Argh, putting completely aside the “owned by Amazon” problem, Goodreads these days is just miserable software—slow, clunky UX, just ate a book review.
So… is #bookwyrm shaping up? Are there other alternatives? Ideally needs “would like to read” that is fast and easy to add to, and sharing out of reviews. Bonus for “read X books a year” goal.
@luis_in_brief BookWyrm is definitely improving, it's ~recently added support for hashtags and a "stopped reading" shelf to complement the existing "to read," "currently reading," and "read" shelves and the ability to create arbitrary new shelves.
Development velocity doesn't match Mastodon or Pixelfed, but chugging along nonetheless 🚀
@luis_in_brief I use Bookwyrm, but honestly not heavily. You just prompted me to go in and update all my reading for the last month, more or less. That's not a comment on its quality though; I was never a Goodreads regular, either. Bookwyrm is decent and worth a look, though very much a shoestring project.
@scott Sadly, part of why I’ve stuck with Goodreads this long is that 50% of what I do with it is hit “post on goodreads” on my Kindle, 45% is “ooh, I want to read this, I’ll record that on Goodreads”, and 5% is frustration.
So I suspect I’d use something not hooked to Kindle… a lot less. Which maybe should finally push me to look seriously at a Boox, but I assume any link out from that to something Goodreads-like (especially if also fediverse/hobby) would be flaky.
@kendraserra It’d be really nice to natively integrate here. But last I looked Bookwyrm was very much a side project and needed a loooooot of love. Which is a shame because it conceptually is great.
(Sort of wish @internetarchive would pick it up as a UX to their book database and tools…)
@kendraserra@internetarchive (Now I’m idly wondering what a Boox-IA-fediverse bizdev partnership might look like. You could do some madly fun stuff with that, if a genie provided a pile of money to kickstart it.)
@ldodds@luis_in_brief I wanted to switch to StoryGraph, but their import didn’t track multiple readings, and didn’t have an API so I could build an importer. With so many years of reading logs, and over 200 books last year, I’m not entering it manually.
I asked if they’d mind me making a browser plug-in to enhance their site to do advanced imports and they didn’t like the idea.
@luis_in_brief@ldodds I think the user experience at StoryGraph is tops. Only concern is data portability. Honestly haven’t tried exporting BookWyrm either though…
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