Like GoodReads, but tired of Amazon? BookWyrm might be what you're looking for.

Old, but just in case folks don’t know about this…

EDIT: I was stunned at all the upvotes this got, and from a two-year-old article to boot! I hope I didn’t do anything to overload their servers. When I posted about the Instagram/Pixelfed import tool, I was kind of surprised at how many folks that were on Lemmy didn’t already know about Pixelfed, which is why I posted this, also from We Distribute. For a long while, IIRC, the Fediverse pie chart was taken up almost entirely by Mastodon (which it probably still is) followed by a small but visible sliver of Pixelfed–Lemmy hardly registed at all. Just goes to show how fast we’ve grown!

EDIT EDIT: I see that some of you were a little bit disappointed with BookWyrm, but I hope you will stick with them because I think they can be an important member of the Fediverse. The sense that I get is that they’re stretched very thin, and could use some support, monetarily of course, but especially from other developers.

  •  renard_roux   ( @renard_roux@beehaw.org ) English
    6•1 year ago

    I went through the export from GoodReads and import to Bookwyrm, and was also disappointed.

    I only had 2 books that wouldn’t import, but once I was in, the lack of filtering and data-based lists was very meh. Maybe I’m missing something?

    • how do I browse books by category? I can only find user-generated lists.
    • how do I sort lists by popularity/rating? I can’t see a single filtering option.
    • no recommendations? Granted, GoodReads sucks at this as well, but I would really like there to be an algorithm that was somewhat capable of looking at what I like and suggesting similar things.

    I know that recommendations require some data that might not be there, but there should also be data available already that is workable for a rudimentary Recommendations system:

    • Sort my Read Books List by My Rating as List W.
    • Select top 5 books from List W, sort by Book Rating, as List W¹.
    • Book X is the top book in List W¹, and is classified as being in Category X.
    • Find Book X in other libraries as List Y.
    • (if data available, sort List X by some sort of metric, e.g. amount of list Likes).
    • Select top list in List X as List Y.
    • Look at other books in List Y, select any that are in Category X. This is List Z.
    • Sort List Z by Book Rating, return top 5 books as Recommendations.

    I know Bookwyrm is open source, but I don’t have the skills to write something like that 😕