Like GoodReads, but tired of Amazon? BookWyrm might be what you're looking for.

Old, but just in case folks don’t know about this…

EDIT: I was stunned at all the upvotes this got, and from a two-year-old article to boot! I hope I didn’t do anything to overload their servers. When I posted about the Instagram/Pixelfed import tool, I was kind of surprised at how many folks that were on Lemmy didn’t already know about Pixelfed, which is why I posted this, also from We Distribute. For a long while, IIRC, the Fediverse pie chart was taken up almost entirely by Mastodon (which it probably still is) followed by a small but visible sliver of Pixelfed–Lemmy hardly registed at all. Just goes to show how fast we’ve grown!

EDIT EDIT: I see that some of you were a little bit disappointed with BookWyrm, but I hope you will stick with them because I think they can be an important member of the Fediverse. The sense that I get is that they’re stretched very thin, and could use some support, monetarily of course, but especially from other developers.

  • hedge@beehaw.orgOPEnglish
    11·
    1 year ago

    Besides Goodreads, Amazon also, unfortunately, owns or has stakes in Book Depository, Abebooks, BookFinder & LibraryThing.

      • hedge@beehaw.orgOPEnglish
        5·
        1 year ago

        Unfortunately, yes. Sometimes buying from them is unavoidable, since they seem to have more books listed than anywhere else. I recommend alibris, not as big, but not owned by amazon. Sometimes if I find a book on Abe, I’ll check and see if the same seller is on alibris, which they often will be. Alibris also actually lets you rate the seller unlike abe!

        • Icarus@beehaw.orgEnglish
          4·
          1 year ago

          Thiftbooks is my goto for used but I’ve always used Abe as a backup. For new I use bookshop.org. So disappointing. I will check out alibris. I know the name, but have never used the service.

          • SkepticElliptic@beehaw.orgEnglish
            4·
            1 year ago

            There really is a need for some kind of exchange trade site. If you’re familiar with boardgame geek “math” trades, this is what I mean. Imagine a site like ebay, where you upload your books that you would like to trade away, and you can “like” books that you want in return. Then somehow there is a market value or score assigned to items so that they can be traded amongst many users automatically.

            Now imagine this for everything. We could go back to a bartering economy while cutting waste and cost.

            • Icarus@beehaw.orgEnglish
              2·
              1 year ago

              I am familiar! (as an owner of too many boardgames) I think this could work for a lot of things!

          • hedge@beehaw.orgOPEnglish
            1·
            1 year ago

            Didn’t know about ThiftBooks, thanks for mentioning.👍 And, possibly stupid question, how is bookshop.org supposed to work exactly? Was never quite clear on that.

            • Icarus@beehaw.orgEnglish
              2·
              1 year ago

              I’m not totally sure, but i think bookshop does profit sharing regardless if the indie bookstore you designate is actually the seller/shipper. I subscribe to Libro.fm (a drm free audible alternative), and they do the same thing. I can designate an indie store and Libro splits a percentage of the profits with them.

  • mobiuscoffee@lemmy.mlEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    I’ve been meaning to check this out! It sounds so cool and possibly interacts with other fediverse things?

  • Leigh@beehaw.orgMEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    Thank you! I’ve seen this mentioned a couple of times and have been meaning to give it a try.

  • bird@beehaw.orgEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    I signed up a few days ago. I never used GoodReads much. Last activity I had there was in 2013 and I kinda fell out of the habit of reading. But I picked up a book this week (and finished it in two days, haha), Recursion.

    It let me import my GoodReads data and I’ve been slowly adding books to read to it. I think for me, the mental hurdle I had was the paralysis of choice. I decided to just pick a sci-fi book that was available for instant borrow on Libby and go from there. I currently started The Big Door Prize because I loved the first season of its TV adaptation. Happy to be reading again.

    • lamentforicarus@beehaw.orgEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      I feel that choice paralysis a lot. My reading moods fluctuate, so sometimes I want to read one genre or sometimes another, but I also have a massive TBR so I struggle determining what book I should read. I’ve learned to just let myself start something, and if it doesn’t work out, then I can stop and maybe pick it back up later. For instance, I just finished Prince of Thorns by Mark Lawrence, a book that I had tried to read three times prior. This was the first time my interest stuck, and now I am finishing the trilogy. But getting over that initial hurdle of “what should I read” can be difficult.

  • always_gone@beehaw.orgEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    I like the idea.
    But the license for the software and that i don’t even know underwhat license the content is makes me question if this is the answer to a foss goodreads.