Hello, fellow bibliophiles!

I’ve been on the hunt for a decent Goodreads alternative for a few years now and was curious as to what the fine folks of the Lemmyverse thought of Bookwyrm.

There are so many GR alternatives that are clearly trying to be “The New Goodreads”, though the whole reason I wanted an alternative is because I’m sick of GR and its devolution into a commercialized, biased, and messy shithole. Like, if I wanted recommendations and feckless reviews straight from the putrid inner bowels of Tiktok, I’d go to Tiktok. And most of these alternatives seem to quickly turn into the same thing. I refuse to believe that GR and its copycats are our only viable option.

Bookwyrm seems promising. It’s been a bit clunky and I’m still figuring it out, but I’m enjoying the utter lack of sponsored or “pushed” content. So, thoughts? Opinions? Suggestions?

  • brand@lemmy.world
    2·
    1 year ago

    Is there any way you can import your book shelves from Goodreads into Bookwyrm?

    I’m curious about it (and tired of the sluggishness and outdated look of Goodreads not to mention Amazon in general), but have a lot of data in Goodreads that I would like to preserve.

    • 133arc585@lemmy.ml
      3·
      1 year ago

      Yes you can. Goodreads has export instructions. On BookWyrm you upload the export file. It maintains ratings, shelves, read status/dates, etc.

      Just be careful when you import: some of my titles were matched to completely wrong titles. For example, “The Color Purple” was matched to some other random book with the word Purple in the title. Fortunately, as part of the import process:

      • it tells you which books it could not reasonably match and lets you manually match them, and
      • it lets you edit any matches it made automatically.

      Every book I had in Goodreads was available to add to my shelves on BookWyrm, even if they didn’t all happen automatically. Overall though, compared to how many books I had on shelves, only a handful were not handled automatically/properly.

      • Chris Young@oldbytes.space
        1·
        1 year ago

        @133arc585 @brand I found that when I imported I had to manually add lots of missing books and then import again. I think the import might have improved since then - adding books definitely has, as it usually finds them to import now (when I joined it was a purely manual process)

    • Robert Kingett, blind@tweesecake.social
      2·
      1 year ago

      @brand As mentioned, yes. You can import from Goodreads/storygraph. The largest instance has the most books on it, but if you read one particular genre more than others, it would be interesting to join one of the smaller instances to help improve their catalogs