- cross-posted to:
- technews@radiation.party
- literature
- cross-posted to:
- technews@radiation.party
- literature
📚 Time to switch to BookWyrm
EDIT: Fairly incredible that this article should appear on WaPo, which is owned by amazon.
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The feature I liked most in goodreads, was that it would send you a monthly email with “new books by authors you’ve read”. It would send it at the start of the month, which was not actionable, but if you’d just wait a few months reading it, it was easy to see that LE Modesitt Jr finished another book in the series I enjoyed.
They stopped sending that, now it’s a “here are some books we want you to show some interest in”.
I got a bookwyrm account, and apart from not knowing all the books I’ve read, they also can’t tell me what books have come out recently, by authors I enjoyed in the past.
I’d think that would be a basic part of any book collection tool.
They stopped sending that, now it’s a “here are some books we want you to show some interest in”.
Sounds like a great example of enshittification.
Stage 2, I think?
Maybe a RSS feed of new books could help?
If you follow an author on Goodreads, it will email you when they release a new book!
I’ve been using StoryGraph since it came around and really enjoy it. I’ve looked at BookWyrm, but I haven’t considered switching yet.
The article mentions the WaPo connection to Amazon and its board, as they should, but I’m surprised to see this particular topic there, too.
This particular paragraph is disingenuous in its characterization of what’s going on with Reddit, though:
There was also a concern that any major changes to the platform could scare people away. One former employee compared Goodreads to Reddit, an 18-year-old internet forum where users are revolting because of modifications to the site. “People feel like they can’t anger the community,” the former employee said.
Honest question: how does StoryGraph value your privacy? Being based in the US and being for free suggests that user data could be the real product. Otherwise it obviously looks really nice and I would love to use their stats.
Not sure what she gets from it, but my partner pays for Storygraph because of how bad Goodreads has become.
It’s changed over time. You used to get recommendations and other things, but they opened that to everyone fairly recently. Now, we get extra stats and things like that, which is still good to me. I mainly pay to support the development and to allow it to remain available for others who can’t pay.
StoryGraph appears to be based in the UK from what I’ve seen, so GDPR etc may apply. They also don’t appear to be owned by a major corporation
Oh thanks! Didn’t see that :)
https://app.thestorygraph.com/privacy But, what private info you are worried about liked/disliked books linked to a email?
Read the privacy statement but couldn’t figure out how to interpet it. I’m not worried about it that much but would like to avoid further feeding into big data. Not sure how, but the books I read could easily tell a lot about me.
I find SG’s recommendations to be the best, I deleted my GR account a year an a half ago, it was all paid “influencers” writing gushing reviews of books that I hated.
I did appreciate giveaways on GR, but I always gave appropriate reviews based on my real opinion. I haven’t won any giveaways on SG yet, but I’m still trying! 😁
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.)
I’d be really interested in trying my hand at writing a Python script to scrape by Bookwyrm RSS feed and syncing it to StoryGraph. I truly love BW as my book “home”, but the functionality of SG and its position in the market as a GoodReads enemy that is BIPOC-owned makes me want to also support it too.
Hello fellow Storygrapher! I agree with all of your point about the site. I’m not into the social aspect of reading so much as just keeping track of things and SG does this very well.
I’ve been meaning to try some Goodreads alternatives, but I’ve been on there so long and have so many books and custom bookshelves that trying to get all that set up again on a new site is intimidating. I guess I just need to sit down and try it one day, but it’s hard to get over that inertia to just leave it all where it is!
This would imply having an account on something owned by Amazon. No, thanks.
Bookwyrm is a great project, can recommend it.
I was going to host my own Bookwyrm instance, but they had some text about a beta version that kind of scared me off. I should revisit that
Please report back if you do. I’m currently in the middle of “what if I hosted a Mastodon instance???” (waiting for DNS to propagate) and the Bookwyrn thought has crossed my mind.
We’re destroying the wrong Amazon!!!
https://literal.club is another alternative.
At a glance, I’m intrigued. Them actually having an API is something I’ve been missing for a while.
What I’m worried about is what they’re planning to do for monetization. Ads? Accounts? Haven’t dug enough to see yet if they’ve posted it.
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 😳
It doesn’t do algorithmic recommendations like GoodReads or Storygraph. Its much more of a feed-based system of finding books via observing what others are reading. It takes some work to curate a following list that fits your tastes, but if you go to your favorite books and actually follow the people who feel similar to you, then over time you will start to get some wild recommendations by seeing the stuff they are picking up or marking as “to read”. I much prefer it to algorithmic recommendations because it adds a human level of complexity - for instance, an algo isnt going to recommend a book that was published 40 years ago that has almost 0 online data about itself, but a person I really respect could say its one of their all-time favorites and now I have a new book that I literally never would have heard about anywhere else except for that one person.
My only problem with that is that what people read is, for many at least, all over the place. So me finding a person that likes a few of the same books as me (no small feat, by the way) is no guarantee that they’ll read anything else that I’ll be interested in.
I get the concept, just wouldn’t mind some educated guessing by an algorithm as a supplement.
Not gonna lie, I still use GR for reviews and also StoryGraph for recommendations from time to time. I dont feel a need to have only one account, but I only ever update Bookwyrm because thats where Ive found something thats closest to community and kindred spirits.
I agree, nothing wrong with having more accounts, but the dream of that great white buffalo that does it all is always looming somewhere 😅
Have look at my other comment for a stopgap solution 😊📚
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 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)
- 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 ®®
3 — recommendations, second round (® for already read, ®® for currently reading)
- The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield ®®
- The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
- The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter by Theodora Goss ®
- The Angel’s Game by Carlos Ruiz Zafón
- The Book of Lost Things by John Connolly
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.
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! 😃👌
To be honest, I freaking love bookwyrm so much. One of my favorite ways to burn time online is to find books that come across my feed that are missing info like cover art, description, etc. and to fill it all in. I’ve spent hours doing this and it feels so cool, like I’m actually part of maintaining the system.
Also, Ive found that the people on Bookwyrm tend to like books that I really love that are also potentially kind of niche, so Ive found a lot of really great book recommendations that I never would have found from Goodreads or an algorithm.
Is it possible to merge books? Was just looking around, and they’re are like 10 entries (not editions) for many of the books I looked up, and so the reviews are scattered.
Not sure, that’s a great question to send to the mods!
I’m try that, thanks 🙂👌
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.
LibraryThing is owned by Abebooks which is owned by amazon. 🙁
Yeah, Goodreads has sucked for a while now, which is a shame because it could be a useful tool.
I’ve been using The Storygraph for the past couple of years, though I should probably look into Bookwyrm instead.
Can I ask what are your issues with Goodreads? I’ve been an (admittedly casual) user of the site for many years and don’t have any particular problems with it.
Well for a start it’s owned by Amazon, so if you use a Kindle device then it can be really useful with its integration. I have a Kobo, so there’s nothing. They’ve locked all the integration away unless you buy into their ecosystem.
On top of that, the review system just isn’t useful any more. As the linked article notes, books that have yet to be released can be review-bombed into oblivion by dint of being about something that a mob might not want. Or shitty books can be bot-reviewed into a 4/5 star position. I’ve fallen for a couple of well-reviewed books that turned out to be utter dog shit.
The review issues honestly just seems like issues with becoming too big/mainstream. Humans tend to ruin nice stuff like that
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.
Goodreads has always been bad. I’ve read appalling books (embarrassingly so) that were praised to high heaven by the author’s friends, who would hunt you down if you left a bad review, while authors without fangirls but with good books got fewer stars.
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).
Goodreads wasn’t exactly developing quickly before the buyout either, but it has certainly stagnated even more since then. The UI has been updated, but I don’t recall any significant improvement to functionality in ages.
Thanks for letting me know, Amazon Owned Washington Post!
They don’t. Jeff Bezos does. Not quite the same thing.