A prominent author's decision to pull her novel from publication after being "review bombed" highlights Goodreads's power and raises questions about its owner: Amazon.

📚 Time to switch to BookWyrm

EDIT: Fairly incredible that this article should appear on WaPo, which is owned by amazon.

  •  kajko   ( @kajko@beehaw.org ) 
    English
    1•1 year ago

    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.

    •  renard_roux   ( @renard_roux@beehaw.org ) English
      2•1 year ago

      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 stuff⁴. 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.

      ——————

      1 — input books

      2 — first recommendations (® for already read, ®® for read after recommendation)

      3 — recommendations, second round (® for already read, ®® for currently reading)

      4 — my initial prompt:

      • Can you recommend any books similar to Patrick Süskind’s “Perfume”? I felt like it was similar, at least in tone, to “Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell”, which I also liked.
      •  kajko   ( @kajko@beehaw.org ) 
        English
        2•1 year ago

        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!