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Bookwyrm – A federated social network for reading books

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Re: Bookwyrm – A federated social network for reading books

#21

Post by briandear »

bluefishinit wrote: post #15
gregmfoster wrote: post #2

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.

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.

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.

Re: Bookwyrm – A federated social network for reading books

#22

Post by raybb »

shaniber wrote: post #17

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/

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 :)

Re: Bookwyrm – A federated social network for reading books

#23

Post by https443 »

eshnil wrote: post #9
https443 wrote: post #5

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.

https://OpenLibrary.org is Internet Archive's initiative to solve this once and for all. Plus it lets you borrow e-books.

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.

Re: Bookwyrm – A federated social network for reading books

#24

Post by bluefishinit »

briandear wrote: post #21
bluefishinit wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

Re: Bookwyrm – A federated social network for reading books

#25

Post by criddell »

teeray wrote: post #3

It seems that this federated service falls into the same asymmetry that others have—everyone is joining the flagship instance (which negates the decentralization).

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.

Re: Bookwyrm – A federated social network for reading books

#26

Post by mandmandam »

briandear wrote: post #16

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 waiti…

> 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.

Re: Bookwyrm – A federated social network for reading books

#27

Post by guerrilla »

briandear wrote: post #21
bluefishinit wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

It's a blatant conflict of interest for the book store and the book review to be the same company.

Re: Bookwyrm – A federated social network for reading books

#28

Post by explorigin »

eshnil wrote: post #9
https443 wrote: post #5

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.

https://OpenLibrary.org is Internet Archive's initiative to solve this once and for all. Plus it lets you borrow e-books.

This is a good start but it's still plagued by the artificial scarcity of digital copies by limiting "checkouts".
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