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.
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.