BookWyrm is the Federated GoodReads Replacement I Didn’t Know I Needed

hedge@beehaw.org to Technology@beehaw.org – 411 points – BookWyrm is the Federated GoodReads Replacement I Didn’t Know I Needed
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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.

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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.

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!

Didn't know about ThiftBooks, thanks for mentioning.👍 And, possibly stupid question, how is bookshop.org supposed to work exactly? Was never quite clear on that.

I'm not totally sure, but i think bookshop does profit sharing regardless if the indie bookstore you designate is actually the seller/shipper. I subscribe to Libro.fm (a drm free audible alternative), and they do the same thing. I can designate an indie store and Libro splits a percentage of the profits with them.

Awesome, thatnks for sharing, liked the idea of food reads but I've been put off by it being Amazon.

Is Goodreads bad? I use it a lot, but would it be better/more ethical to change like with reddit?

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.

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...

The moderation was garbage so the reviews can get pretty nasty depending on the genre. Trolls often go to the site to review instead of amazon because they can get away with so much

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!

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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 tried it a few months ago and had a similar experience. I do love the idea though.

UI/UX is bad and frustrating, but I'm SO happy this exists.

Much akin to reddit, the best thing about goodreads isn't the product itself so much as the communities that use it, and the resulting history of reviews/comments/etc. that build up over time.

The absence of these user generated reactions (for lack of a better catch-all) is a big part of why I never really managed to permanently migrate to Librarything instead. Though, given their devs are quite technical, one could hope they would consider connecting up with the fediverse some day too.

(I realise that many reviews on GR are worthless, but sadly if you're interested in some particularly niche things, it can be not only awkward to find the right version of a book on LT, but often enough there just aren't any reviews at all due to make it useful when a particular text is rather niche to begin with.

But assuming it federates in a way that's actually useful, this at least might mean a beginning that could lead to alternatives that are not just an improvement on BookWyrm's UI/UX, but Goodreads' too.

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. (Edit: OK, looking at the code base it's a bit more involved than I can be bothered with at the moment. I'm spending the time I can do development on other stuff. I do like the idea of the service, but right now the limitations just make using it to organize my reading unrealistic.)

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 just wish there was an easy way to sync my progress from my kindle. Does Kobo (or similarly easy to find reader) offer syncing to BookWyrm by chance? Any suggestions that aren’t too expensive are appreciated.

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.

Sweet, definitely not a type of implementation I'd expect on top of the fediverse so that makes it even cooler!
Looks super well thought out, especially love the robust import feature and federated book metadata. I'll have to check it out sometime soon.

I've been meaning to check this out! It sounds so cool and possibly interacts with other fediverse things?

Yes it does. You can follow BookWyrm accounts from Mastodon and Calckey. At least that is what I tested.

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.

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.

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!

What is that app? I don't know it and I've been looking for

Is there any federated interaction between BookWyrm and Kbin? Can I follow book or author updates or keep up with reviews or conversation?

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

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.

looks like bookwyrm.social is dead?

It seems to be back now. I think it runs on a small server and quite often gets hug of deathed

instead of "reddit hug of death" we are slowly approaching to "fedi hug of death". hopefully.

Dead in which way? The server is online, theres just not that much going on. Personally I just want a place to write down which books ive read, so i dont really engage much with others. Seems to be the same for others.

temporary server error. seems fine now