BookWyrm Social Reading

[Quoth]

Anyone using https://joinbookwyrm.com/?

Personally I'm not interested in my "reading" being tracked or shared, but there may be other aspects of value.

Mastodon seems better than Facebook or Twitter and can't be bought out. Though an individual server instance or Bookwyrm could be?

Watch out for those high speed .303 book worms.

[Paperbackstash]

Never heard of it

As much as I have enjoyed Goodreads for around 15 years now, I don't have interest in joining a second social media type of reader website

[ChrisHistorian76]

I've also never heard of this site.

This does make me think of a question though. Has anybody found a site that does a good job of replicating FictFact? I really miss that site!

[rantanplan]

I have tried it several times and abandoned it several times. Even though I like the idea of having an open source social media platform for reading, I found that many books weren't as of then available and I had to add all the information by hand. It was just too tedious for me to keep up with it.

In the end, it was a worse storygraph in my experience. Your mileage may vary on the hosted instance and the book languages.

[Frogm4n]

That's going to be the problem on any community built platform. Someone has to take the initiative to enter the data or find a reliable source that it can be imported from. It's the classic chicken vs egg problem.

[maddz]

I have zero desire to join any social site or book discussion site. Unless it's people I know well, I'm not a sociable person, and my opinion of a book is unlikely to coincide with somebody else's. I also have odd reading tastes for my demographic: Amazon keeps pushing chick lit and YA fantasy at me; I despise the former, and with rare exceptions I find the latter puerile.

I post reviews on my LibraryThing account and on The Tavern. Netgalley titles get posted there as well. That's it for me.

[kyteflyer]

I have Goodreads but considering dropping it, now that I have achieved what I joined for ( to get reading again)…

[Uncle Robin]

Originally Posted by rantanplan

In the end, it was a worse storygraph in my experience. Your mileage may vary on the hosted instance and the book languages.

I don't use any of the Storygraph's social features, other posting some reviews to Mastodon, but when I first joined Mastodon a year ago, I copped plenty of flak from very aggressively self-righteous Bookwyrm users for daring to prefer a privately owned service that better met my needs than Bookwyrm

[rantanplan]

So I created a new Bookwyrm account yesterday on their flagship instance. The problems I had a few months ago are still present:

• Existing book data is not properly maintained (though everyone can contribute so I simply updated them)
• Linking books to have multple editions is only possible if they share a common ISBN. No arbritary linking is currently possible.
• Authors often exists multiple times without an option to link them.
• Though there is a reading goal section and the service very much revolves around that, there are no fancy statistics about overall progress, genre preferences etc.

What is great though is that you can just follow someone from your Mastodon accounts and get all of the user's updates and reviews in your timeline.

Overall, it is a lot of work if you want to use it in a satisfactory way. However, if you put in the effort, you may actually have cleaner data in your reading history that goodreads or storygraph allows for.

[Quoth]

If the ISBN is the same, then they are the same editions, just different print runs. A real different edition is any revision to content, formatting or size.

[JSWolf]

If you don't care or want the social stuff, StoryGraph is a great place to go.

https://app.thestorygraph.com

[Uncle Robin]

Originally Posted by rantanplan

Overall, it is a lot of work if you want to use it in a satisfactory way. However, if you put in the effort, you may actually have cleaner data in your reading history that goodreads or storygraph allows for.

As someone who has entered >500 books manually into Storygraph, the idea of doing it all over again on another site gives me the screaming heebie jeebies. Having that experience though does make me curious - how is the data Bookwyrm allows "cleaner"? Entering my exact editions into Storygraph has been and remains the one major pain point of the experience, but in the end, when I persist, I always get the exact edition - same ISBN,, same cover, same publisher, same publication date. The process is tedious and often requires intervention from either one of their volunteer librarians or the paid support staffer, so I often don't bother and just pick an edition that's "close enough" But when I do bother, everything matches. How does Bookwyrm exceed that level of detail?

[rantanplan]

Bookwyrm is entirely community driven and I haven’t found any situation where I needed mod support. The downside to that is that they are more vulnerable to vandalism.

[Uncle Robin]

Originally Posted by rantanplan

Bookwyrm is entirely community driven and I haven’t found any situation where I needed mod support. The downside to that is that they are more vulnerable to vandalism.

Indeed. I am still curious to know what you meant by "cleaner data" - it's an interesting choice of adjective

[rantanplan]

Originally Posted by Uncle Robin

Indeed. I am still curious to know what you meant by "cleaner data" - it's an interesting choice of adjective

I can make sure that everything in the book profile is correct. If there is an error, I can just update it.