[HN Gopher] Bookwyrm - A federated social network for reading books
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Bookwyrm - A federated social network for reading books
Author : susanthenerd
Score : 327 points
Date : 2023-07-19 12:34 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (joinbookwyrm.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (joinbookwyrm.com)
| briandear wrote:
| Ok, hard truth time:
|
| My step mom is in her 60s, a prolific reader, member of two book
| clubs and most of her friends are readers. She would never think
| about joining Bookwyrm because the value prop makes no sense to
| her. Why does anyone care about federated? (I'm talking normal
| people here.) Mastodon, Pleroma? What are those? Who cares? Why?
| (Again, talking as normal people here, the kind of people you'd
| talk to waiting in line for a Southwest Airlines flight to
| Orlando.)
|
| "Federated, anti-corporate" -- the creator of this site might
| think that's important, but most people don't care.
|
| What does "anti-corporate" even mean? That is going to turn a lot
| of users off because it feels political. It's also unnecessary as
| a sales tool because what would "pro-corporate" mean in the
| context of a book social network? A lot of the books people want
| to read are published by corporations. Most of the self published
| stuff goes through Amazon. So "anti-corporate" is what? An
| aspiration? Or just a tagline? Unless this is a social network
| for samizdat (which would actually be pretty awesome..)
|
| Let me put this another way: A book readers' social network is an
| awesome idea. Goodreads proved it could work. But I don't
| understand the market problem this one is solving.
|
| If it were me, I would probably create a network out of a
| specific book genre or niche, then develop from there. But
| "Goodreads for Anarchists" doesn't really light any fires for me.
|
| Still, good luck to the creators. Great to see people trying to
| build things!
| Angostura wrote:
| > She would never think about joining Bookwyrm because the
| value prop makes no sense to her. Why does anyone care about
| federated?
|
| Why she even need to worry or know about it being federated?
| She would just a list of book clubs and choose one (in my case
| I chose an instance based in the UK because ... I'm in the UK.)
|
| All 'Federated' means is - "if no one is talking about a
| particular book in your local book club, you can also opt to
| take part in conversations going in other book clubs."
| goodpoint wrote:
| > "Federated, anti-corporate" -- the creator of this site might
| think that's important, but most people don't care.
|
| Most people never learn and fall for the same tricks every
| time. Bait and switch, enshittification, and the chickens come
| home to roost.
|
| > hard truth time
|
| So other people are either lying or to soft to accept the
| truth? Please spare us.
| bluefishinit wrote:
| > Goodreads proved it could work. But I don't understand the
| market problem this one is solving.
|
| Goodreads and Shelfari both got bought by Amazon. They killed
| Shelfari and froze Goodreads development. As users, federation
| protects us from this. We even have the choice of running our
| own instance.
| briandear wrote:
| I get it. But how big of a demand is there for that? Does the
| average Wednesday night neighborhood book club care? I am not
| denying that there is value there for someone, but most
| people don't care. People that read books at a level of
| enthusiasm to join a network about reading don't think about
| that stuff. Federation is a feature but it really isn't an
| above the fold concern for the vast majority of the potential
| audience.
|
| My point is that the value prop of this site isn't
| federation, it "a social network for books."
|
| This could be marketed as a tool for virtual book clubs and
| communities. "Your book club, anywhere" kind of thing. This
| could be marketed as a tool for real world book clubs to use.
| There are thousands of book clubs who would probably love an
| easy to use tool for managing those clubs. Focusing on that
| aspect would be huge in my opinion. If the more tech astute
| want to "run their own instance," that feature exists. Sort
| of like Wordpress for books -- you have the Wordpress.com for
| those that just want to use the platform and the .org version
| for those that want to self-host as an example.
|
| The ideological aspects are secondary assuming the goal is to
| grow and have a lot of people caring about this. A huge
| independent book community would be amazing. But this won't
| get huge if normal people don't have a reason to care.
| sanderjd wrote:
| I'm with you here. I'll be bullish on federation when I
| understand what non-ideological problems it solves. I
| totally share the ideology! (And I get the sense that you
| do too.) But that's not enough. It needs to be _useful_ to
| be durable.
| the_third_wave wrote:
| Federation is what keeps SMTP in place as the default
| electronic communications channel. Alternatives come and
| go but SMTP abides, there to cover your posterior when
| that fancy instant shout channel app flips over and goes
| the way of the dodo.
|
| While many of the current proponents of federation are
| wont to explain the concept in line with their own
| ideologies - usually in the form of references to anti-
| Capitalism, Anarchism or some form of Marxism, often
| mixed in with a heavy dose of MDS when it comes to
| proposing alternatives to Twitter - this does not make
| the concept of federation ideological. It just makes it a
| widely applicable concept which has shown its usefulness
| for a very long time.
| sanderjd wrote:
| I don't think people fall back to SMTP when a chat
| product goes away, I think they find a new centralized
| proprietary chat product.
|
| SMTP survives in its federated form because of path
| dependency. And people didn't start using email because
| it was federated, they started using it because it was an
| entirely new capability to most people. The federation
| was how its creators managed to implement such a thing at
| that period of time, but nobody in the 90s was saying
| "email is great because it is decentralized!", they were
| saying "email is great because I don't have to wait days
| for a piece of paper to travel across the continent and
| it's cheaper and faster to type than to make a phone
| call!".
|
| Another commenter put this well: decentralization /
| federation of social networks thus far seems to be a
| _feature_ but not a _benefit_. What is the benefit to
| users, what can they do with a decentralized network that
| they couldn 't otherwise do? So far, the answers to this
| are ideological, the benefit is "I don't want to use an
| application centrally run by XYZ corporation, and this
| lets me achieve that goal". I think that's incredibly
| reasonable, but it is downstream of ideology rather than
| utility.
| the_third_wave wrote:
| > I don't think people fall back to SMTP when a chat
| product goes away, I think they find a new centralized
| proprietary chat product.
|
| ...after they told their "friends" (i.e. other users of
| the failed app) via email about that hot new app that is
| totally going to be the place to be. That is what I mean
| with "SMTP abides", it is there and will be there while
| the centralised proprietary churn comes and goes. SMTP is
| easy to set up, compatibility is close to guaranteed -
| Google's attempts to turn Ee-mail into Gee-mail have
| failed, Microsoft never managed to extend/extinguish it -
| and it runs on just about every piece of hardware known
| to mankind. Upkeep is simple as well, the spam problem
| has been solved a long time ago, email generally "just
| works".
|
| It can even work as a chat server by using something like
| Delta Chat [1] if you're turned off by the "old school"
| user agents.
|
| [1] https://delta.chat/en/
| goodpoint wrote:
| Claiming that federation is ideological is itself a very
| ideological statement.
|
| Being able to have an independent platform instead of a
| corporate-controlled one is very useful in practice.
| sanderjd wrote:
| > Claiming that federation is ideological is itself a
| very ideological statement.
|
| No, it isn't.
|
| Federation is ideological because it is not (yet?) in and
| of itself a useful feature. It is a feature desired by
| people (like myself) who have an ideology that attracts
| them to the idea.
|
| Ask yourself: What is the selling point of federation /
| decentralization to someone who does have any ideology
| whatsoever with respect to technology? I want there to be
| a good answer to this question, but I've yet to see a
| compelling one.
| bluefishinit wrote:
| > But how big of a demand is there for that?
|
| I think every Goodreads or Shelfari user would benefit from
| the service not being dead.
| sanderjd wrote:
| Definitely. I _hate_ that Shelfari is dead and that
| Goodreads sucks. That 's why I clicked on this comment
| thread. But what should convince me that this product
| will not be dead? Sure, I believe that it won't be
| _killed by Amazon_ in particular, but why should I be
| convinced that it will survive on its own terms?
| sleepybrett wrote:
| i suppose you could start by not coming into threads and
| shitting on it sight unseen but instead look at ways you
| can make it better, so that you can have an alternative
| to shlfari and goodreads.
| sanderjd wrote:
| I haven't once shat on it, and it isn't sight unseen,
| I've been playing with it since I saw this link. I think
| they've done an excellent job with it, and I really hope
| it succeeds, because I really want something like this.
|
| But I also think briandear is fundamentally right that
| for this to be successful and thus useful to me for more
| than a short period of time, it needs to have a selling
| point that doesn't only appeal to computer nerds like me
| who know what "decentralization" even is, and care about
| it.
| bluefishinit wrote:
| It will need a community to survive, so I think people
| being excited about it is a great first step. I feel
| comfortable investing into building a community knowing
| it won't be purchased and killed. That doesn't mean
| success is guaranteed, but it is a prerequisite for me to
| invest in a social network at this point.
|
| I'll add that a vertical like books probably has a better
| chance of succeeding than a more general purpose social
| network, because there's always going to be value in
| providing metadata around books, it's timeless
| information more like wikipedia than twitter. I see a lot
| of value in creating a community driven and community
| owned corpus of book information and reviews.
| sanderjd wrote:
| But if it will need a community to survive, then the
| selling point can't be "it won't go away after you use it
| for awhile". Or if it is, it needs some compelling
| narrative for why it will definitely attract a durable
| community.
|
| FWIW: I think this product looks really great and already
| does a bunch of stuff I want, and looks waaaay better and
| runs waaaay faster than Goodreads, and those are all
| absolutely big selling points that I think could break
| through with the general book-loving community, and I
| think that's awesome! But I just don't think "it is
| decentralized" or "it will definitely not die" are clear
| selling points for it.
| bluefishinit wrote:
| If it needs a community to survive, you first need to
| bootstrap that community. People who care about
| federation and are willing try federated projects seem
| like a great community to help things get started.
| Especially because like I said earlier, this is in a
| vertical where value isn't locked into social silos.
| Reviews that these users make won't only be read by early
| users who they know, but will provide value to all future
| users.
|
| It's normal and actually required to start with early
| adopters and innovators before reaching more mainstream
| audiences.
| sanderjd wrote:
| Sure, I definitely don't begrudge them their choices!
| It's their product, if they think this is a good way to
| bootstrap it, that's up to them.
|
| But my feedback is that I think a better way to bootstrap
| would be to focus on figuring out what book enthusiasts
| dislike about the current products in this space and
| building that (for what it's worth, I think they're also
| doing a pretty good job of this!), and on figuring out a
| financial model to sustain the project for a long time.
|
| But I can do it that way when I build a product like
| this, they certainly don't need to care a whit about my
| feedback.
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| > Federation is a feature but it really isn't an above the
| fold concern for the vast majority of the potential
| audience.
|
| Federation is a feature, not a benefit. I read your other
| comments and generally agree. To be fair, the feature vs
| benefits (that people care about) is an ongoing problem
| will nearly all new products (I've clicked into) that are
| shared on HN.
|
| You'd think by now more would get it, but they don't.
| Instead, it's more, "Ooh! Ooh! Look at our features..." but
| as you said...no one cares. I would say it also falls under
| the product classic "don't make me think." Yeah, if I had
| the time I might be able to convert features to benefits
| but that takes effort. Sorry. I'm out. Next!!!
|
| Benefits! It's all about me. F*k your features. What are
| you going to do for me (i.e., benefits)?
| sanderjd wrote:
| > As users, federation protects us from [the service being
| killed or development frozen].
|
| Honest question: Does it?
|
| Personally, I worry significantly more about bit rot on
| projects that make no money. Does federation solve that
| somehow? What I'm usually looking for is: What is the
| incentive for people to keep working on this? Is it a passion
| project made by one or more young people? What happens to it
| when life happens to them, when they want to start families,
| etc.? Is it a prestige project from a wealthy person? I think
| this is less risky, but wealthy people get bored... Or is
| there reason to think they can get a decent amount of
| donation money like Wikipedia? This is probably best case
| scenario, but does it work for niches? I dunno.
|
| Does federation overcome these challenges in a novel way?
| the_third_wave wrote:
| Federation can help if you run the software yourself since
| your identity and your "content" are tied to your instance
| just like they are with email. As long as you keep it
| running and make sure the software is up to date with
| current federation standards you're more or less safe from
| all those hazards. If the developers of _Bookwyrm_ grow out
| of their anti-capitalist phase and sell it to Amazon, get
| that family and realise there is more to life than chasing
| characters on a screen, get hit by the proverbial _Bus_ or
| otherwise lose interest in maintaining the project you
| still have your "content" and identity which you can keep
| alive by either federating with other ActivityPub-enabled
| platforms - which will probably lead to a loss of
| functionality - or maintaining/getting someone to maintain
| the project for as long as there are interested users. All
| this stands and falls with the viability of ActivityPub, it
| will be interesting to see whether the concept pans out in
| the coming years.
| sanderjd wrote:
| This makes some sense, but couldn't this also be achieved
| with a centralized but open source product?
| the_third_wave wrote:
| No, that would make it possible to create alternative
| instances to use if and when the main instance goes
| belly-up. Those alternative instances would start afresh,
| without the user base and lacking any content created by
| them. If there were more than one alternative instance
| the two would not communicate unless they employed some
| sort of federation - ActivityPub or something similar -
| or some mirroring scheme.
| Tao3300 wrote:
| > What does "anti-corporate" even mean?
|
| It means that the creator is in for quite a shock as to what
| kinds of books are about to start showing up.
|
| https://friend.camp/@tripofmice/110741402641594925
| cabalamat wrote:
| > It's also unnecessary as a sales tool because what would
| "pro-corporate" mean in the context of a book social network?
|
| Does whatever maximizes Amazon's short-term profits, probably.
| izzydata wrote:
| Does it matter what most people care about? I don't believe the
| goal is to get all the traffic from everyone wanting such a
| service. I think the people who do care about having a site
| that isn't driven by ads and corporate interest would not want
| a billion people using the service. So it is self selecting for
| like minded individuals which keeps it niche. This also keeps
| it less likely to be flooded by fake reviews because it isn't
| worth doing to a smaller audience.
| mandmandam wrote:
| > What does "anti-corporate" even mean? That is going to turn a
| lot of users off because it feels political.
|
| Those people can use any anodyne corporate option they 'choose'
| (read: Amazon). No one is stopping them.
|
| Tbh, if someone thinks that corporations are cool and friendly,
| to the point where they're _scared_ of using a non-corporate
| book club, then I wouldn 't miss them. Their absence would
| actually be a big value proposition for me.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| Lots of FOSS stuff exists because of small capitalist
| corporations helping support, build features, host and so on.
|
| The project itself is hosted on Microsoft Github! Hm, I
| wonder if Bookwyrm is technically breaking their own license
| by hosting with Microsoft.. since git "copies" code.
| monkeywork wrote:
| >My step mom is in her 60s, a prolific reader, member of two
| book clubs and most of her friends are readers. She would never
| think about joining Bookwyrm because the value prop makes no
| sense to her.
|
| A free site to discuss books with others doesn't make sense to
| her? The first line on their website says "BookWyrm is a social
| network for tracking your reading, talking about books, writing
| reviews, and discovering what to read next." Sounds like that
| might be your step mom's jam.
|
| >Why does anyone care about federated? (I'm talking normal
| people here.) Mastodon, Pleroma? What are those? Who cares?
| Why? (Again, talking as normal people here, the kind of people
| you'd talk to waiting in line for a Southwest Airlines flight
| to Orlando.)
|
| I agree why would she care about any of those things - she's
| just signing up to a site to talk about books. You're the one
| focusing on those things not her. I honestly struggle to follow
| these complaints from tech-oriented folks on tech-oriented
| websites tying to say that some phantom person who isn't tech
| oriented will just be deeply lost.
|
| You talk about products based on the audience - here on Hacker
| News it makes sense to talk about the fact that this is
| federated and activitypub based, at your step moms book club
| you'd just talk about the fact that it's a social site for
| books.
| jsnell wrote:
| Actually, even before that line they have a much more
| prominent subtitle: "Social Reading and Reviewing,
| Decentralized".
|
| So it does seem that the federated nature is what they
| consider their main unique selling point for everyone, it's
| not just a framing for the HN audience.
| sanderjd wrote:
| Yeah this would make sense, sort of like how posts here
| include what programming language some product is written in,
| because we're interested in that sort of thing, even though
| it isn't part of the general messaging of the product.
|
| But in this case "decentralized" and "anti-corporate" _are_
| prominent in the messaging. "Decentralized" shows up twice
| above the fold, and both things get their own icon, also
| above the fold.
|
| I'd really love federation / de-centralization to be an
| implementation detail of useful products, where someone posts
| here, "Hey, you know this awesome new product that's getting
| lots of traction? Here's a blog post about how they
| implemented it using ActivityPub because it allowed them to
| launch and get network effects way faster!". But that never
| seems to be what I see. Instead it always seems to be, "Hey
| check this new product out, the selling point is that it's
| decentralized!".
| shaniber wrote:
| There's also Storygraph, a smaller, independent GoodReads
| alternative. It's gotten some positive coverage, and I've had a
| good experience using it.
|
| https://www.thestorygraph.com/
| gureddio wrote:
| Both look like something I currently do in a Google Sheet. I
| might take a look
| raybb wrote:
| The one thing they're missing for me is private notes. It's
| super important to me to have notes of where I heard about a
| book that's on my to read list.
|
| Oh and also it would be great if they upstreamed their
| corrections to open library.
|
| But for now I'll stick to volunteering for Open Library and
| improving the situation there which helps many sites.
|
| Current project I'm working on for them is to have their author
| pages supplemented by Wikidata. It's relatively low hanging
| fruit and then encourages people to contribute further
| upstream.
|
| If anyone is interested in volunteering as a dev, designer, or
| librarian you should totally hop on their weekly call it's very
| friendly :)
| freilanzer wrote:
| You could always message them and tell them why these
| features would be great to have. Private notes sound useful.
| raybb wrote:
| I could but it cost $5/mo to write in their feature request
| form. I don't think it's a bad idea but I won't be paying
| to request a feature.
| freilanzer wrote:
| Makes sense.
| zimpenfish wrote:
| Already on the request list -
| https://roadmap.thestorygraph.com/requests-
| ideas/posts/priva... - but missing the "without currently
| reading the book" aspect that I think 'raybb is talking
| about.
| cyrialize wrote:
| +1 to StoryGraph. I'm a big fan.
|
| I had the pleasure of seeing the CEO of StoryGraph, Nadia
| Odunayo, at a Ruby conference a year or so ago. She was a
| keynote speaker and she was absolutely wonderful.
|
| Nadia gave a presentation on encountering a Ruby bug, but
| presented it as a mystery story with chapters and narrative
| storytelling. Definitely one of the best, entertaining
| presentations I've seen in a long time.
| raybb wrote:
| Is this the talk you're referring to?
|
| RubyConf 2022: Keynote: The Case Of The Vanished Variable - A
| Ruby Mystery Story by Nadia Odunayo
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5eVFVHKuDE
| cyrialize wrote:
| Yes! That was the exact one.
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| "Track your reading and what your friends are reading" sounds
| like classic social network bullshit dopamine trap. Like brag
| about acheivements in how many have you read through this month
| or be sad about how stupid/lazy you are while others are so smart
| and gritty. They should better offer sharing
| quotes/highlights/remarks/explanations/summaries/follow-ups and
| discussing these.
| sanderjd wrote:
| This is true. But I also enjoy reading things people I know
| have read / are reading, so that I can talk about it with them.
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| Sure. I'm just trying to be grumpy to excuse suggesting an
| idea :-)
| gotshadowban wrote:
| [flagged]
| kristiandupont wrote:
| There are filter bubbles and then there are positive effects
| from recommendation engines. I'm terrified of the former but I
| personally love how much music Spotify and even Youtube have
| introduced me to. And since I find it quite annoying to start a
| book that I end up disliking, I would love a functional
| recommendation engine for that.
| pseg134 wrote:
| Imagine if you read a book and just enjoyed it! Is there an app
| for that?
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| Are you kidding or do you really feel like you need an app
| for such an occasion?
| greedylizard wrote:
| [flagged]
| [deleted]
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| I see...
| scubbo wrote:
| I'm 99% sure they're kidding.
| [deleted]
| smcleod wrote:
| I feel like it's a bit different for books than it is from say
| - taking staged photos of you wearing some fancy clothes while
| out to dinner.
|
| For me I follow friends who have similar tastes or interests as
| I know there's a good chance I might like what they've been
| reading so will often ask them what they thought of a book if
| not on the site - when we catch up in person.
| Kye wrote:
| I remember when this first emerged under the original name (which
| I don't remember). It was rough, but you could see the potential.
| I'm glad to see the developer kept at it and that it's making
| inroads.
| irajdeep wrote:
| Tangential - totally enjoyed this talk
| https://youtu.be/Ic_5gRVTQ_k by one of the creators of Bookwyrm.
| grey_earthling wrote:
| I enjoyed this one, from their homepage:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ANYMii3Sypg
| lasermatts wrote:
| Super into a book-focused social network! I was on Goodreads last
| night and it's a pretty hollow shell. Such a great idea to have a
| place to talk about/recommend books!
| bavarianbob wrote:
| I can't be the only one with a burgeoning appetite for an
| experience that is solely focused on the individual. I don't care
| about being social in this domain and that opinion often feels
| like a contrarian one. I want to track my books, my thoughts on
| those books, and my upcoming queue. There's a handful of services
| that provide a wonderful curation of books to read (mostly human-
| curated) and as such, my queue is never empty.
|
| It seems as if every new service is trying to incorporate
| algorithmic recommendations, social elements, and other useless
| frills. Let's get back to the basics. Give me a rock solid
| digital library.
| masukomi wrote:
| This is a fediverse app. there are no algorithmic
| recommendations.
|
| > There's a handful of services that provide a wonderful
| curation of books to read (mostly human-curated) and as such,
| my queue is never empty.
|
| I feel like you didn't even _look_ at what you were commenting
| on. This is LITERALLY that.
|
| Think Goodreads but without the BS influence from its Amazon
| overlords trying to sell you something or people mass-dunking
| on a book that hasn't come out because they disagree with the
| author's politics or the fact that it has a gay protagonist or
| whatever it is they're up in arms about today.
|
| > Give me a rock solid digital library.
|
| Sure, but wanting that doesn't mean there isn't also value in
| this. DOUBLY so when you yourself said that you valued services
| that do exactly what this does.
| LightHugger wrote:
| That kind of information should not be hosted on a website
| though, because if the website goes down you'd be losing all
| that tracking data, all those thoughts and all those plans.
| Maybe if there's a way to export everything in one click and
| you take regular backups. But a service like that is the worst
| place to store data that you'd rather not lose.
| masukomi wrote:
| ... this is an open source federated app. There is NO reason
| you can't run your own instance that you control and back up
| that participates in the network. IF you don't want to pay
| for expensive hosting, but want it to be always on, then
| throw it on a raspberry pie and run it from home.
|
| also, because it's federated, all the data you add is backed
| up on all the other instances that federate with yours. It
| isn't easy to recreate from their copies, but it's not lost.
| eimrine wrote:
| A rock solid digital lib should be abuse-proof or it gonna be
| not rock-solid.
| PurpleRamen wrote:
| If you want a solo experience, just a note/knowledge managment-
| solution of your choice. I mean there are many apps like
| Tellico or Calibre who are somewhat focused to this domain. But
| you could also just use Notion, or Obsidian to maintain
| something of your own.
| ecshafer wrote:
| Goodreads is a pretty bad site overall. Its good for tracking
| which books you've read I guess, but I don't think its better
| than a google doc sheet. The average reader there doesn't really
| have good taste in books. You are honestly better off just using
| a google doc to track your books, and use /lit/ for discussions
| and recommendations, since /lit/ has much higher quality reviews,
| and discussions than good reads. Maybe a federated good reads
| will be better as it filters out a lot more people and might get
| rid of a low brow stuff.
| geoffdunbar wrote:
| I'm probably being dumb here, but what do you mean by /lit/? I
| can't figure out how to turn that into an Internet thing
| (website? social? what is it!), and searching for /lit/ is
| predictable not helpful. Always looking for a good source of
| book discussions and recommendations!
| huggingmouth wrote:
| 4channel, a place where surprisingly good discussions are
| often held. I use it as s complement to hn, especially for
| topics that upset hn downvoters.
|
| For people who want to have an honest discussion with a fun
| dose of rudeness and name-calling, it's great.
| tech_ken wrote:
| IDK, I enjoy the occasional spicy conversation but the
| intermittent, casual slurs are a big turnoff for me
| moneywoes wrote:
| 4chan I believe
| ecshafer wrote:
| /lit/ is the 4chan board. If you aren't actually familiar
| with 4chan past rumors, it has decently good and varied
| tastes.
| bamfly wrote:
| > The average reader there doesn't really have good taste in
| books.
|
| _Massive_ problem everywhere. Sometimes I 'll read some well-
| reviewed book-club sort of book, and it's usually somewhere
| between middling, and really bad. I once encountered one of
| those from a major publisher and aside from not being very good
| to begin with, it didn't even seem to have had a test-read done
| before it went to print--there were multiple parts, and one
| egregious chapter, where it looked like the author had done a
| major re-organizing edit then never gone back to iron out the
| wrinkles, such that the text would contradict itself line-to-
| line, like two or three versions of a scene describing
| different action, sequence of events, and circumstances re:
| things like which characters were present, had been hastily
| mashed up then never fully reconciled. This was plainly not a
| some intentionally-ambiguous literary device, but an oversight
| that left the reader unable to know what was supposed to have
| occurred. You'd never know what a mediocre story and technical
| mess it was from reading online reviews, though, unless you dug
| deep into the one- and two-star stuff (and found a reviewer of
| that sort who hadn't DNF'd it after the first couple chapters),
| plus other people I know who read it didn't even notice--one
| did, and we both got to stop feeling like we were taking crazy
| pills when we compared notes. WTF.
|
| All I can figure is a lot of people just skim everything, so
| are used to filling in lots of narrative gaps in their head or
| accepting the gist or outcomes of bits that don't make much
| sense to them and moving on, which would also explain why the
| quality of the story, characters, and writing aren't something
| they really notice, if it's all coming through to them rather
| _impressionistically_ anyway and they 're painting the rest of
| the picture any way they like. I dunno.
|
| TL;DR I find book recommendations nearly useless unless I've
| got a good sense of how a reviewer's quality-o-meter is
| calibrated. Star ratings from a broad, general audience are
| entirely useless.
| ecshafer wrote:
| This touches on things I notice in modern literature, it's
| not really about books. There's a lot of these "book club"
| books that suck. I am 99% certain it's just pay to play. The
| books are kind of melodramatic and not good, with basic prose
| and themes that are overdone, but will be well regarded as
| you say. I think it's because there's a lot of this culture
| around "being someone that reads books" so you have people
| that post memes or wear book t shirts or whatever. But they
| read the books npr and Oprah recommend.
| 9erdelta wrote:
| what is /lit/?
| bitdivision wrote:
| I'm guessing the 4chan board?
| dri_ft wrote:
| https://4chan.org/lit/catalog
| raybb wrote:
| I assume OP is talking about the 4chan message board. Here's
| Reddit thread talking about said board https://www.reddit.com
| /r/books/comments/6ghfe5/have_you_guys...
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| The reddit discussion for /lit/ is hilarious. It's sad how
| even reading books has become some political thing. God
| forbid I like an HP Lovecraft story because it's creepy.
|
| Some of the comments have this "I like how honest and
| unrestricted /lit/ is, but why can't we have that without
| all the Nazism and patriarchy" vibe that's just so
| incredible, I sort of stare at them in amazement.
| edgyquant wrote:
| Thats why I don't use Reddit and would never take any
| opinion on something from there seriously.
| ecshafer wrote:
| It really just shows how Reddit often "doesn't get it".
| If you don't want that stuff then just don't look at it.
| But Reddit also due to the voting system just kind of
| tends towards this lowest common denominator malaise of
| mediocrity. /r/books, /r/literature or even something
| like /r/fantasy just tends towards talking about a few
| popular easily digestible books or meta topics.
| lukas099 wrote:
| I use /lit/. It definitely does have Nazism and
| patriarchy plastered over it. If you dig around, there
| are great posts there. But it is a valid complaint.
|
| I'm wondering, do you take more issue with the Redditors
| saying they don't like the far-right stuff on /lit/ than
| you do with the actual far-right stuff on /lit/? Or are
| you commenting on the political nature of the entire
| (/lit/ + Reddit) system?
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| > I'm wondering, do you take more issue with the
| Redditors
|
| I joined a subreddit a few years ago, printSF, I think
| (not sure) thinking that it might be more to my liking.
| The regular science fiction subreddit seemed to be more
| about Marvel movies (it's not just reddit that does this,
| scifi.stackexchange might as well be
| harrypotter.stackexchange).
|
| I tried to like it. I saw books and authors that were
| unfamiliar (that should be good... it's difficult to find
| new stuff I enjoy). But then I started digging into the
| comments, and it was complete drek. There was one day
| when I must have read through two dozen, and "Bechdel"
| was in every single one of them. I don't think I knew
| what it was at the time, but one of them was a comment
| haranguing someone else about it, and so I enedd up
| learning that day.
|
| Another time, someone mentioned Asimov's Foundation in a
| recommendation thread. The replies were bizarre.
|
| It's clear that whatever they were after is nothing like
| what I want to read. We're not wanting the same genres.
| And I don't know why. It'd be one thing if these same
| sorts of people who were concerned with all that bullshit
| were happy and well-adjusted. Then it would mean that I
| was just some old fuddy-duddy and that the world had
| moved on without me. But they're not happy or well-
| adjusted, and they seem as if all they want out of this
| (and everything else) is to ruin and trash what they can.
|
| I suspect that too many literature classes in public
| schools and community colleges are to blame. They can't
| listen to or read a story and just enjoy it for what it
| is. Everything must be deconstructed and hidden meanings
| revealed, the sort of hidden meanings only they're clever
| enough to see. And that opens up the cracks for their
| weird-assed politics to be inserted into it. Then every
| interaction between every two characters is homoerotic,
| every dystopia is a critique of capitalism, and the only
| horror permitted is how conservative modern governments
| are.
|
| So yeh, I guess you could say this is a bigger problem
| for me than some halfwit in mama's basement trying to be
| an edgelord on 4chan and failing. And I hesitate to say
| that too loudly most of the time, because even though
| none of my words here are offensive, having described my
| personality there are those who would seek to make sure
| I'm not allowed to post ever again.
| huggingmouth wrote:
| In case someone needs it spelled out to them: 4chan
| became such a great place precisely because your allowed
| to say what you want there. Participating is easy because
| you can be honest and don't have to police yourself, and
| as a result posting there becomes FUN.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| Can you give an example of a thread on /lit that is of
| notably higher quality than what can be found on reddit
| and call out specific comments that wouldn't have been
| made without benefit of anonymity?
|
| I was put off by the gross fire hose of drek on other
| boards on 4chan when I looked at it initially but note
| lit seems to have actually reasonable discussions. That
| said it doesn't look to my eyes notably different from
| say reddit save for the intermittent random gross like
| slurs tossed about which add nothing whatsoever. If folks
| were banned for calling each other slurs one would hope
| the same people who had something to say could just say
| it without including the slurs.
|
| Do you have a counter argument?
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| > If folks were banned for calling each other slurs one
| would hope the same people who had something to say could
| just say it without including the slurs.
|
| You'd hope that, but it doesn't work that way.
|
| In a place where you can be banned for the gross slurs,
| you might be banned for relating some personal anecdote
| in which you speak of some _other_ person making a gross
| slur. Why, when you didn 't type in the gross slur
| yourself?
|
| Who knows. Maybe they think you're secretly a klansman,
| trying to pollute people's brains with the slur without
| actually saying the slur. Maybe they think you're not
| sufficiently progressive enough because you actually have
| a personal history where you were proximate enough to a
| bigot that you could hear what they were saying. Maybe it
| really is Orwellian, and you _thought_ the word though
| you didn 't put it in the comment.
|
| But considering the _extra_ effort it would take to post
| in such a place, always wondering if the next comment
| will get you banned, why would you bother?
|
| People with interesting things to say will find it
| difficult to exist, belong, or remain in such a forum.
|
| I don't think you get any of the good, without accepting
| that some of the bad has to be present too.
|
| These people who do that sort of banning, somewhere in
| their shriveled little brains actually believe they're
| making the world a better place.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| I don't think we have to choose between no moderation and
| excessive moderation nor between 100% anonymity and none.
| Consider our nicks we each chose the level of anonymity
| we were comfortable with.
|
| I think if you consider the space of probable commenters
| and comments and the average quality of discussion
| obtained by the probable commenter that produces a
| comment you ought to be able to figure out why removing
| the producers of some comments improves quality of
| discussion.
|
| Consider a discussion about an interesting new piece of
| tech into which a commenter inserts an ad for soap. The
| comment is not worthless it is worse it has negative
| value because every reader of the thread must consume
| more noise to get to the signal. The probable future
| contribution of the commenter is 99.999999% likely to be
| negative because commenter is obviously a robot pushing
| spam. If you allow it then soon your threads will be 90%
| ads and soon 100% ads because actual people will tire of
| wading through the slop. Then your threads will only be
| available on archive.org because the spammers murdered
| you.
|
| Now lets consider an offensive human being. They see
| everything in the world as a jewish conspiracy against
| folks like themselves. They ARE capable of normal
| communication but they are prone to tracking back to
| their odious and tiresome conspiracies. First the
| discussion was about finance aaaaaaaaand now we are
| talking about Jewish people running the world. Most
| readers experience this commenters words as offensive and
| tiresome. Some waste mental energy for the nth time
| debunking the obvious nonsense. In general the perceived
| quality of the forum declines and the more content like
| this we have the more value we lose as other readers go
| elsewhere.
|
| Unlike the robot have something to lose here both ways.
| Focusing on the folks you lose because they can't use
| slurs and not the people you lose because they won't hang
| out some place they get slurred is a fundamental failure
| of analysis.The poster may be capable of providing
| valuable contributions we will lose if we drop an instant
| banhammer here but we have even more to lose by keeping
| him on with present contributions. Why?
|
| Two factors:
|
| - Smart helpful content takes energy and the kind of
| person who you actually want to write commentary has many
| demands on their time because they actually do useful
| things. By contrast your uncle who doesn't work can cut
| and paste or type the same screed from memory at spam bot
| like levels. Given a chance bad commentary will dominate
| by volume
|
| - The kind of person capable of producing useful comments
| is dramatically less likely to also produce bigoted
| screeds because the through and intelligence needed to
| produce such allows one to either not think like that or
| at least to talk about finance without injecting such.
|
| That is to say there is high value in each ban and little
| of value lost per commenter banned. In fact almost all
| value that might be lost can be retained by watching new
| commenters and have them receive polite negative feedback
| or official warnings instead of instantly banning them
| when the transgressions are not egregious.
|
| If your uncle can control his tenancy to track back to
| conspiracy theories he can contribute if not then not
| much of value has been lost.
|
| Again focusing on the folks you lose because they can't
| use slurs and not the people you lose because they won't
| hang out some place they get slurred is a fundamental
| failure of analysis.
|
| Their shriveled little brains are 100% correct.
| siegecraft wrote:
| I don't have specific examples as I am not a regular
| reader of lit, but I can comment on "it doesn't look to
| my eyes notably different from reddit." The anonymity,
| lack of up/downvotes, non-hierarchial layout, lack of
| moderation, and heavy focus on images creates a very
| different experience from reddit. Some say this leads to
| better and more organic discussions (I agree for the most
| part), but I think they're only going to be as good as
| their community. Anyway, there's no reason you can't use
| them both.
|
| > specific comments that wouldn't have been made without
| benefit of anonymity
|
| Open any thread and you will find tons of examples, no
| reason to post them here. But I expect you meant specific
| comments that are valuable and insightful? Probably a
| matter of taste. On reddit it is at least much easier to
| find highly-rated comments, which is a plus for voting.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| I opened many threads and see zero examples of discussion
| that couldn't have happened here on or Reddit. The only
| things I see which couldn't be posted here are offensive
| and worthless. Can you post a single example?
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| You see many examples of comments, I'm sure, that look
| like they could happen anywhere.
|
| And you continue to believe that, right up until you see
| a comment just like them, that gets someone banned from
| reddit. And then you're irate, and you wonder why you
| were banned. But you can't even get much explanation,
| because having been banned from reddit, they've taken the
| one way you might use to demand the explanation.
|
| But even that's not the full picture. Sometimes there are
| people whose "contrariness" is a bit higher than other
| people's. And they refuse to participate in places where
| they aren't allowed to say whatever they want, even if
| pretty much all the time they'd never say anything that
| would get them banned. Are those people more interesting
| than others? Who knows, you'll never find their stuff on
| reddit.
|
| I think in the legal world, you call this over-moderation
| a "chilling effect". You don't have to censor everyone,
| it turns out, if you can scare or bully them into self-
| censoring.
|
| Eventually, I think, everyone sees what we're talking
| about. It's just by the time it's so overt that even you
| can't deny it anymore, there won't be much anyone can do
| about it.
| pseg134 wrote:
| They're easy to miss when you are trying not to see them.
| malfist wrote:
| Feel free to provide an example of what we're missing
| beowulfey wrote:
| I think it's just a matter of taste, honestly.
|
| I don't enjoy 4chan (I mostly browsed /mu/ when I
| visited) probably for the same reasons that you do. And
| that's perfectly fine!
| tiltowait wrote:
| r/books is a disappointingly bad sub. I subbed there for
| a while, but it was filled with the same recommendations
| over and over (which is the problem with any
| recommendation subs).
|
| The kicker for me, though (and the reason I unsubbed) was
| when the mods barred any posts complaining about the
| casting of Roland in the Dark Tower adaptation that was
| made several years ago, on the grounds that the only
| reason for anyone to disagree with casting Idris Elba was
| racism. People pointing out that changing Roland's race
| fundamentally changes his relationship with Susannah (and
| possibly even has implications for Susannah's
| relationship with Eddie) had their posts removed.
| smcleod wrote:
| And it's owned by Amazon, who have no incentive to make it any
| better than it is.
| OfSanguineFire wrote:
| Goodreads isn't just for fiction or popular-interest non-
| fiction like /lit/. You can also use it to track any book with
| an ISBN. I'm in academia and am constantly reading specialized
| literature, and I keep track of it on Goodreads because why
| not. I've had a lot of great interactions with other users who
| are similarly learned and perhaps working in parallel fields to
| my own. If you aren't limited to the mainstream part of the
| website where mob behavior rules, you will be interacting with
| very different - and frankly much more worthwhile - people.
| mavhc wrote:
| A social network that doesn't let me use a social login? Sigh
| scaglio wrote:
| You mean OAuth? It should be a good thing for a social.
| mavhc wrote:
| Yep, having 100s of community run servers storing passwords
| is a terrible idea
| the_third_wave wrote:
| A decentralised social network which tries to distance itself
| from centralised social networks, hence no surprise that they
| do not offer Google/Facebook/Apple/etc. login.
| lukas099 wrote:
| What would be the easiest way to migrate my book lists from
| Goodreads to this (or anything else?)
| juliasct wrote:
| Is it Goodreads 2.0?
| Apofis wrote:
| Is there a book review site that actually has credible reviews of
| comedy books? I realized recently that it's night impossible to
| find a useful comedy category.
| pryelluw wrote:
| I've looked and haven't found anything. My default is to browse
| the used but book stores inventory and read a couple of pages
| to get a feel for the book.
| gregmfoster wrote:
| I love the idea of more book-focused social networks! Curious
| what the motivation here is to make it federated, instead of
| focusing on high-velocity user-focused product development. My
| greatest gripes with existing book-social-media-networks aren't
| the federation, but rather the dated UX.
| morisy wrote:
| It's got a very ideologically-driven focus, including an anti-
| capital source license:
|
| https://github.com/bookwyrm-social/bookwyrm/blob/main/LICENS...
|
| I think the focus on federation is to encourage small,
| decentralized and communally operated sites that play well with
| the broader fediverse. I can see that working well for a lot of
| book communities!
|
| Also, spent a bit of time a few weeks ago and it already seemed
| to have the nicest UX of the open social book services, at
| least that I could see (would love recs - mostly interested in
| a personal tracker).
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Well, that's a license I've never seen before! This makes it
| entirely unpractical for any company to host a server, which
| is an... interesting approach.
|
| I'm not sure why the police or military wouldn't be allowed
| to host a book reading website, though. I guess this was
| written as some kind of anti-government protest.
| thebooktocome wrote:
| > I'm not sure why the police or military wouldn't be
| allowed to host a book reading website, though.
|
| Many religions have an injunction against killing or
| otherwise contributing to the harm of sentient beings.
| bluefishinit wrote:
| One benefit to federation in book-focused social media is it
| helps stop Amazon from buying the centralized services. They
| bought Goodreads and Shelfari. It's great to know they won't be
| buying the book-iverse.
| briandear wrote:
| What's wrong with Amazon? They made it possible for self
| published writers to actually make a living. They disrupted
| the big five publishers and have done a lot for independent
| writers. Even the indy bookstores require an author to go
| through corporate publishing gatekeepers. Amazon gives
| literally any writer an opportunity to sell books.
| izzydata wrote:
| Amazon is too big. It attracts too many bots and fake
| reviews. They also have no incentive to remove fake
| positive removes as it is a conflict of interest for them
| to sell as many books as possible.
| bluefishinit wrote:
| I buy tons of books through Amazon and own a Kindle. That
| being said they're _horrible_ at running book social
| networks. Of the two they bought they killed one and froze
| development on Goodreads. A federated book community will
| stop them from swooping in and killing the whole party.
| guerrilla wrote:
| It's a blatant conflict of interest for the book store and
| the book review to be the same company.
| vidarh wrote:
| I use Amazon a lot, but that doesn't change the rot that
| set in for Goodreads after Amazon bought them.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| Seems that one could logically integrate calibre libraries. One
| could I imagine have a function that rather than explicitly
| requiring the reviewer to provide the ebook link instead allows
| the user to click on a "read" button and have it examine the
| sources that reader knows about including but not limited to
| ebook sites and calibre libraries.
|
| In particular its nice that calibre actually allows one to read
| books in the library in a web interface.
|
| Bookwyrm instances running in areas that aren't liable to be
| taken down could provide inline libraries that readers can add
| to. It's sad that this is in most developed countries considered
| criminal instead of helpful.
| teeray wrote:
| It seems that this federated service falls into the same
| asymmetry that others have--everyone is joining the flagship
| instance (which negates the decentralization).
| malermeister wrote:
| I don't think it negates the decentralization.
|
| It still allows you to pack your shit and move somewhere else
| should a narcissistic billionaire buy the flagship instance.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| Does it? The possibility of doing otherwise seems just as
| important as the reality of doing it.
| criddell wrote:
| If I were going to join this, I would seek out the flagship
| instance. It's the least likely to shut down a year from now.
|
| I think it's also important to make signing up as frictionless
| as possible. I would guess most people don't care if it's a
| federated service or even what that means. If you ask those
| people to choose an instance, you are instantly going to lose
| some of them.
| biftek wrote:
| This is the inherent flaw of decentralized networks.
|
| You either appeal to people who really care about
| decentralization (an extremely small group) or you're not
| really decentralized.
| [deleted]
| Zambyte wrote:
| I already run software that federates with this, and I didn't
| even realize this existed (Pleroma). Seems quite decentralized
| to me.
| mekarpeles wrote:
| I disagree that having a popular flagship federated service
| negates decentralization.
|
| The point of decentralization is not to destroy the ability to
| centralize (see e.g. git versus SVN and then look at github).
|
| The advantage is that federation and decentralization empower
| an entirely new set of use cases, archival strategies,
| development, and accessibility affordances that may have not
| been possible before. While enabling the town square &
| metcalfe's law that are advantageous to many people / use
| cases.
| sanderjd wrote:
| It's incredibly clear at this point - and it was clear _a
| priori_ also, but with some uncertainty - that this is how
| federated networks will work, if they do at all. This just
| needs to be incorporated into any assumptions about these
| systems. Instead of thinking through the costs and benefits of
| decentralization with fairly evenly distributed node sizes, it
| 's necessary to think through the costs and benefits of a
| decentralized system with a power law distribution of node
| size, because that's going to be reality.
| guerrilla wrote:
| Nah, it doesn't negate anything. The flagship instance is a
| fine default but it's important to be able to move at any time
| for any reason and even to run one's own. This is itself a
| quality feedback mechanism and freedom.
| DaSHacka wrote:
| I think this itself is the big benefit of federated services
| for most people. I'm less concerned with proper distribution
| of users across instances but rather is users always have
| recourse should any particular instance get elon'd.
| guerrilla wrote:
| Exactly... and they will. The drama always boils up and
| even if it doesn't, people die and such.
| godshatter wrote:
| They need a brain-dead way to hop between instances without
| losing data, if it doesn't already exist. Of course this only
| works well if the instance that is shutting down gives notice
| in time for people who login in only occasionally to see it.
| deanc wrote:
| Consumers want centralisation. All of this stuff is too
| complicated right now for end-users.
|
| In an ideal world, my data would live on the instance but as
| soon as its mutated a local copy is sync'd through the
| browser/app. That way it's my data, and if the instance goes
| down, I can choose to sync it somewhere else.
|
| Ideally this would be packaged up in one application, so for
| different kinds of "sites" the mechanism for syncin'g and
| migrating would be the same.
| mcguire wrote:
| Like Usenet News?
| PurpleRamen wrote:
| > Consumers want centralisation.
|
| Consumers want to not care about the details. Most people
| don't care much about federation, p2p, full decentralization
| or centralization, until something crashes. As long as they
| have no problems, they would even play with the devil.
|
| Centralized solutions, tend to be easier in usage, faster,
| and with a more stable moderation who maintains the peace.
| This is something decentralized solutions can't easily
| replicate, but it's not like it's impossible. It's just that
| so far not many are trying to climb this mountain, because
| implementation and maintaining of centralized systems is also
| easier.
| FalconSensei wrote:
| > Consumers want to not care about the details
|
| You are partly correct. They do not care about details, but
| they want things as simple as possible, and
| decentralization makes that harder. See all people
| complaining (or don't understanding) about having to choose
| a mastodon or lemmy instance.
|
| And copy+pasting usernames/post links that you have open,
| to search for it again on your own instance so you can
| reply... is not simplicity.
|
| I can only guess as mass readers tried to migrate to
| bookwyrm, how many people would be complaining that they
| are trying to add a book a friend is reading, but it's not
| showing for them - because it's registered on another
| instance but they didn't realize
|
| Or why they see different ratings, or less number of
| reviews than their friends
| riezebos wrote:
| Consumers often also don't want to be dependent on local
| data. I would propose a feature to link (& sync) user
| accounts across multiple servers, that way no one needs to
| depend on a single server. Power users can set up their own
| server and use that as a local copy of all their data.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| Oddly enough, their license which prohibits any sort of standard
| corporation setup from hosting or making copies of the software,
| would seem to prohibit their own source code being on their own
| Github.
|
| It also rules out Gitlab.
|
| I suspect they can not use any commercial host such as AWS or OVH
| either.
|
| As a self hoster, I don't think even I would be able to host this
| - I use cloudflare and would be sending source code materials to
| be copied by cloudflare.
| risfriend wrote:
| This exists in some form here already -
| https://www.reddit.com/r/books/
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| Reddit and Twitter will be around for a while due to inertia,
| but it doesn't make sense to be making any new investments
| there. People have one foot out the door.
| teeray wrote:
| That's like saying the /r/books subreddit exists in some form
| already as the NYT bestsellers list. This is fundamentally
| different (and noteworthy), as it's another entry in the
| fediverse space.
| ranting-moth wrote:
| I like the phrase "in some form" in the context of Reddit.
|
| To me, that form resembles the majestic Titanic, steaming away
| in the moonlight.
| saltysalt wrote:
| Other than being distributed which is interesting, how does this
| differ from https://www.librarything.com/ ?
| flir wrote:
| If I had to guess (I'm probably not going to sign up), LT
| centres books while this seems to centre reading. So a bit less
| "database for books", a bit more "social media for reading"?
| saltysalt wrote:
| Thanks, makes sense!
| https443 wrote:
| Where does it get the list of books from? I thought that was
| always the biggest challenge with sites like Goodreads etc.
| Goodreads both (A) pulls data from Amazon, and (B) has an army of
| volunteer "librarians" who have additional privileges to merge
| duplicate books etc.
| ernesth wrote:
| It fetches data from the public APIs of openlibrary.org and
| inventaire.io. From my point of view, inventaire is really
| great as it synchronizes with wikidata and is far better at not
| duplicating works or authors.
| masukomi wrote:
| I _think_ it's just things users have added. This is a
| fediverse app. It's not some centralized list of books that
| people are working from. It's not limited to English books, or
| even US books.
| eshnil wrote:
| https://OpenLibrary.org is Internet Archive's initiative to
| solve this once and for all. Plus it lets you borrow e-books.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| OpenLibrary is a treasure.
|
| I have a half-finished project that scans barcodes with the
| webcam, looks up the information in openlibrary, speaks the
| tile out-loud and records the output to a file that tellico
| can import.
|
| Some people might note that tellico can take a list of ISBNs
| on input, so the extra step of OL lookup seems redundant. A
| lot of bookstores put their own barcodes (sometimes over the
| ISBN) and there can be namespace collisions between those
| barcodes and the ISBN. Looking it up on OL and reading the
| name out loud lets you catch these issues when scanning.
| There's nothing worse than scanning hundreds of books and
| then having to go back through to find the dozen of them that
| scanned wrong; by reading out-loud the OL information, you
| can just set them aside immediately and enter the information
| manually later.
| mekarpeles wrote:
| Mek here from Open Library, thanks for your kind words.
|
| Here! Check our @cdrini's
| https://openlibrary.org/barcodescanner
| mekarpeles wrote:
| Hi, Mek here from Open Library.
|
| I was incredibly lucky to work at the Internet Archive the
| same time as Mouse and couldn't be more proud of their work
| on BookWyrm.
|
| Open Library and its network of generous volunteers have (I
| hope) made a lot of positive progress towards cataloging the
| books that are out there and making them more accessible to
| the world. AND it's absolutely the case that our project
| exists to support innovative projects like Bookwyrm and
| incredible thinkers like Mouse.
|
| Open Library can't and shouldn't be everything. It's hard
| enough doing well at one thing. The Open Library team is
| considering how we may be able to participate within the
| decentralized ecosystem by offering a BookWyrm instance so
| readers may have more ways to socially engage with each other
| and connect around books. If you're interested in helping us
| try this as an experiment, please reach out
| <mek@archive.org>!
|
| I appreciate how difficult it is to run a service which gives
| communities voices (it requires moderation tooling, staff,
| and so much more). I'm impressed by the thoughtful,
| impressive, and creative work Mouse has done building
| BookWyrm and am super grateful for its progress which I see
| as being a win for the entire ecosystem (an ecosystem Open
| Library is proud to be a piece of).
|
| Keep it up <3
|
| P.S. the fact that many services like Mastodon or BookWyrm
| may have large primary servers is not a demerit. The fact
| that there are smaller local servers, that new servers can
| emerge over time, and that engineering thought is being put
| into how data moves through such environments is key to
| acknowledging the importance of creating safe communities,
| promoting archival strategies, and enabling accessibility.
| Many people use GitHub (centrally) and also use Git
| (centrally) and the fact that many common use-cases have been
| centralized do not undermine the significance of the times
| where small, high impact cases are able to succeed because
| decentralization has made them _possible_.
| https443 wrote:
| Wow, I just realized Open Library covers like 80% of
| Goodreads as well: read/to-read lists, ratings, yearly
| reading goals. Seems like https://openlibrary.org itself
| would be a fine Goodreads alternative if you don't want to
| set up your own Bookwyrm instance.
| rg111 wrote:
| I have been using the Open Library app for almost a year
| now. I am very satisfied with it.
|
| After GR removed the ability to add books manually by users
| and added stringent rules for them to be added to
| consideration by "librarians", I stopped using GR.
|
| I read a lot of obscure books that often don't have ISBN or
| an webpage (!). I can't track them or add them! It was so
| unfair.
|
| So, I moved to OpenLibrary and have been using it ever
| since.
| mekarpeles wrote:
| That's awesome. May I ask, for pre-ISBN books, do you
| typically look up books by title? What do you do with
| books when you find them? What is your primary use case /
| reason? Is it as a reference library (of things to read)?
| Keeping track of reading?
| Semaphor wrote:
| What it sadly is missing is the data. My first try, I found
| 2 out of 3 books in a series missing, and the first book
| was missing data. It looks like ImportBot [0] adds them
| somehow, but it's not clear how this is done and how it
| could be fixed as there's no information on the user page.
| As much as I'd like an open solution, if I have to add
| every other book I read to the database first, that will
| make me stop using it quickly.
|
| [0]: https://openlibrary.org/people/ImportBot
| mekarpeles wrote:
| Hi, can I ask what books were missing? The more examples
| we have, the more we can update our bots to make sure
| these books get either imported or fixed within our
| search engine.
|
| I completely understand wanting to use a service that has
| the books you're looking for and would also completely
| understand if it's too much work to type up the examples.
| If you'd rather not do so publicly, happy to receive your
| email at <mek@archive.org> and do what I can to help.
| Thank you!
| explorigin wrote:
| This is a good start but it's still plagued by the artificial
| scarcity of digital copies by limiting "checkouts".
| gnulinux wrote:
| Copyright law is a plague on contemporary free society. I'm
| a composer, I work on contemporary Western classical music,
| and finding written music published since 1923 is a full-
| time job in itself. It's relatively easy (still not easy)
| to find extremely famous composers (e.g. Philip Glass,
| Gyorg Ligeti, Jennifer Higdon etc), but if you're trying to
| find someone lesser known, or god forbid someone unknown
| published by some random European music publishing house,
| good fucking luck. They literally won't make the
| publication available to you if they decide. Some works are
| only available for performance (i.e. if you're allowed to
| play this music, they "rent" the sheet to you) and no
| option to study the written work for other authors. It's
| excruciatingly difficult and holds the entire field back
| multiple, multiple decades. People write about ideas that
| were already explored and in circulation almost 4 decades
| ago because it's likely impossible to read their works.
|
| Let me not even begin to talk to you about finding papers
| (analyses of other artists' works, musicology etc) if
| you're not affiliated with a university. You need a fortune
| to keep up with the field, or be arrrg (and it's not easy
| to find musicology papers in SciHub compared to other
| fields).
|
| In this aspect we're significantly worse than how things
| were back in 1800s, 1900s or early 2000s.
| OfSanguineFire wrote:
| > god forbid someone unknown published by some random
| European music publishing house
|
| One of the most striking developments in the last 20
| years is that so many of those European publishers are
| making a lot of their study scores free to read online.
| Apparently they have given up trying to make money from
| ordinary music lovers and are OK with selling just to
| performers and libraries. Back when I became a huge fan
| of a somewhat lesser-known European avant-garde composer,
| I despaired that it would cost many, many thousands of
| euro to buy the study scores of all his pieces. Now they
| are right there for free on the publisher's website.
|
| Otherwise, piracy largely fills the gap, although many
| composers have some famous piece, the score of which is
| impossible to ever see. Boulez's _Repons_ and
| _...explosante-fixe..._ are my usual examples of this -
| all the rest of his scores have circulated in pirate
| circles for well over a decade. Someting like Magnus
| Lindberg's _KRAFT_ is probably not easily found because
| its score is a meter tall and therefore difficult to
| scan.
| gnulinux wrote:
| Hmm I'll be honest, I always have very difficult time
| finding both of the options you listed. Not aware of any
| publishing house that share contemporary sheet music for
| free, nor do I have a good source for sheet music piracy.
| For piracy, I try the standard sources such as Library
| Genesis, Pirate Bay, Google "X PDF" etc... and almost
| never get something for niche composers in the last 10 to
| 20 years.
| OfSanguineFire wrote:
| Universal Edition, Edition Wilhelm Hansen (now part of
| Wise Music Classical, I think) and Boosey & Hawkes are
| examples of publishers who have put up a lot of scores by
| 20th century composers for free. The Finnish Music
| Information Centre website has many scores by Finnish
| composers of recent decades.
|
| With regard to pirated scores, that mainly happened on
| filesharing networks like Soulseek and DC++.
|
| > almost never get something for niche composers in the
| last 10 to 20 years.
|
| Why don't you just write to them and ask for a PDF? As
| you know, composers are usually happy to hear of any
| interest in their music, and (just like academics and
| their research papers) they don't always agree with their
| scores being "behind a paywall" for personal use.
| freilanzer wrote:
| Copyright really is a plague.
| thebooktocome wrote:
| A necessary evil as long as the publishing industry
| continues to have a choke-hold on copyright law. IA
| recently lost a lawsuit trying to fight this "digital
| copies must be lent like physical objects" nonsense.
| gnulinux wrote:
| It's actually a lot worse than that, you're mistaken. IA
| recently lost a lawsuit that argued that. The court ruled
| that when a digital copy is shared "a new copy is made"
| on the computer of the person shared, so you can't even
| do the common practice of buying 3 physical copies of a
| book and digitally sharing 3 copies at any given time.
| It's because if you have 3 physical copies of a book,
| once you share it digitally 3 times, you already
| exhausted your privilege and not entitled to those 3
| copies any more. It makes absolutely no sense, and makes
| US Copyright law unreasonably and extremely maximalist,
| even though US copyright law was already relatively
| maximalist compared to other countries. We live in the
| dark ages.
|
| More information here:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bp2aowF0jUw
| DaSHacka wrote:
| This unfortunately isn't up to them, its the publishers
| that are enforcing this arbitrary restriction. In fact, IA
| landed in some _preeeety_ hot water recently for fudging
| the rules on this very thing [0]. If the IA could get away
| with handling out an infinite amount of e-books I 'm sure
| they absolutely would.
|
| [0] https://www.npr.org/2023/03/26/1166101459/internet-
| archive-l...
| dubbel wrote:
| Looks like they integrate with existing open sources for books,
| like OpenLibrary: https://docs.joinbookwyrm.com/adding-
| books.html
| smcin wrote:
| Without the trailing slash defaults me to the Chinese-language
| page, /zh. The English page is https://joinbookwyrm.com/
| FalconSensei wrote:
| mine redirects to the german one. US IP and English browser and
| OS.
| ricardobayes wrote:
| Chances are, your browser or OS language is in Chinese?
| smcin wrote:
| No, it's English
| bovermyer wrote:
| For me, this is too much effort.
|
| Instead I have a page on my site that tracks my books read.
|
| https://www.benovermyer.com/kb/books/
| Daegalus wrote:
| On a bit of a side note. I have been thinking of rebuilding my
| blog/site from the ground up to be simpler, cleaner, and have
| more info. Your site just gave me a ton of inspiration on how
| to make it better and how to make use of it better. Especially
| since I am trying to go the more POSSE/IndieWeb route.
|
| I was even considering making a historical section where I
| unearth old projects and sites I built. I recently found the
| wayback machine had saved some of my old blogs and sites that I
| have lost, so I plan to back them up and put them up as a
| historical type thing on my site and your layout gives me ideas
| on how to do it best.
| pknerd wrote:
| AS far as tracking is concerned, Goodreads works fine for me. I
| am not sure why should I use it.
| malwrar wrote:
| One good reason might be more data ownership than tracking.
| Centralized platforms seem to at some point realize how
| valuable their user's contributions to the site are, and change
| the deal eventually to e.g. lock things behind a paywall when
| they grow bold and/or can get away with it. Reddit and Twitter
| are two high-profile examples of this, but there are numerous
| examples from the past as well for things like nutrition
| tracking and cd cataloging. A federated model might better
| reflect the idea of community ownership, and prevent site
| owners from betraying the community and cashing out on their
| contributions.
| OfSanguineFire wrote:
| You can still export all your Goodreads activity to a .csv
| file. Amazon has so given up making any improvements to the
| website, that I don't even expect them to remove
| functionality like that.
|
| I don't believe that Amazon considers users' contributions to
| Goodreads valuable, it only bought the site to 1) stop paying
| Amazon Associates referral fees to the independent
| corporation that Goodreads was, and 2) to stop Goodreads from
| directing any book-sale traffic to its competitors.
| pknerd wrote:
| tbh, this is not my issue. My only complain with Goodreads is
| their pathetic UI. My own purpose of using Goodreads is
| tracking and the UI is so confusing that it takes me a while
| to figure out how to find the last page I had read and then
| update it.
| FalconSensei wrote:
| on the other hand, I find GoodReads super intuitive. Moved
| to storygraph and I find the UX there kinda bad. Hard to
| find stuff
| bluefishinit wrote:
| Really neat to see federation move into a vertical like books. It
| seems really well suited to books (and music) since you could
| have instances that focus on particular genres or time periods. I
| also like the suggestion in their repo that book clubs run their
| own instances. Very cool.
| qotsy wrote:
| Homepage loads slow because there is a 2.6MB png image
| cubefox wrote:
| Wrote them an email
| ape4 wrote:
| Its the image of a bunch of book covers. Better to have them
| together in one image than separate images.
|
| https://joinbookwyrm.com/static/images/book-grid.png
| TremendousJudge wrote:
| It features several photographs, it probably should've been a
| jpg at least.
| DaSHacka wrote:
| Or a webp, much preferable for the size savings[0] if its
| not an image the end-user would ever want to save.
|
| [0] https://developers.google.com/speed/webp/
| jrm4 wrote:
| What about a federated social network for sharing books, perhaps
| outside of our present legal framework?
|
| Yeah, I know. I just look at the absolute technological absurdity
| that is "e-book lending" and can't help but think that something
| done like this, by book lovers, could perhaps _emerge_ a better
| way to pay writers.
| cubefox wrote:
| It seems the main purpose of "social networks" for books would be
| to talk about a book you just read. To have a forum for every
| book in the world. Of course most books are old and few people
| are reading them, so you would want the network with the largest
| market penetration among book readers, otherwise people will
| rarely find anyone to talk to for most books.
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