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
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.
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.
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.
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.