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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

#51

Post by qwerty456127 »

pseg134 wrote: post #48
qwerty456127 wrote: post #38

"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.

Imagine if you read a book and just enjoyed it! Is there an app for that?

Are you kidding or do you really feel like you need an app for such an occasion?

Re: Bookwyrm – A federated social network for reading books

#52

Post by bluefishinit »

briandear wrote: post #35
bluefishinit wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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 au…

> 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.

Re: Bookwyrm – A federated social network for reading books

#53

Post by sanderjd »

briandear wrote: post #35
bluefishinit wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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 au…

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.

Re: Bookwyrm – A federated social network for reading books

#55

Post by aidenn0 »

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.

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.

Re: Bookwyrm – A federated social network for reading books

#56

Post by freilanzer »

explorigin wrote: post #28
eshnil wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

Copyright really is a plague.

Re: Bookwyrm – A federated social network for reading books

#57

Post by sanderjd »

bluefishinit wrote: post #52
briandear wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 au…

> 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.

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?

Re: Bookwyrm – A federated social network for reading books

#58

Post by thebooktocome »

explorigin wrote: post #28
eshnil wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

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.

Re: Bookwyrm – A federated social network for reading books

#59

Post by ecshafer »

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.

Re: Bookwyrm – A federated social network for reading books

#60

Post by sanderjd »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #38

"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.

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.
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