any federated interaction between BookWyrm and Kbin? Can I follow book or author updates or keep up with reviews or conversation?
Doesn’t look like it’s possible yet. Doesn’t seem to work with Lemmy, either. Sounds like an interesting feature request for their respective issues trackers, though.
I was able to follow my bookworym account on mastodon, but not sure how to use my existing accounts w/i bookwyrm. I think the functionality doesn’t translate well to other fediverse products w/ different setups… kinda like trying to interact w/ tweets (posts?) via lemmy
I was hoping that because Kbin does support mastodon posts it might work. I’d love to see that integration
Thank you! I’ve seen this mentioned a couple of times and have been meaning to give it a try.
I like the idea.
But the license for the software and that i don’t even know underwhat license the content is makes me question if this is the answer to a foss goodreads.
OMG, there’s a third party app with dark mode!!! Goodreads app doesn’t have it, which I hate with a passion… I’m sold, just started the import process of my books from goodreads to bookwyrm!
I tried it, but actually using it to create lists of books is effectively impossible. It lets you click one of the 5 books it shows you, or you can manually search every book. It’s a brutal experience. Goodreads letting you go through your books as a table and checkbox which books to add blows it out of the water.
I might self host it so I can see what options I have to either make a new page to make lists in a way that’s actually functional, or see how the data is managed to write a script to import those correctly from goodreads, but it’s extremely painful to do right now.
Admittedly it’s young, and I appreciate that being open source means that it’s something I can roll my own spins on, but right now it’s pretty rough.
I know I’m not alone here, but truly a Letterboxd version of bookwyrm would be amazing. Esp if it had some integrations with Jellyfin.
+1