So I finally broke down and made a very poor purchasing decision and ordered an e-ink writer to be a notepad/e-reader hybrid. Partially so that it is less of a hassle to read books I got from kickstarters and the like while still using the kindle app for the disturbing amounts of money I throw at Amazon.
Historically? I loved goodreads because theoretically I would get good recommendations based on what I liked. In practice, that has never happened but it is still nice to see if I read something in the past. And once I have multiple ebook ecosystems, it will be nice to actually check that rather than spend the first 100 pages wondering if this is familiar.
So any good recommendations? I suspect what I SHOULD do (and will likely start doing more as a self betterment thing) is just put a note in my personal nextcloud every time I finish a book with a quick summary and some thoughts. But having the big database is also really nice.
Thanks
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I’m using Bookwyrm for about a year now, I think.
I really like it and it’s federated approach. Even though it has it’s issues (multiple different versions of the same book over multiple servers), I still like to track my readings with it and I also love to add a new book to the server to make it available for everyone :-)
So a +1 from me as well :-)
+1 for bookwyrm
Saw the headline, came in thinking “I know there’s a federated version, but can’t remember the name” and BAM! there it is; Abidan in with the save!
So. Fucking. Slow.
Only if it was Free Software or at least OpenSource…
Huh? It is.
No. It’s not. It’s just a proprietary source-available software. The license is neither Free nor Open.
Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person or organization (the “User”) obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the “Software”), to use, copy, modify, merge, distribute, and/or sell copies of the Software, subject to the following conditions:
The conditions they attach are essentially, don’t use it for corporate profit or law enforcement.
It’s not a BSD license, but if you’re an individual you can do whatever you want with it.
So it does violate some core rules of both FS an OS. Also the text is so full of legal holes which makes it useless in it’s goal too. It only prevents good-intent individuals from contributing and acts as a tool in hand of big evil corpurates.
I’m not sure what exactly you consider “core rules” but GPL3 also puts stipulations on how software can be used and who can use it but I doubt you would be complaining about that.
I’m also not a lawyer, but I don’t see how a license that says “if you’re an individual, do whatever you want” is going to stop someone with good intentions from contributing.
Software Freedom #0: The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose
Open source criteria #6: The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.
By forbidding some entities from using the software, it violates both Free Software and Open Source and makes itself proprietary.
To get off Amazon’s Goodreads, I migrated to Storygraph. It’s not self-hosted, but the social aspect of recommendations and reading reviews from a substantial community was something I wanted to maintain.
Storygraph has a migration tool to move your Goodreads history and lists over. Free and paid tiers. Enough engagement that there are book challenges and reasonable recommendations.
I didn’t learn about Bookwyrm until 6 months after joining StoryGraph. I don’t think I’ll migrate again unless SG pulls some unexpected nonsense.
To be honest I’ve found a really incredible community of like-minded people on BW and regularly find top quality book suggestions just from seeing what these people are reading. One key is to find your favorite books, and then follow lots of the same people who felt similar to you. Some will be misses and have bad recommendations going forward, but at least a handful will be very like-minded readers.
I tried a few alternatives, but the Goodreads import wasn’t working well for any of them and I miss the two people who have very similar taste to my own. Sadly I don’t know them, we just connected over Reddit at some point and it feels weird asking them to migrate.
Same. I don’t really see the point of tracking what you read if you’re not interested in connecting it to other peoples’ readings. Storygraph has been great.
Probably just so you don’t accidentally waste time unknowingly rereading a book.
I’ve been using hardcover for a few months…great vibe, active development.
I wanted to migrate my CSV export from Goodreads somewhere selfhosted but apparently it’s not possible. All the selfhosted book trackers I’ve tried insist on “properly” importing your books and to do that they only consider entries with proper ISBN numbers. Guess what, many of the books I’ve read don’t have those on Goodreads. So they’ll simply ignore like 3/4ths of my export. So stupid.
Anyway, I ended up knocking together a shell script to convert the CSV to a plain text file and I’ll be updating that from now on. I never really cared about “shelves” and all that other stuff anyway, I mainly need title, author, and when I started/ended reading something. I don’t need ratings and reviews to know what I think about a book and if my memory fails I can just read it again.
Back when people I knew were on Goodreads it was fun checking out what the others were reading but they’ve all left the platform ages ago.
