They miss some critical features like tracking series and since they only offer integration with Open Library most of your books will have to be added manually.
Once https://www.librarything.com fixes their API, it would be nice to see an integration with Openreads.
I guess the point is being open-source and integrating with open-source projects. Is this the case with LibraryThing? 🤔
It’s not, and it’s run by a private for-profit corporation, but once they re-enable their API it doesn’t really matter for the purpose of scraping the data. Open data is open data, and integration is just a hook, not part of the core functionality of the app.
I wonder how this compares with Bookwyrm, which is federated.
This is an offline tracker, so it doesn’t compare per se. There were talks about integrating bookwyrm into the app, but as of now there is no public API.
Same issue. Both rely purely on Open Library who have very limited database, so you pretty much have to enter all data manually. That’s not an issue if you have 10 or 50 books. But once you reach 1000s it’s not viable.
This makes me think:
What if we could contribute our Calibre metadata to Bookwyrm ? All it would take is a plugin to connect Calibre servers to the Fediverse, right?
Definitely should be possible. And in general there are ways to get the data in, it’s just not average user-friendly. Even a simple Calibre export can be imported by a Bookwyrm instance admin, it just requires some data parsing before that. Nobody is really willing to do that on a scale that matters.
I was thinking:
- User installs plugin
- Popup window prompts for Fediverse login and offers a prominent Bookwyrm create account button with default instance or chose another, it would be cool if it would autofill everything except email and password.
- Once inside, it shows you a list of checkboxes where you can chose what to share: book info (metadata), user reviews (stars), is there anything else?
- Shows you a progress of what is being synced
- Once “closed”, it will run in the background every time you run Calibre, unless you set it to manual sync.
Any ideas?
I think it’s worth exploring, but maybe not in here. This is way off-topic from the original post.
Bookwyrm imported my goodreads export more or less fine, but (IDK if Amazon gave me them) my lists disappeared in the process, and trying to recreate them was the dealbreaker for me. My absurdly large book lists were casual and not something I needed to keep, but I have a few 50-100 book lists that I do care about and that would have required manually searching each title, and that’s where I drew the line.
It’s already enough of a hassle to go page by page through the 1000-1500 books I have on goodreads and check boxes. Typing them out is way too much work to migrate.
Eventually I’ll probably roll my own because I have other functionality requests none of the options meet, but goodreads lists are already not great, so not even matching them is a big step down.
Lists are not exported from Goodreads. They only allow exporting My Books section.
But yeah, DIY solution is the way to go. I gave up on using any site for tracking books, they all either have partial functionality or limited database. These days, I just use SQLite database with a custom Python scraper that I turned into a basic website that offers everything I need.
It’s why I wasn’t automatically blaming the other options. I never looked at the actual data to know if they were there.
But trying to recreate them was absolutely brutal, and has been with every option I tried. I looked at implementing my own down and dirty tool to make it more manageable in bookwyrm, but there was just too much mental overhead to get a grasp of the code base in my limited dev time. Just making a basic database and a couple scripts to display my favorites on a couple web pages seems a lot easier. Plus I can treat series as first class citizens in lists and pages with their own blurbs, which none of the bigger options seems to think is useful.
Sounds like an interesting tool! But the negative comments on here make me uncertain. Any more positive experiences? I actually recently thought about how Goodreads is not really what I want and I’m a developer. Not that I truly have time to contribute im afraid though .
I really like the app for my personal reading tracking. Been using it for a couple years, and this year (?) there was a huge update that improved it a lot (better UX/UI and statistics if I’m not mistaken).
It’s mostly an app that does what it should, but not more, and gets out the way, which is awesome.
I’ve been using it for a few months now and I think it is great. I can’t compare it to Goodreads and others because I have not used them, but it is pretty straight forward to add a book, give a rating and write a review. I like the UI a lot too.
The only problems I have with it is that the API they use is not very good for adding books in my native language and that backup is manual and I don’t know if it has integration with Android’s automatic backup.
Also, it would be nice to be able to write multiple reviews for the same book, it would be cool to see how much my vision and opinion of a particular title changed over time. I should probably suggest this feature on their github.
This project was actually my exit way from Goodreads. Unlike another commenter, I found virtually no issue with searching for books in European languages. All the statistics which GR offers are available, and you can easily import your books to the app. And of course, no ads, zero trackers and open source.
The only caveat is the social aspect, since this is an offline tracker.
Edit: If you have any concerns, hop on the matrix community where the dev is active.
