this post was submitted on 18 Mar 2025
293 points (98.7% liked)

Technology

66892 readers
5072 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each other!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
  10. Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.

Approved Bots


founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

Just here to shed some light on BookWyrm, the Fediverse equivalent of Goodreads. I've been doing some more reading lately, and I like to keep track of what I read and also I like reading other's review, suggestions, etc. Now I boycot amazon and others big tech as much as possible, so for me Bookwyrm is the place to be. It's steadily growing I think, but I thought it deserved some more attention, therefor this post. Same goes for BookBrainz and to a lesser extend IA's Openlibrary. OpenLibrary is, among other things, a place where people catalogue book-metadata, and if a book is not on Bookwyrm yet, it can often be imported from OpenLibrary. Problem with OpenLibrary is that the data is often messy and there are a lot of duplicates. That's where BookBrainz comes in, the book-equivalent of MusicBrainz. They're not that big yet, but what they do very well is that they have got very clean data. I feel like BookBrainz has the potential to be the perfect source of data on books, for other apps to use as they please, similar to how MusicBrainz is already functioning. It just needs more contributors, but I'm sure it's steadily growing. I just started doing my part, adding the books I read on all three.

Would love to hear thoughts on these platforms, as well as other platform suggestion if you've got any.

Edit: changed Bookwyrm.social to BookWyrm, since people should pick an instance themselves.

top 25 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] CH3DD4R_G0BL1N@sh.itjust.works 4 points 13 hours ago

Trogdor the Bookinator

[–] sic_semper_tyrannis@lemmy.today 2 points 17 hours ago

I like getting audio books from Libro.FM. It's all DRM free and some money gets donated to a bookstore of your choosing.

[–] pdqcp@lemmy.dbzer0.com 30 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

I ditched my goodreads account once I learned about bookwyrm as an alternative, I'm liking it so far

[–] NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip 16 points 1 day ago

I tried bookywrm a year or two back. It was nice that I could import my goodreads history. But something like 70% of my books just weren't in the database.

And I am not just talking kindle exclusive authors. It was (not necessarily one of the books but at the same level) seminal works like Lois Lowry's The Giver.

These days I am checking out Storygraph. Import was very smooth. Not super huge on the excessive amounts of AI but AI generated premises that (theoretically) cater to my own interests seems like a good use of the devil's silicon.

[–] Teknikal@eviltoast.org 10 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I tried to use Bookwyrm for a while but ended up having to add nearly every single book manually looking up isbn codes finding cover links etc.

Just gave up on it after a while.

[–] meldrik@lemmy.wtf 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Is t it a community effort though and does it not pull in info from other BookWyrm instances?

At least you have done something nice for the next one, looking for those books 😁

[–] Teknikal@eviltoast.org 3 points 22 hours ago* (last edited 22 hours ago)

It does but it didn't have any of the books I was reading. If it's going to work it needs to be a lot easier to add Books at the minute it wants about 15 different mostly irrelevent pieces of information anyone adding needs to hunt down manually.

[–] trueheresy@lemmy.dbzer0.com 16 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Thanks so much for sharing this Bookwyrm is on my radar to try (currently use storygraph). I've been looking for ways to contribute to the open source community as a non-coder so def going to check out bookbrainz. Freedom of information is one of my biggest passions and this goes hand in hand with those goals as they form the backbone of meaningful archival efforts.

[–] sloppychops@lemmy.ca 7 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I also use Storygraph and like it well enough. Is there a good reason to switch to Bookwyrm?

[–] Jrockwar@feddit.uk 5 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I've only started using Storygraph recently (which I also like) but I'd consider a federated alternative. Does anybody know whether its possible to migrate the history from SG to Bookwyrm?

[–] sloppychops@lemmy.ca 5 points 1 day ago

I was just looking into that and found that, apparently, you should be able to migrate your data quite easily. I already did so from Goodreads to Storygraph, and it was easy enough.

[–] FridayLives@lemmy.world 10 points 1 day ago

Calibre integration?

[–] antonim@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 21 hours ago

While I was looking for an alternative to Goodreads, which was widely known to be horrible long before the recent push against these big corpos, I tried BookWyrm (my first contact with the fediverse). I like their approach and wish them success, but what put me off is exactly what you say, the data they use is messy and lacks a lot of info. E.g. one of the things that makes (or at least made) GR satisfying is the visual aspect, you get these cool charts with the book covers, but Open Library doesn't have covers on so many books. So should I go to Google Images and add covers for 80% of my "library" of like 500 books? Lots of work.

For comparison, TMDb, which is the source of data for Letterboxd, seems to have about as high-quality if not better data than IMDb that it is an alternative to (idk if it's FOSS though?).

I've manually added many dozens books to Goodreads, so I'm not against assisting a site I use and enjoy. (Ofc at this point I regret improving that garbage site.) But the lack of data on BookWyrm was just too much even for me.

So in the end I just switched to the simplest solution: LibreOffice Calc. But we do need an alternative to GR. I came across BookBrainz a few years ago, it was still early in development. Today it might be better, I should give it a shot and maybe add some data there...

[–] Grass@sh.itjust.works 5 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)
[–] Imgonnatrythis@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

What don't they understand about consummate Vs?!

[–] bdot@lemmy.world 1 points 12 hours ago

guy wouldn’t know majesty if it came up and bit him in the face

[–] lowleveldata@programming.dev 7 points 1 day ago

How do I use this? Let's say I would like to find highly reviewed SF detective books. How can I do that?

[–] Cossty@lemmy.world 6 points 1 day ago

I am currently using Storygraph, but I might switch to Hardcover. Their app is really good looking, if a bit slow, and it is very letterboxy, which I like. They too have lists feature which is a lot better than just tags, in my opinion.

I like storygraph a lot but... I have been using it for around 3 years and in that time nothing substantial changed on that website. They still don't have normal author page.

[–] unnamedau@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 day ago

i LOVE bookwyrm, i don't read so much right now but it was just. so easy to work with <3

[–] jamie_oliver@lemmy.world 6 points 1 day ago

I never started a goodreads account because amazon, but always wanted one. Signing up.

[–] i_am_not_a_robot@feddit.uk 5 points 1 day ago

I've been using Bookwyrm since I learnt about it - not long after I joined Mastodon. Migrated my GoodReads history over. @chris@wyrms.de if you want to follow!

[–] alf@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 day ago

I've been trying to use both BookWyrm and Storygraph. I prefer Storygraphs UI and they have a larger library of books (it seems). However I would like to mainly use BookWyrm to help with the network effect, as well as to contribute with adding books

[–] anamethatisnt@sopuli.xyz 3 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Interesting, gonna check out the selfhosted bookwyrm later.
I'm not much interested in sharing book reviews and the like so I will probably stick to https://calibre-ebook.com/ though.

https://docs.joinbookwyrm.com/

[–] psyspoop@lemm.ee 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

Another alternative on the fediverse is NeoDB. I'm trying that one out for the time being. Its interface is pretty barebones and could use some work, but it's nice because you can track more than books.

[–] tingly@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago

Ohhhh this is super interesting. Thanks for sharing.