[HN Gopher] BookWyrm is a federated Goodreads replacement
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BookWyrm is a federated Goodreads replacement
Author : dredmorbius
Score : 300 points
Date : 2021-09-05 00:05 UTC (22 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (wedistribute.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (wedistribute.org)
| [deleted]
| dictatorsunion wrote:
| As an avid Goodreads user, Id say 80-90% of active GR users are
| female teenagers. Id suggest promoting on booktwitter or booktok
| instead if you want more traction. There's also StoryGraph in the
| running with the same if not more features and a pretty strong
| network effect already, but still miles away from GR. GR is the
| laggiest platform I have ever used, and the tech updates are
| minimal at best, but people still use it primarily because of the
| network size. Just pure network size.
| Aeolun wrote:
| > Id say 80-90% of active GR users are female teenagers.
|
| This explains a lot about the lists I see being popular on
| there.
| toyg wrote:
| _> As an avid Goodreads user, Id say 80-90% of active GR users
| are female teenagers._
|
| Lol, I would have said "50yo vanity-obsessed male geeks"
| instead, judging by the activity in my feed.
|
| I recently made a bit of an effort to use GR a bit more, to go
| through some of the challenges and increase my reading rates.
| The anglocentrism is tiring, though - all the "best" lists are
| dominated by mediocre Anglo writers. If I remember correctly,
| when "social lit" sites first exploded, they had basically
| segmented by language - I know Italians used Anubii rather than
| GR, for example. I picked GR because I was still somewhat in
| love with the anglosphere, I think I'm ready to move to
| something a bit more "i18n", but it's not clear what that might
| be.
| tpoacher wrote:
| What exactly is wrong with Goodreads? I keep hearing a lot of
| hate about it, but the reasons seem never expanded on.
|
| I use Goodreads to maintain a public bookshelf of books I have
| read or want to read. It's also nice that I can check what my
| friends are reading. Occasionally it's nice to read other
| people's views on a book. I typically tend not to agree, but it's
| nice that these exist.
|
| That's it. Isn't that what Goodreads is about? Seems like a nice
| website and perfectly suited for what it does. Am I missing
| something?
| matsemann wrote:
| Lots of discussions over the years about it here.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20904549
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24454221
|
| For me it works ok. But that's because I like you only use it
| to track. But if the other stuff worked better I might have
| used that too. A better recommendation system. Not insane
| loading times would maybe make me browse more etc. So much
| untapped potential here.
| jan_Inkepa wrote:
| It does feel a bit neglected/dead (except for the fact that
| people still use it a bunch) - the changes come rarely. In some
| sense this is nice! It's a stable piece of software that does
| what it should do.
|
| One thing I find lacking is that it seems to mostly be used by
| english-speakers. So the one case where I'd be curious to use
| the social networking features, for non-English-lanuage
| literature, it falls flat. There's no equivalent to it that I
| know of for the German-language world (that people actually
| use), which is irksome, because I'd actually use the social
| networking features there (whereas for English literature I
| know what I like and don't care what other people read, I don't
| know German literature as well).
|
| But not becoming terrible is a nice side-effect of this...it's
| not even a managed decline, it's just pottering along okay! But
| it is odd. I wonder what their high-level strategy as a
| business is.
| denisw wrote:
| In the German-speaking world, LovelyBooks [1] is quite
| popular. It seems to be strongly focused on fiction, though.
|
| [1]: https://www.lovelybooks.de/
| varjag wrote:
| Yeah. It's poised to become Amazon's Google Reader, but just as
| with Reader there's nothing truly wrong with it aside from lack
| of maintenance.
| input_sh wrote:
| - It sucks at recommending books. You may stumble upon some
| book in the home feed, but its recommendation is as good as if
| it didn't exist.
|
| - Lists suck. For example, it never anticipates even something
| as simple as abandoning a book (though you can create that).
|
| - There's like a whole industry of faking ratings and nobody
| cares about it enough to do anything about it.
|
| - It's owned by Amazon, but Amazon basically didn't touch it
| since the acquisition almost a decade ago.
|
| Well, they did so recently to kill the API access, which was
| its #1 selling point to me. I liked using it by not visiting
| their ugly design ever, but that's not a possibility anymore.
| verylittlemeat wrote:
| Goodreads will always win simply because it's where all the
| users are.
|
| Like reddit or any huge site its usefulness isn't in the
| presented top layer (recommendations/front page/popular list
| of x) it's the depth of millions of users.
|
| If you read a relatively obscure book and look it up on
| goodreads then you read through the reviews to find users who
| gave a high quality write up and then look at that user's
| profile. This will lead you to other users and books that are
| actual quality.
|
| You could create a smaller website with a higher quality
| surface level but it's going to be infected with the bias of
| a small "elite" userbase making it a basically useless echo
| chamber.
| poetaster wrote:
| While I generally agree that everything needs work, I also
| believe don't fix it if it isn't broke.'
| the_biot wrote:
| In other words, stop trying, let's just stick with the
| current terrible status quo. That's a supremely unhelpful
| comment to make, intended to discourage anyone from
| improving things ever. Shall we all just go back to a cave
| and knock some rocks together?
| verylittlemeat wrote:
| It's a reality check for anyone who makes a better
| goodreads and doesn't understand why it never gains
| traction.
|
| It's on par with complaining about facebook and creating
| your own better version of facebook while completely
| ignoring the reason why everyone is on facebook to begin
| with.
| dewey wrote:
| > It's owned by Amazon, but Amazon basically didn't touch it
| since the acquisition almost a decade ago.
|
| This is a good thing. In the recent year they updated the
| design in subtle ways to make it nicer to use and less rough
| around the edges too which was a nice surprise.
| ainzzorl wrote:
| > Amazon basically didn't touch it since the acquisition
| almost a decade ago.
|
| This is what I love about it. When something works for me
| (and Goodreads does), I don't want it to change.
| input_sh wrote:
| It's not a good thing when there are glaring issues that
| remain unfixed, like books receiving 1 star reviews while
| they're still being written.
| Brybry wrote:
| Personally, as a Goodreads user I don't care about the
| review ratings.
|
| I'm there for: a) making a list of things I want to read
| b) finding more books by authors (including upcoming) to
| add to that list c) release dates for books on that list
| (and sorting that list by date) d) seeing what other
| people are reading
|
| All of those tasks were time consuming before Goodreads
| and I'm extremely happy that some let's-refactor-our-
| website-for-whatever-reason push hasn't broken my use
| case.
|
| 1 and 5 star ratings for unreleased books are dumb but
| humans are really bad at 5 star rating systems anyway.
|
| I find there's far more value in the _number_ of ratings,
| but in the end books are often about personal taste.
| [deleted]
| mejutoco wrote:
| I like goodreads a lot often check reviews there. I was missing
| recommended books based on more than one book. Something more
| nuanced than books similar to x.
|
| I created my own solution for it and published it here:
|
| https://what3books.com
| [deleted]
| krono wrote:
| As far as I'm aware, it's the only service that lets you easily
| find out whether a book is part of a series/universe, where/how
| it fits in there, and notifies you about upcoming entries in
| series you follow (email notifications have never worked for me,
| but at least you can check on the site).
|
| Essentially series/universe discovery and news. This used to be
| massive painpoint for completionist me before Goodreads.
|
| If anyone knows of any alternatives I'm all ears by the way.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| I think the key is to seperate the catalogue of books and authors
| from the social and recommendation elements, which is another
| aspect of federation and de-centralization.
|
| If you're aiming to lock people in and own all their data, then
| you need to combine the two, but then you kill the social
| elements by sucking in lots of disparate communities. You can do
| something sub-reddit like, but if you're not actually interested
| in sucking up everyone's information then you can slice off the
| catalogue part to openlibrary and wikidata and have a much easier
| time building your specific social thing on top.
|
| Bookwyrm (and inventaire.io) seem to have adopted this approach,
| building on OpenLibrary and Wikidata catalogues.
|
| And in the background those two data projects interact at various
| levels and with other open data projects that build from the same
| sources. For example, there's wikidata projects that try to
| seperate out all the acadamic authors with the same name, so you
| can have multiple John Smith's and find the right one and connect
| them across different databases.
| personjerry wrote:
| It really feels like "federated" is to tech geeks (i.e. HN
| people) what "blockchain" is to a lot of non-tech people.
|
| What does federated do for me at all in solving this problem?
| rektide wrote:
| federated means your bookgroup could set up their own instance
| & everyone could either post their book reviewws there, or you
| could aggregate your own reviews into that instance. it's the
| freedom to start new communities, while still being able to
| participate worldwide.
|
| it means that there's a protocol there, at the heart, for
| having multiple parties cooperating. it means anyone is free to
| build their own server or client. it meams we're not all
| trapped in one walled garden, one silo, it means the freedom to
| innovate & evolve.
|
| right now there is not a lot of models for how we the peoe can
| host things online in an interoperable way. we can still use
| http & the technology that we have (unlike block chain), but we
| can use well defined vocabulary
| (https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-
| vocabulary/#activity-t...) & protocols as a base to communicate
| & interweave social networking systems.
| pharmakom wrote:
| I agree with everything you've said, but most users will
| never want to host their own instance. It might even be an
| anti feature, since it sounds like a bunch of work! This is
| not a benefit that most people are going to care about - at
| least in the way you have explained it.
| tigroferoce wrote:
| I think it's a different view. Technical-savvy people who
| know how the web was conceived and thought like
| decentralization because it promises freedom. In my
| (limited) experience users just want ease of use and nice
| UX, and just don't take into account the long term
| implications of their choices. I'm afraid, like someone
| said earlier, that decentralization solves a problem
| mainstream don't have and don't want to have.
| pharmakom wrote:
| I think the mainstream does care about decentralisation,
| but only in so far as it affects the final experience.
| Censorship on major social networks is a great example.
| People absolutely do care, but starting their own Reddit
| (for instance) is far outside of their abilities. Where
| would you even begin?
|
| They also don't care about how it is implemented, just so
| long as it works. Sometime I feel like the HN crowd cares
| more about what language a product was written in than
| how well it serves their needs!
|
| What is required is a platform which combines the UX of a
| centralised service with the ability to easily spin up
| new instances, is open-source, security audited, etc.
| etc.
| nsim wrote:
| I'm still trying to understand how this works at a functional
| level.
|
| I see you can find reviews via ActivePub services, like
| Mastodon, but you can only post from BookWyrm instances?
| i.e., you can't have one federated social identity that can
| post reviews and post other fediverse content?
| zdunn wrote:
| No. Unfortunately, the fediverse has kind of given up on
| the idea of a single identity using a variety of services.
| Every new ActivityPub services wants to own the user
| account and the interactions are one way or extremely
| limited (likes/reposts).
| atatatat wrote:
| Shows that the architects took an above average time
| considering the space, and that users may be turned off by data
| lock in due to previous community betrayal.
| mdoms wrote:
| None of this federated stuff will ever gain mainstream
| acceptance. I would bet my house on it. It adds multiple layers
| of complexity and a ton of UX trade-off, and doesn't solve any
| problems for a typical user.
| oehtXRwMkIs wrote:
| Ever heard of email?
| [deleted]
| varjag wrote:
| That's a stretch, as it has neither identity nor content
| federation. Would you call IP stack a federation protocol
| too?
| commoner wrote:
| I wouldn't make that bet. Mastodon isn't mainstream yet, but
| it does have almost a million active users:
|
| https://fediverse.party/en/mastodon
| smt88 wrote:
| A million active users is at least two orders of magnitude
| away from "mainstream".
| Scarblac wrote:
| It's the main difference between the WWW and the centralized
| information systems that came before it.
|
| I remember seeing the first Web pages at CERN, clicking
| through them a bit and being unimpressed. You sound like me
| back then.
| corobo wrote:
| I agree in terms of users running their own thing.
|
| What I do imagine will happen is that one instance takes off,
| gets itself a board or VC to answer to, removes activitypub,
| runs away with the win
|
| Tech people will be mad but overall nobody will be able to do
| anything about it as they'll just ground-up rewrite
| eventually. The users won't care about the drama at all
|
| Money is a bastard
|
| I'd love to be wrong on it and I'm not just sitting here
| doom'n and gloom'n, I'm trying to ActivityPub-enable all of
| my projects as it happens! I do believe it's something to
| watch out for though
| [deleted]
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > What I do imagine will happen is that one instance takes
| off, gets itself a board or VC to answer to, removes
| activitypub, runs away with the win
|
| Any instance which did this would be totally forgoing the
| network effect of being able to link up w/ other instances.
| So this is quite unlikely, at least in most cases.
| corobo wrote:
| Any instance that did this wouldn't care, they have all
| the users
|
| See also Google talk, Facebook messages, literally any
| other thing that was once open access ever by a big
| company. That racist Twitter gab is an isolated Mastodon
| install last I heard if you want to see this in action,
| though I wouldn't recommend going there
| rapnie wrote:
| > doesn't solve any problems for a typical user.
|
| Mentioning "Federation" as a feature will not be very
| appealing to the average user, indeed. It is more of a
| technical concept. But there are features that derive from an
| app being federated.
|
| Ever heard people complain they were suddenly banned for no
| apparent reason, and have no means to get it fixed? In a
| federated service you may just go to another instance (and in
| future migrating / controlling your own content will be
| easy).
|
| A big centralized platform has a single ToS, and algorithms
| throw random people from the entire userbase at you. In a
| federated system you can choose a server with rules / ToS
| that appeals to you. An individual server is like a community
| with own culture and topics of interest.
|
| Wanna escape ads, algorithmic driven UI? Choose any federated
| server (currently fediverse is ad-free). Server adds ads
| later on? Migrate to one that does not.
| rektide wrote:
| this worship of solving user problems pretends like the one
| or two companies running the big huge massive winner take all
| monopoly walled-garden networks are going to keep being good,
| going to keep doing things in the users best interest, are
| going to make better and better product.
|
| it's a world view that does not click with how i view
| software development & progress. i see long term stewartship
| as hard, see most walled gardems eventually succumb to
| acceued bad decisions or events that they become saddled
| with, or poorly steered into, or simply not aligned with
| their users on. federation isnt an answer to a problem, it is
| the theory that many problems require more than one ultra-
| massified uber-answer. federation says that problems and
| their answers require experimemtation, require adaption. it
| believes in protocols to agree upon & communicate across
| people & communities with. federation is freedom to generate
| new interfaces & extend capabilities.
|
| i think it's dangerous to only ask "what can help the user
| now". technical environments need to be diverse &
| potentiated, need to have creative possibilities open.
| federation gives us both a quick, well known, easy to adopt,
| easy-to-host users & communities basis, and gives us the
| liberty to keep exploring further. i would trade these
| liberties for no products, and i think users over time will
| see how trapped they are & appreciate living life not under
| the auspices of ultra-massified software titans, but instead,
| with smaller, more adaptive, more community based (but
| interoperating) federations.
| gverrilla wrote:
| I may be wrong, but all I have seen "federated" resembles one
| of the worst and most harmful websites ever created (twitter),
| which is really disappointing and disgusting. Likewise, the
| "blockchain" scene talks about innovation all day but the bulk
| of their creation is boring and dated, recreating the
| banking/finance scene using new tech with minor changes. Back
| in the day, people thought machine guns would produce peace!
| [deleted]
| bottled_poe wrote:
| Just had a look. Unsurprisingly, the demographic of the user base
| is skewed to IT professionals (at least at this time). Whether
| that's a good thing is subjective, but I personally want broader
| perspectives on literature. I think this will be a difficult
| problem for bookwyrm to overcome.
| Shorel wrote:
| With less than a thousand users, we can't really say anything
| about the demographic of the user base.
|
| Let it grow for a few months and see.
| Krasnol wrote:
| We get this service early and for free. To advertise this to
| the general public should be the least we can to.
| uncomputation wrote:
| I honestly wonder sometimes if HN is the best place to market a
| lot of the things that get posted here. A lot of people on HN
| are developers and I think they post here because it's _their_
| community but in reality it's actually not a good fit for a lot
| of products. Maybe some dev/SAAS things, but something like
| Goodreads? That should be marketed to readers, not developers.
| The only reason it gets posted here is because the development
| side is interested (supposedly) in the decentralized technical
| nature of the product, but that actually matters very little to
| most people.
| onionisafruit wrote:
| I don't see this as marketing to get new users. It's more
| showing peers something interesting you found or are working
| on. Of course they'll be happy to get some users from hn, but
| I suspect that isn't really the goal here.
| atatatat wrote:
| That this isn't implicitly clear at minimum says a lot
| about general shift in tone.
| irrational wrote:
| This is a problem with any similar thing that already has a
| heavily established site. One is my hobbies is boardgames. The
| longest running site is Board Game Geek (BGG). It's age shows
| (this was the front page of the site until very recently
| https://www.boardgamegeek.com/dashboard), but more modern
| competitors have had issues trying to get a foot hold. The most
| recent one is Board Game Atlas. They have tried all kinds of
| things to lure users, such as contests, but I'm sure the
| percentage of people using it is a fraction to BGG.
| fsiefken wrote:
| hi irrational, one of my hobbies too, currently playing hive
| solo, mint works an warp's edge). I understood the bgg site
| was overhauled a few years ago to make it more responsive. I
| suppose it's more modern and looked better on mobile but I
| liked the old dated interface as well. How does it show it's
| age and what would you have wanted? I subscribe to a few
| geeklists and have my favorite game a subforums bookmarked. I
| rarely go through the homepage but if I do I like the
| serendipity of it all. So much content. A "digital garden"
| where the flowers are the games
| counternotions wrote:
| Very excited to see a decentralized alternative to Amazon-owned
| Goodreads & LibraryThing, the latter which I recently learned is
| 40%-owned by Amazon through a subsidiary AbeBooks.
|
| I'm not too familiar with the fediverse model. I noticed that
| registration is closed on the primary instance
| bookwyrm.social.[1] Is the ideal use case of bookwyrm for each
| user to host their own instance? Like this one:
| https://book.dansmonorage.blue/
|
| As a user, I wouldn't want to sign up on someone's hobbyist
| bookwyrm instance only for them to shut it down later and lose
| all my data.
|
| 1. https://docs.joinbookwyrm.com/instances.html
| matthberg wrote:
| That info is out of date, bookwyrm.social is in open
| registration now. A more accurate list of instances is
| available here: https://joinbookwyrm.com/instances/. I signed
| up on bookwyrm.social (here: https://bookwyrm.social), though
| it took a notably long time to receive the email confirmation
| message.
| Krasnol wrote:
| The whole instance is quite slow now.
|
| Email took something around 20min for me.
| commoner wrote:
| Probably the HN effect. Give it a day and I'd expect the
| site to speed up as the traffic falls.
| Krasnol wrote:
| Yes, I'm pretty sure that's it but it was still working.
|
| Just a bit slow.
| bookwyrm-social wrote:
| yes, it's running slower than usual because of the
| traffic spike (more registrations in an hour than over
| the last two months)
| input_sh wrote:
| > As a user, I wouldn't want to sign up on someone's hobbyist
| bookwyrm instance only for them to shut it down later and lose
| all my data.
|
| Mastodon goes around this problem by only linking to servers
| that adhere to their covenant[0], which includes sane stuff
| like daily backups, >1 person with access to the server,
| minimum of 3 months notice before shutdown, and moderation.
|
| So, any community you see here[1] promises to give you a
| notice. I'm assuming other software will eventually reach the
| number of servers where something similar makes sense to
| implement.
|
| [0] https://joinmastodon.org/covenant
|
| [1] https://joinmastodon.org/communities
| brachika wrote:
| Goodreads is amazing at what it is, which is an IMDB equivalent
| for books. Yeah, it is neglected, outdated and owned by a shady
| megacorporation, but I don't see any viable alternatives as of
| now.
| deck4rd wrote:
| I think Letterboxd is becoming a viable alternative to IMDb, so
| I don't see why one can't come along for Goodreads too.
| [deleted]
| patchtopic wrote:
| the signup confirmation email for BooKWyrm seems to have stopped
| working.
| bookwyrm-social wrote:
| It's just running very slowly! There have been a lot of signups
| and it maxed out what mailgun will send. If you don't get an
| email you can contact the instance admin directly
| hirako2000 wrote:
| "A portion of the proceeds go towards the Yunakin land tax."
|
| An _Anti Corporate_ organisation adopting a very corporate
| measure in my view.
|
| If taxes could lead to justice, then native Americans would be
| far less prone to poverty, alcoholism and depression.
|
| About the product itself, it's hard to see how this is an
| alternative to goodreads. The federation is designed in a way
| that silos communities. A great model for decentralised
| moderation etc. The parallel could be made with reddit, not so
| much with goodreads where over half of the books in existence are
| listed, very often rated/reviewed.
| rektide wrote:
| > _The federation is designed in a way that silos communities._
|
| You seem to have taken the exact opposite view of what anyone
| in the fediverse would consider this as. This is many connected
| communities. Not siloed. That's what "decentralized" means,
| their very first major point on the website.
|
| If there's real gaps in how federation works to connect, the
| fediverse is happy to discuss, adapt, & adopt: bring on your
| more specific complaints! This is supposed to be the cure for
| silos! Everyone can run whatever they want, and we can
| interoperate! Interoperate & co-evolve.
| hirako2000 wrote:
| Sorry I wasn't clear with what I meant stating silos. And I'm
| all for decentralisation, and value the open effort of
| Bookwyrm.
|
| Silo: the federation aspect, from what I understand of the
| currently hosted communities using this tech is making the
| exploration of books contained within each federated host.
| Maybe I am wrong in which case I will retract my critic.
| Peertube suffers the same problem. So a constructive comment
| would be: decentralisation is great, and if the federation
| design bridges the gap so that information from each node in
| the system can be searched then that's a rock solid solution
| as a repository of books information, reviews and
| discussions.
|
| Please accept my apologise, I certainly came off as negative
| and the comment I made was not deserved , especially
| considering the free and open effort there.
| fragileone wrote:
| With PeerTube there's Sepia Search [1] which allows
| searching for videos across all instances. All federated
| networks basically need open-source, centralised search
| engines like Sepia Search to enable users to search across
| all federated instances.
|
| [1] http://sepiasearch.org/
| rektide wrote:
| > _The federation is designed in a way that silos communities._
|
| You seem to have taken the exact opposite view of what anyone
| in the fediverse would consider this as. This is many connected
| communities. Not siloed. That's what "decentralized" means,
| their very first major point on the website.
|
| An unfortunately limited & skeptical view. Hopefully you just
| need to be better informed. If there's real gaps in how
| federation works to connect, the fediverse is happy to discuss,
| adapt, & adopt: bring on your more specific complaints! This is
| supposed to be the cure for silos! Everyone can run whatever,
| they want, and we can interoperate!
| dsq wrote:
| Are GoodReads/Amazon and others cool about this use of their
| exported data? Can BookWyrm expect lawsuits? Genuinely curious,
| not trolling.
| indigo945 wrote:
| In the EU, GDPR makes it clear that as the user, you own the
| data. Companies are legally required to allow you to export
| your data, also in part to create more competition among
| platforms.
|
| No idea about the US, though, where social platforms seem to
| sometimes come with clauses that make users waive their
| copyright (which would be unenforceable in Europe).
| newbamboo wrote:
| Will it have fake quotes too?
| mathnmusic wrote:
| GoodReads is all but dead for many. A few months ago, they
| deprecated their API keys (without notice).
|
| I started building a GoodReads-equivalent but realized that many
| people care more about learning from multiple media formats
| (blogs, videos, research papers, interactive explorables,
| podcasts, courses etc) rather than simply reading books. Because
| there are too many projects attempting to build a new GoodReads,
| I ended up building something more oriented for multimedia
| learners.
|
| It's up and running, open-source, built with Ruby on Rails and
| supports protocols like ActivityPub, RSS etc. There is a
| companion browser extension, integration with Slack groups,
| Twitter and more, and a WIP mobile app. Like GoodReads, you can
| build your learning lists and embed them on your sites.
|
| It participates in fediverse so your reviews can be broadcasted
| to your followers on Mastodon, PeerTube etc but full federation
| is not yet there because it has an underlying knowledge graph
| that will need to be synchronised across instances.
|
| I think many HN users may be interested in checking it out:
|
| https://learnawesome.org/
|
| https://github.com/learn-awesome/learn
| mathnmusic wrote:
| One of the cool things that the knowledge graph enables is that
| you can follow "topics" and get learning resources like latest
| research papers for THAT TOPIC in your feed - even outside the
| main site. This is the power of ActivityPub which is really a
| distributed pub/sub for the open Web. My motivation for
| building this feature came from the reproducibility crisis: I
| want to be alerted when something I believe has come under
| question or has been falsified.
| Scarblac wrote:
| Where do you get the books from? I'm often surprised when I
| start reading an obscure Dutch second hand book that Goodreads
| has it. Is the ISBN database open data?
| mathnmusic wrote:
| OpenLibrary (relatively less known project by Internet
| Archive) is doing good work on collecting identifiers for
| books and works, which LearnAwesome leverages. But if you
| check in app/utilities/book.rb, you will notice that we have
| our own data enrichment pipeline to work with multiple
| sources.
| input_sh wrote:
| If you mean ISBNs in general, that's not available. However
| plenty of libraries around the world do publish their own
| list of ISBNs, and you'll find dozens of datasets and search
| engines that combine those into one.
|
| You're gonna have to move away from western languages
| entirely to find a book that's not available in one of those.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| Goodreads is owned by Amazon, and a lot of the data in
| various digital sources (both real and correct and random or
| mistaken) seem to come from people listing physical books for
| sale through Amazon. (Library catalogues are another common
| source)
|
| The ISBN codes seems to be in some weird legal gray area.
|
| The codes can be broken down so you can tell (to some degree)
| which language, geographic region and publisher was involved
| and whether the ISBN is valid (as in meets a checksum
| constraint) and has been "issued" (a continually updating
| list) managed in a decentralised manner but since it's an
| older system, it wasn't ever really designed for this kind of
| usage.
|
| It also hits the problem, that these days you care a little
| less about the actual physical object, which ISBN was
| designed around, but certainly a trove of data hidden there.
| personjerry wrote:
| GoodReads isn't about learning though. It's about books. I
| think there's value and potential in the niche you've chosen. I
| want to point out that the "learning" niche is very different
| than the "book review" niche and comes with its own set of very
| strong competitors.
| leetrout wrote:
| This is all new to me. Who competes in this space? Or what
| are some good keywords to search with?
| bogwog wrote:
| Learning? Just search for "learn <subject>" and you'll see
| a bunch. I remember my university had a partnership with
| one called Lynda.com, but that seems to have been acquired
| by LinkedIn.
| leetrout wrote:
| Wow you've got a lot going on. Do you have any stats on usage
| you feel like sharing? I'm curious how people have discovered
| this and how it has grown since this seems outside any circles
| I am around except HN.
| avnigo wrote:
| I recently came across the API issue too; from their page on
| APIs [0]
|
| > Goodreads no longer issues new developer keys for our public
| developer API and plans to retire the current version of these
| tools.
|
| I generally find that I trust their book ratings more than any
| other sites, though, seeing as they are user-generated, and
| also given the amount of users being in the 10s of millions.
|
| BookWyrm seems pretty fantastic and promising from what I see,
| but I don't know that it would attract the current Goodreads
| user. I'm really hoping it gets some traction.
|
| [0]: https://help.goodreads.com/s/article/Does-Goodreads-
| support-...
| vosper wrote:
| > I generally find that I trust their book ratings more than
| any other sites, though, seeing as they are user-generated
|
| There are far too many reviews for advanced copies seeded by
| publishers, though, and there's no consistent disclosure or
| way to filter these out.
|
| That, and the rating system is far too simplistic. When
| you're optimizing for engagement then having users spend a
| lot of time reading reviews is probably good. It's not
| optimized for time spent to find a good book to read, though.
| avnigo wrote:
| Agreed. I was more so referring to the law of large
| numbers, hoping that from their large user base it's more
| likely to get a more representative rating than a site with
| a smaller user base maybe suffering from some sampling
| bias.
| streamofdigits wrote:
| at first sight very promising: an online application that is
| catering to specialized interests (hence very specific data /
| internal business logic) yet able to be both decentralized
| (multiple instances) and integrating via activitypub with other
| (social media type) platforms in the fediverse
|
| the moment the open source community realises that open source is
| not just about freeing up things conjured up in proprietary
| context but opens entirely new universes will be a tipping point
| of sorts...
| Shorel wrote:
| Heads up: The GoodReads export takes a long time.
|
| I'm still waiting for mine to be delivered.
| bookwyrm-social wrote:
| There are two types of data exports from GoodReads - a full
| data export, and a csv download. The csv download is what you
| want, and it is generally very quick
| (https://www.goodreads.com/review/import)
| Shorel wrote:
| Thank you, I confused them both.
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