📚 Time to switch to BookWyrm
EDIT: Fairly incredible that this article should appear on WaPo, which is owned by amazon.
To be honest, I freaking love bookwyrm so much. One of my favorite ways to burn time online is to find books that come across my feed that are missing info like cover art, description, etc. and to fill it all in. I’ve spent hours doing this and it feels so cool, like I’m actually part of maintaining the system.
Also, Ive found that the people on Bookwyrm tend to like books that I really love that are also potentially kind of niche, so Ive found a lot of really great book recommendations that I never would have found from Goodreads or an algorithm.
Bookwyrm is a great project, can recommend it.
I just tried BookWyrm. It imported all my stuff from GoodReads. So far I’m loving it.
Have you figured out how to get it to recommend you a book that you’d even consider reading? I sure haven’t 😳
I may be strange on this, but I have never felt like I need automatic recommendations, and any I have gotten feel more like a nuisance.
I have my list of books on BookWyrm and sometimes I look at it and go like “oh I wonder what this author has been up to” and I look it up, or I participate on some online discussion about what people have read and if something sounds interesting I add it to my BookWyrm list.
I’ve also added a couple of books from people I follow there, who have interest in common but sometimes add this entirely unexpected book and I get to explore it.
I have a feeling that has more to do with the quality af the algorithms you’ve been exposed to than the base concept of them.
As a for-instance, I gave ChatGPT a list of 2 books¹ I was happy with a few days ago, and asked it to recommend similar stuff⁴. It gave me a list of 5 books², 3 of which I’d already read, and very much liked. Asked it to add those 3 to my input list and recommend some more, got 5 new ones³ (one I’d already read, and liked).
Så far I’m on book 2 of the recommendations, very much liked the first one, almost done with the second and it’s great.
I probably won’t get that level of recommendations from Bookwyrm at any point, but it would be nice to have something based on all the data in pumping into it, instead of having to guess which stranger to follow and hope they read something good, and that I’ll actually be there to notice.
——————
1 — input books
2 — first recommendations (® for already read, ®® for read after recommendation)
- The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón ®
- The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco ®
- The Picture of Dorian Grey by Oscar Wilde ®
- The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker
- The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova ®®
3 — recommendations, second round (® for already read, ®® for currently reading)
- The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield ®®
- The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
- The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter by Theodora Goss ®
- The Angel’s Game by Carlos Ruiz Zafón
- The Book of Lost Things by John Connolly
4 — my initial prompt:
- Can you recommend any books similar to Patrick Süskind’s “Perfume”? I felt like it was similar, at least in tone, to “Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell”, which I also liked.
No, that sounds like a great use of AI. I would be happy if a non-corporate option could be used for these kind of tasks for those that benefit from it.
For me though, I don’t think it’s about bad recommendations for books but the idea of seeking recommendations at all. I’m almost never in a “I want to read something but I don’t know what” state. If I don’t have a book in front of me or in my mental queue, I’m usually doing something else instead. My queue is almost never empty.
I don’t follow strangers hoping for recommendations, I just follow someone that I feel an affinity for and sometimes that results in learning about a new book, seeking it and reading it.
The idea of receiving book recommendations feels overwhelming, especially from a system that would find a million interesting things, just for me. But I’m not opposed at all to such a tool existing!
I’m always searching for the next book 😅 We clearly have vastly differing needs, very interesting to see a different perspective on the subject — thanks! 😃👌
I’ve been using StoryGraph since it came around and really enjoy it. I’ve looked at BookWyrm, but I haven’t considered switching yet.
The article mentions the WaPo connection to Amazon and its board, as they should, but I’m surprised to see this particular topic there, too.
This particular paragraph is disingenuous in its characterization of what’s going on with Reddit, though:
There was also a concern that any major changes to the platform could scare people away. One former employee compared Goodreads to Reddit, an 18-year-old internet forum where users are revolting because of modifications to the site. “People feel like they can’t anger the community,” the former employee said.
Thanks for the BookWyrm recommendation, looks interesting. I have tried LibraryThing before, but it wasn’t quite what I was looking for. I started building my own Goodreads alternative years ago since I couldn’t find anything existing that suited my needs, but unfortunately didn’t ever have the time to properly work on it.
LibraryThing is owned by Abebooks which is owned by amazon. 🙁
