All of you who are building ”alternatives to goodreads”!
Please keep in mind that
- not all #books are published in english and
- there are translations of books and
- people may read several different language versions of the same book, even at the same time.
Brought to you by a #goodreads user who can't mark two different language versions of a book as being ”currently reading” simultaneously.
@jellal Federated are at least BookWyrm by @mouse and @Readlebee, neither of which is yet in production use, if I'm correct.
There are also some closed alternatives, the names of which I don't remember at the moment, as they are not as interesting as federating ones, regardless of how progressive the people making them are.
@Stoori thanks!!!
@Readlebee That sounds good!! I'll check it out!!
You're probably right with "most of the time" though, and the ISBN should be the main way to differentiate books from one another.
@nihl @romainelaprophetesse of course there are lots of books that don't have ISBN, mainly older books. So one shouldn't rely on that method only.
@Stoori What advantages does Goodreads have over, say, setting up your own card catalogue with Shaarli or something?
@drwho social interactions etc.
I had exactly this problem before and did find it frustrating. I'm still using Goodreads, although I keep promising myself that I'll stop, because it's a useful catalogue but these things are annoying.
@ephemeral Same here, I'm still using only Goodreads as my social reading diary, and the main reason is exactly that it's too hard to find non-English books on the alternatives.
BookWyrm looks most promising, though, and the developer has mentioned that fetching book data from LibraryThing database will be added in the future, and that could be the killer feature for me to start using it.
@Stoori Ah yes, that does sound good. LibraryThing just hasn't grabbed me. I've been seeing BookWyrm pop up quite a bit lately - must have a look.
@ephemeral We use LibraryThing to catalogue our home collection, but it's not really geared towards social usage. Goodreads is the opposite in this sense, it's good in socialising with other readers but not so good in cataloguing home collection.
@Stoori Ah this is a good idea. And yes, although I never much thought about how I use it, my Goodreads is mostly for the interactions, and only partly for the database, so fits what you suggest.
@Stoori People are making alternatives to goodreads??? Where can I find those? 👀