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.
Besides Goodreads, Amazon also, unfortunately, owns or has stakes in Book Depository, Abebooks, BookFinder & LibraryThing.
Not AbeBooks!?! 😲😭
Unfortunately, yes. Sometimes buying from them is unavoidable, since they seem to have more books listed than anywhere else. I recommend alibris, not as big, but not owned by amazon. Sometimes if I find a book on Abe, I’ll check and see if the same seller is on alibris, which they often will be. Alibris also actually lets you rate the seller unlike abe!
Thiftbooks is my goto for used but I’ve always used Abe as a backup. For new I use bookshop.org. So disappointing. I will check out alibris. I know the name, but have never used the service.
Didn’t know about ThiftBooks, thanks for mentioning.👍 And, possibly stupid question, how is bookshop.org supposed to work exactly? Was never quite clear on that.
I’m not totally sure, but i think bookshop does profit sharing regardless if the indie bookstore you designate is actually the seller/shipper. I subscribe to Libro.fm (a drm free audible alternative), and they do the same thing. I can designate an indie store and Libro splits a percentage of the profits with them.
There really is a need for some kind of exchange trade site. If you’re familiar with boardgame geek “math” trades, this is what I mean. Imagine a site like ebay, where you upload your books that you would like to trade away, and you can “like” books that you want in return. Then somehow there is a market value or score assigned to items so that they can be traded amongst many users automatically.
Now imagine this for everything. We could go back to a bartering economy while cutting waste and cost.
I am familiar! (as an owner of too many boardgames) I think this could work for a lot of things!
Thank you! I’ve seen this mentioned a couple of times and have been meaning to give it a try.
I like the idea.
But the license for the software and that i don’t even know underwhat license the content is makes me question if this is the answer to a foss goodreads.UI/UX is bad and frustrating, but I’m SO happy this exists.
Much akin to reddit, the best thing about goodreads isn’t the product itself so much as the communities that use it, and the resulting history of reviews/comments/etc. that build up over time.
The absence of these user generated reactions (for lack of a better catch-all) is a big part of why I never really managed to permanently migrate to Librarything instead. Though, given their devs are quite technical, one could hope they would consider connecting up with the fediverse some day too.
(I realise that many reviews on GR are worthless, but sadly if you’re interested in some particularly niche things, it can be not only awkward to find the right version of a book on LT, but often enough there just aren’t any reviews at all, or at least not enough to make it useful when a particular text is niche to begin with.
But assuming it federates in a way that’s actually useful, this at least might mean a beginning that could lead to better alternatives. If someone has to make the first move, I’m glad this happened.
I’ve been meaning to check this out! It sounds so cool and possibly interacts with other fediverse things?
Yes it does. You can follow BookWyrm accounts from Mastodon and Calckey. At least that is what I tested.
I signed up a few days ago. I never used GoodReads much. Last activity I had there was in 2013 and I kinda fell out of the habit of reading. But I picked up a book this week (and finished it in two days, haha), Recursion.
It let me import my GoodReads data and I’ve been slowly adding books to read to it. I think for me, the mental hurdle I had was the paralysis of choice. I decided to just pick a sci-fi book that was available for instant borrow on Libby and go from there. I currently started The Big Door Prize because I loved the first season of its TV adaptation. Happy to be reading again.
I feel that choice paralysis a lot. My reading moods fluctuate, so sometimes I want to read one genre or sometimes another, but I also have a massive TBR so I struggle determining what book I should read. I’ve learned to just let myself start something, and if it doesn’t work out, then I can stop and maybe pick it back up later. For instance, I just finished Prince of Thorns by Mark Lawrence, a book that I had tried to read three times prior. This was the first time my interest stuck, and now I am finishing the trilogy. But getting over that initial hurdle of “what should I read” can be difficult.
Awesome, thatnks for sharing, liked the idea of food reads but I’ve been put off by it being Amazon.
