📚 Time to switch to BookWyrm
EDIT: Fairly incredible that this article should appear on WaPo, which is owned by amazon.
Bookwyrm is a great project, can recommend it.
Does anyone else ignore the reviews and social media aspect of Goodreads and only use it to organize their data?
You might like StoryGraph better for that. I switched from Goodreads because I got sick of all the social aspects of the site. I just want to keep track of what I’ve read and update it so I get a Spotify Wrapped like experience for books—StoryGraph offers that.
When StoryGraph gets its api (on the roadmap). That’ll be delightful.
I’m still bummed GoodReads discontinued their official API. (They have an undocumented GraphQL one driving parts of their site you can use. Ish.)
This would imply having an account on something owned by Amazon. No, thanks.
I’ve been on BookWyrm for a bit and I quite like it. I’ve actually written my first reviews (something I never did on gr).
https://literal.club is another alternative.
I just tried BookWyrm. It imported all my stuff from GoodReads. So far I’m loving it.
Have you figured out how to get it to recommend you a book that you’d even consider reading? I sure haven’t 😳
I may be strange on this, but I have never felt like I need automatic recommendations, and any I have gotten feel more like a nuisance.
I have my list of books on BookWyrm and sometimes I look at it and go like “oh I wonder what this author has been up to” and I look it up, or I participate on some online discussion about what people have read and if something sounds interesting I add it to my BookWyrm list.
I’ve also added a couple of books from people I follow there, who have interest in common but sometimes add this entirely unexpected book and I get to explore it.
I have a feeling that has more to do with the quality af the algorithms you’ve been exposed to than the base concept of them.
As a for-instance, I gave ChatGPT a list of 2 books¹ I was happy with a few days ago, and asked it to recommend similar stuff. It gave me a list of 5 books², 3 of which I’d already read, and very much liked. Asked it to add those 3 to my input list and recommend some more, got 5 new ones³ (one I’d already read, and liked).
Så far I’m on book 2 of the recommendations, very much liked the first one, almost done with the second and it’s great.
I probably won’t get that level of recommendations from Bookwyrm at any point, but it would be nice to have something based on all the data in pumping into it, instead of having to guess which stranger to follow and hope they read something good, and that I’ll actually be there to notice.
——————
- input books
- first 5 recommendations (® for already read, ®® for read after recommendation)
- The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón ®
- The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco ®
- The Picture of Dorian Grey by Oscar Wilde ®
- The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker
- The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova ®®
- 5 recommendations more (® for already read, ®® for currently reading)
No, that sounds like a great use of AI. I would be happy if a non-corporate option could be used for these kind of tasks for those that benefit from it.
For me though, I don’t think it’s about bad recommendations for books but the idea of seeking recommendations at all. I’m almost never in a “I want to read something but I don’t know what” state. If I don’t have a book in front of me or in my mental queue, I’m usually doing something else instead. My queue is almost never empty.
I don’t follow strangers hoping for recommendations, I just follow someone that I feel an affinity for and sometimes that results in learning about a new book, seeking it and reading it.
The idea of receiving book recommendations feels overwhelming, especially from a system that would find a million interesting things, just for me. But I’m not opposed at all to such a tool existing!
I’m always searching for the next book 😅 We clearly have vastly differing needs, very interesting to see a different perspective on the subject — thanks! 😃👌
The article is a bit strange. Two different things are mixed there - goodreads as such, and generic social media issues (unreasoable dislikes, paid reviews etc). I like goodreads and do not know if there is an alternative. However, the site and app are outdated as hell, and miss some obvious features. However, if I understood the article correctly, these issues were there before Amazon, Amazon simply did not invest in the site enough to solve these issue.
Thanks for the BookWyrm recommendation, looks interesting. I have tried LibraryThing before, but it wasn’t quite what I was looking for. I started building my own Goodreads alternative years ago since I couldn’t find anything existing that suited my needs, but unfortunately didn’t ever have the time to properly work on it.
