As title. Even better if whatever you use also helps with recommendations! I’ve been mostly using Goodreads, but Bookwyrm looks like a neat decentralized alternative. Does anyone have any experience with it?
The Storygraph is a fantastic goodreads alternative with way more stats and helpful info on your reading habits. It’ll import your goodreads history too!
Cool! They advertise their “machine learning AI” recommendations system, do you have any experience with the quality of its recommendations?
I don’t use it very often but have yet to be disappointed by it (in English only, though).
Been using this and it’s great! I especially like that I can put in half and quarter stars for my ratings. Only downside might be the UI which can feel a bit off.
I’ve been really enjoying Storygraph as well! I really like that the reviews give you some criteria/prompts. I tend to read a lot of books and sometimes they are similar enough that I don’t quite remember which book was which. I rarely write actual reviews beyond a star rating so having some low effort dropdowns to help differentiate them has been so great! I am excited to see where it goes as it gets more users.
I used to use Goodreads, but switched to StoryGraph at the beginning of the year, and haven’t looked back. The only time I refer to Goodreads now is when I want to know if a book in a series can be read standalone, since that’s often mentioned in their question/answer section for the book, and it saves risking spoilers by reading reviews.
Though that said, I’ve yet to come across a spoilery review (that wasn’t indicated as such) on StoryGraph…
I looked at BookWyrm, and did set up an account on an instance, but I prefer StoryGraph.
ETA: I haven’t really looked at the recommendations feature on StoryGraph, so I can’t help you with how well that does or doesn’t work. My TBR is way too long already…!
I’ll be honest… I basically don’t track my reading. There are enough metrics in my life that I don’t have control over, that I don’t feel it necessary or useful to apply a tracking to what I do in my spare time. I try to make sure I get the book club book read before the monthly meeting, and otherwise I guess the tracking is the pile of books in the TBR pile and the read pile (and what’s on bookshelves. I figure if I don’t remember a book well enough to recommend it to someone, it was probably fairly forgettable, and if I do it was probably pretty memorable and that’s good enough for me!
Yeah this is me. I got enough shit to do besides having to track my media intake. Did that in the past with video games and film. It provided me no benefit and was just another chore to do at the end of the day. If others like doing so, go for it, just not a ‘me’ thing.
I buy paper books and put them in my shelf. Now get off my lawn, damn kids!
Once I buy a place and aren’t planning on moving so often, I’d like to do this! But the thought of moving a large book collection is a bit daunting.
Just means you need to get extra book box sized boxes for moving :D
Doesn’t hurt to invest in a hand truck so you don’t have to carry them from point A to point B and can just load up the truck and wheel them around.
A book collection requires years to accumulate. You’ll be fine.
Yeah, and if people are feeling super duper old school, you can just… write shit down on a piece of paper, such as “Read 2023:”
Maybe I’m crazy out of touch, but since when did literally everything require an app
Bookwyrm & Librarything. I’ve never used goodreads and am a Long time Library thing user. I like Bookwyrm for tracking ebooks and tend to use Librarything for physical books, I also use a specific language bookwyrm for tracking 2nd language reading
Interesting! Is there a specific reason you don’t use one platform for both ebooks and physical books?
Library thing deals with shelving information nicely, so its just more comfortable for physical books. I found it a bit less comfortable for ebooks, so used something else for that and now its habit
Goodreads, although if I can figure out the process of exporting my data over to Bookwrym then I’ll likely do that.
You will need to export from Goodreads using a computer (go to My Books, then click on Import and export under Tools on the left). When you get a csv file from GR you can import it to Bookwyrm using:
Yeah, Bookwyrm is fun. It’s pretty basic in terms of tracking compared to GR but works and I like that I can follow my friends from masto.
I found Bookwyrm to be too much work, because most of the books I read weren’t on there so I have to manually add everything. Also the instance I was on was horribly slow.
That was my experience too. I often read 100+ books per year, and it’s just too much work to manually add every detail of half of those.
That’s why I backed off one of my attempts to migrate off goodreads, too. Yeah, it was easy to export and easy to import the list of books, but when there’s 100 of them that are horrendously wrong at the end of the process it’s just too much work.
I’ll wait to do that kind of work until I’m ready to fully self host so I can pick and choose what to include and how to structure and organize them all.
Oof that sounds like it could get tedious. I suppose this is something that might be solved as more people use it, and it builds up an internal catalogue of books?
I’m still using Goodreads, mostly because I read with ereaders, right now a Kindle and Kindle/Amazon are already getting that data.
I don’t really track my reading. Maybe I should have, but I never really saw the point. Besides, most of my reading predates the web. I’ve been reading since 1966. That said, I did a TON of book recommendations on Reddit at r/booksuggestions and r/SuggestMeABook. I ended up creating a Google doc to store the recommendations I wrote for re-use. That turned out to be a good idea; I separated the recs into genres, and polished them as I noticed mistakes or areas for improvement.
Eventually someone asked me to make that Google doc public, so I did.
Meanwhile I’m on BookWyrm. I was part of a group that left GoodReads when Amazon took over; we set up a community on Google Plus (RIP) to search for alternatives to GoodReads and Amazon (see what I mean about greedy corporations destroying one community after another?). We set up a research project to find and test replacement services. If BookWyrm had existed back then, it would have been far and away the best choice. It needs more development, but I’m willing to wait for that to happen. Meanwhile I’m having fun with it.
One thing for sure: I will NEVER trust a service owned by a plutocrat or corporation ever again.
I was on GoodReads back when the lying owners sold out to Amazon while pretending that Amazon was the enemy in order to get free labor out of the users. And I was part of the group of GoodReads refugees that assembled on Google Plus to start researching alternatives, both to GoodReads and to Amazon.
I did a lot of that research myself.
All of which is to say that BookWyrm didn’t exist back then. But if it had, it would have immediately been my first choice. And I believe it would have been the first choice of the whole group, too.
I read almost exclusively on Kindle, which integrates with Goodreads and updates when I’m done reading an ebook, so I still use Goodreads for that reason. I also manually track my reading in StoryGraph, though, which I like better with one exception: No ability to add quotes from books you’ve read. I really like sharing my favorite excerpts, so I miss that feature on StoryGraph.
Unfortunately Goodreads does not allow for multiple profiles on an account (as far as I can tell). My wife has been reading through dozens and dozens of books over the last couple years and linked my amazon account to goodreads, so I can’t link my kindle there as well.
I just signed up for StoryGraph though, it looks promising, although it may be a pain in the ass to do everything manually.
I’m mostly on lovelybooks.de now. It’s a nice community that is not owned by amazon, however it was bought out a couple of years by Hugendubel which is a big book store chain in Germany so it’s not exactly independent.
did you check HardcoverApp? https://hardcover.app/ It’s bootstrapped, you can track books, and get recommendations. They are working on launching Discussions.
I still use goodreads because I haven’t managed the motivation to move to self hosting it yet.
I’m really bad at keeping up with it, though. It seems like half the time I go to add books I have like 20+ from 4-5 different apps to find and add.
I use a LibreOffice sheet for pending stuff, and as a form of control list for stuff I either recommend or not (which also indicates stuff I either completed or dropped).
I mostly read on my PocketBook. When finished, I delete a book from the device and mark it in Calibre with a tag “finished”. I still have quite a lot of paper books - for those I just remember which I’ve already read.