GoodReads is all but dead for many. A few months ago, they deprecated their API keys (without notice).
I started building a GoodReads-equivalent but realized that many people care more about learning from multiple media formats (blogs, videos, research papers, interactive explorables, podcasts, courses etc) rather than simply reading books. Because there are too many projects attempting to build a new GoodReads, I ended up building something more oriented for multimedia learners.
It’s up and running, open-source, built with Ruby on Rails and supports protocols like ActivityPub, RSS etc. There is a companion browser extension, integration with Slack groups, Twitter and more, and a WIP mobile app. Like GoodReads, you can build your learning lists and embed them on your sites.
It participates in fediverse so your reviews can be broadcasted to your followers on Mastodon, PeerTube etc but full federation is not yet there because it has an underlying knowledge graph that will need to be synchronised across instances.
I think many HN users may be interested in checking it out:
GoodReads isn't about learning though. It's about books. I think there's value and potential in the niche you've chosen. I want to point out that the "learning" niche is very different than the "book review" niche and comes with its own set of very strong competitors.
I recently came across the API issue too; from their page on APIs [0]
> Goodreads no longer issues new developer keys for our public developer API and plans to retire the current version of these tools.
I generally find that I trust their book ratings more than any other sites, though, seeing as they are user-generated, and also given the amount of users being in the 10s of millions.
BookWyrm seems pretty fantastic and promising from what I see, but I don't know that it would attract the current Goodreads user. I'm really hoping it gets some traction.
One of the cool things that the knowledge graph enables is that you can follow “topics” and get learning resources like latest research papers for THAT TOPIC in your feed - even outside the main site. This is the power of ActivityPub which is really a distributed pub/sub for the open Web. My motivation for building this feature came from the reproducibility crisis: I want to be alerted when something I believe has come under question or has been falsified.
Wow you've got a lot going on. Do you have any stats on usage you feel like sharing? I'm curious how people have discovered this and how it has grown since this seems outside any circles I am around except HN.
Where do you get the books from? I'm often surprised when I start reading an obscure Dutch second hand book that Goodreads has it. Is the ISBN database open data?
What exactly is wrong with Goodreads? I keep hearing a lot of hate about it, but the reasons seem never expanded on.
I use Goodreads to maintain a public bookshelf of books I have read or want to read. It's also nice that I can check what my friends are reading. Occasionally it's nice to read other people's views on a book. I typically tend not to agree, but it's nice that these exist.
That's it. Isn't that what Goodreads is about? Seems like a nice website and perfectly suited for what it does. Am I missing something?
- It sucks at recommending books. You may stumble upon some book in the home feed, but its recommendation is as good as if it didn't exist.
- Lists suck. For example, it never anticipates even something as simple as abandoning a book (though you can create that).
- There's like a whole industry of faking ratings and nobody cares about it enough to do anything about it.
- It's owned by Amazon, but Amazon basically didn't touch it since the acquisition almost a decade ago.
Well, they did so recently to kill the API access, which was its #1 selling point to me. I liked using it by not visiting their ugly design ever, but that's not a possibility anymore.
For me it works ok. But that's because I like you only use it to track. But if the other stuff worked better I might have used that too. A better recommendation system. Not insane loading times would maybe make me browse more etc. So much untapped potential here.
It does feel a bit neglected/dead (except for the fact that people still use it a bunch) - the changes come rarely. In some sense this is nice! It's a stable piece of software that does what it should do.
One thing I find lacking is that it seems to mostly be used by english-speakers. So the one case where I'd be curious to use the social networking features, for non-English-lanuage literature, it falls flat. There's no equivalent to it that I know of for the German-language world (that people actually use), which is irksome, because I'd actually use the social networking features there (whereas for English literature I know what I like and don't care what other people read, I don't know German literature as well).
But not becoming terrible is a nice side-effect of this...it's not even a managed decline, it's just pottering along okay! But it is odd. I wonder what their high-level strategy as a business is.
You get spammed with hundreds of fake profiles trying to add you is the biggest disappointment I've seen myself firsthand (obvious phishing links included). There is a lot of botted activity.
Very excited to see a decentralized alternative to Amazon-owned Goodreads & LibraryThing, the latter which I recently learned is 40%-owned by Amazon through a subsidiary AbeBooks.
I'm not too familiar with the fediverse model. I noticed that registration is closed on the primary instance bookwyrm.social.[1] Is the ideal use case of bookwyrm for each user to host their own instance? Like this one: https://book.dansmonorage.blue/
As a user, I wouldn't want to sign up on someone's hobbyist bookwyrm instance only for them to shut it down later and lose all my data.
That info is out of date, bookwyrm.social is in open registration now. A more accurate list of instances is available here: https://joinbookwyrm.com/instances/. I signed up on bookwyrm.social (here: https://bookwyrm.social), though it took a notably long time to receive the email confirmation message.
> As a user, I wouldn't want to sign up on someone's hobbyist bookwyrm instance only for them to shut it down later and lose all my data.
Mastodon goes around this problem by only linking to servers that adhere to their covenant[0], which includes sane stuff like daily backups, >1 person with access to the server, minimum of 3 months notice before shutdown, and moderation.
So, any community you see here[1] promises to give you a notice. I'm assuming other software will eventually reach the number of servers where something similar makes sense to implement.
As an avid Goodreads user, Id say 80-90% of active GR users are female teenagers. Id suggest promoting on booktwitter or booktok instead if you want more traction. There’s also StoryGraph in the running with the same if not more features and a pretty strong network effect already, but still miles away from GR. GR is the laggiest platform I have ever used, and the tech updates are minimal at best, but people still use it primarily because of the network size. Just pure network size.
> As an avid Goodreads user, Id say 80-90% of active GR users are female teenagers.
Lol, I would have said "50yo vanity-obsessed male geeks" instead, judging by the activity in my feed.
I recently made a bit of an effort to use GR a bit more, to go through some of the challenges and increase my reading rates. The anglocentrism is tiring, though - all the "best" lists are dominated by mediocre Anglo writers. If I remember correctly, when "social lit" sites first exploded, they had basically segmented by language - I know Italians used Anubii rather than GR, for example. I picked GR because I was still somewhat in love with the anglosphere, I think I'm ready to move to something a bit more "i18n", but it's not clear what that might be.
Just had a look. Unsurprisingly, the demographic of the user base is skewed to IT professionals (at least at this time). Whether that’s a good thing is subjective, but I personally want broader perspectives on literature. I think this will be a difficult problem for bookwyrm to overcome.
I honestly wonder sometimes if HN is the best place to market a lot of the things that get posted here. A lot of people on HN are developers and I think they post here because it’s _their_ community but in reality it’s actually not a good fit for a lot of products. Maybe some dev/SAAS things, but something like Goodreads? That should be marketed to readers, not developers. The only reason it gets posted here is because the development side is interested (supposedly) in the decentralized technical nature of the product, but that actually matters very little to most people.
This is a problem with any similar thing that already has a heavily established site. One is my hobbies is boardgames. The longest running site is Board Game Geek (BGG). It’s age shows (this was the front page of the site until very recently https://www.boardgamegeek.com/dashboard), but more modern competitors have had issues trying to get a foot hold. The most recent one is Board Game Atlas. They have tried all kinds of things to lure users, such as contests, but I’m sure the percentage of people using it is a fraction to BGG.
federated means your bookgroup could set up their own instance & everyone could either post their book reviewws there, or you could aggregate your own reviews into that instance. it's the freedom to start new communities, while still being able to participate worldwide.
it means that there's a protocol there, at the heart, for having multiple parties cooperating. it means anyone is free to build their own server or client. it meams we're not all trapped in one walled garden, one silo, it means the freedom to innovate & evolve.
right now there is not a lot of models for how we the peoe can host things online in an interoperable way. we can still use http & the technology that we have (unlike block chain), but we can use well defined vocabulary (https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-vocabulary/#activity-t...) & protocols as a base to communicate & interweave social networking systems.
Shows that the architects took an above average time considering the space, and that users may be turned off by data lock in due to previous community betrayal.
None of this federated stuff will ever gain mainstream acceptance. I would bet my house on it. It adds multiple layers of complexity and a ton of UX trade-off, and doesn't solve any problems for a typical user.
I may be wrong, but all I have seen "federated" resembles one of the worst and most harmful websites ever created (twitter), which is really disappointing and disgusting.
Likewise, the "blockchain" scene talks about innovation all day but the bulk of their creation is boring and dated, recreating the banking/finance scene using new tech with minor changes.
Back in the day, people thought machine guns would produce peace!
I think the key is to seperate the catalogue of books and authors from the social and recommendation elements, which is another aspect of federation and de-centralization.
If you're aiming to lock people in and own all their data, then you need to combine the two, but then you kill the social elements by sucking in lots of disparate communities. You can do something sub-reddit like, but if you're not actually interested in sucking up everyone's information then you can slice off the catalogue part to openlibrary and wikidata and have a much easier time building your specific social thing on top.
Bookwyrm (and inventaire.io) seem to have adopted this approach, building on OpenLibrary and Wikidata catalogues.
And in the background those two data projects interact at various levels and with other open data projects that build from the same sources. For example, there's wikidata projects that try to seperate out all the acadamic authors with the same name, so you can have multiple John Smith's and find the right one and connect them across different databases.
Goodreads is amazing at what it is, which is an IMDB equivalent for books. Yeah, it is neglected, outdated and owned by a shady megacorporation, but I don't see any viable alternatives as of now.
As far as I'm aware, it's the only service that lets you easily find out whether a book is part of a series/universe, where/how it fits in there, and notifies you about upcoming entries in series you follow (email notifications have never worked for me, but at least you can check on the site).
Essentially series/universe discovery and news. This used to be massive painpoint for completionist me before Goodreads.
If anyone knows of any alternatives I'm all ears by the way.
In the EU, GDPR makes it clear that as the user, you own the data. Companies are legally required to allow you to export your data, also in part to create more competition among platforms.
No idea about the US, though, where social platforms seem to sometimes come with clauses that make users waive their copyright (which would be unenforceable in Europe).
I like goodreads a lot often check reviews there. I was missing recommended books based on more than one book.
Something more nuanced than books similar to x.
I created my own solution for it and published it here:
at first sight very promising: an online application that is catering to specialized interests (hence very specific data / internal business logic) yet able to be both decentralized (multiple instances) and integrating via activitypub with other (social media type) platforms in the fediverse
the moment the open source community realises that open source is not just about freeing up things conjured up in proprietary context but opens entirely new universes will be a tipping point of sorts...
There are two types of data exports from GoodReads - a full data export, and a csv download. The csv download is what you want, and it is generally very quick (https://www.goodreads.com/review/import)
"A portion of the proceeds go towards the Yunakin land tax."
An _Anti Corporate_ organisation adopting a very corporate measure in my view.
If taxes could lead to justice, then native Americans would be far less prone to poverty, alcoholism and depression.
About the product itself, it's hard to see how this is an alternative to goodreads. The federation is designed in a way that silos communities. A great model for decentralised moderation etc. The parallel could be made with reddit, not so much with goodreads where over half of the books in existence are listed, very often rated/reviewed.
> The federation is designed in a way that silos communities.
You seem to have taken the exact opposite view of what anyone in the fediverse would consider this as. This is many connected communities. Not siloed. That's what "decentralized" means, their very first major point on the website.
If there's real gaps in how federation works to connect, the fediverse is happy to discuss, adapt, & adopt: bring on your more specific complaints! This is supposed to be the cure for silos! Everyone can run whatever they want, and we can interoperate! Interoperate & co-evolve.
[+] [-] mathnmusic|4 years ago|reply
I started building a GoodReads-equivalent but realized that many people care more about learning from multiple media formats (blogs, videos, research papers, interactive explorables, podcasts, courses etc) rather than simply reading books. Because there are too many projects attempting to build a new GoodReads, I ended up building something more oriented for multimedia learners.
It’s up and running, open-source, built with Ruby on Rails and supports protocols like ActivityPub, RSS etc. There is a companion browser extension, integration with Slack groups, Twitter and more, and a WIP mobile app. Like GoodReads, you can build your learning lists and embed them on your sites.
It participates in fediverse so your reviews can be broadcasted to your followers on Mastodon, PeerTube etc but full federation is not yet there because it has an underlying knowledge graph that will need to be synchronised across instances.
I think many HN users may be interested in checking it out:
https://learnawesome.org/
https://github.com/learn-awesome/learn
[+] [-] personjerry|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] avnigo|4 years ago|reply
> Goodreads no longer issues new developer keys for our public developer API and plans to retire the current version of these tools.
I generally find that I trust their book ratings more than any other sites, though, seeing as they are user-generated, and also given the amount of users being in the 10s of millions.
BookWyrm seems pretty fantastic and promising from what I see, but I don't know that it would attract the current Goodreads user. I'm really hoping it gets some traction.
[0]: https://help.goodreads.com/s/article/Does-Goodreads-support-...
[+] [-] mathnmusic|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] leetrout|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Scarblac|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] tpoacher|4 years ago|reply
I use Goodreads to maintain a public bookshelf of books I have read or want to read. It's also nice that I can check what my friends are reading. Occasionally it's nice to read other people's views on a book. I typically tend not to agree, but it's nice that these exist.
That's it. Isn't that what Goodreads is about? Seems like a nice website and perfectly suited for what it does. Am I missing something?
[+] [-] input_sh|4 years ago|reply
- Lists suck. For example, it never anticipates even something as simple as abandoning a book (though you can create that).
- There's like a whole industry of faking ratings and nobody cares about it enough to do anything about it.
- It's owned by Amazon, but Amazon basically didn't touch it since the acquisition almost a decade ago.
Well, they did so recently to kill the API access, which was its #1 selling point to me. I liked using it by not visiting their ugly design ever, but that's not a possibility anymore.
[+] [-] matsemann|4 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20904549
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24454221
For me it works ok. But that's because I like you only use it to track. But if the other stuff worked better I might have used that too. A better recommendation system. Not insane loading times would maybe make me browse more etc. So much untapped potential here.
[+] [-] jan_Inkepa|4 years ago|reply
One thing I find lacking is that it seems to mostly be used by english-speakers. So the one case where I'd be curious to use the social networking features, for non-English-lanuage literature, it falls flat. There's no equivalent to it that I know of for the German-language world (that people actually use), which is irksome, because I'd actually use the social networking features there (whereas for English literature I know what I like and don't care what other people read, I don't know German literature as well).
But not becoming terrible is a nice side-effect of this...it's not even a managed decline, it's just pottering along okay! But it is odd. I wonder what their high-level strategy as a business is.
[+] [-] mrmuagi|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] varjag|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] counternotions|4 years ago|reply
I'm not too familiar with the fediverse model. I noticed that registration is closed on the primary instance bookwyrm.social.[1] Is the ideal use case of bookwyrm for each user to host their own instance? Like this one: https://book.dansmonorage.blue/
As a user, I wouldn't want to sign up on someone's hobbyist bookwyrm instance only for them to shut it down later and lose all my data.
1. https://docs.joinbookwyrm.com/instances.html
[+] [-] matthberg|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] input_sh|4 years ago|reply
Mastodon goes around this problem by only linking to servers that adhere to their covenant[0], which includes sane stuff like daily backups, >1 person with access to the server, minimum of 3 months notice before shutdown, and moderation.
So, any community you see here[1] promises to give you a notice. I'm assuming other software will eventually reach the number of servers where something similar makes sense to implement.
[0] https://joinmastodon.org/covenant
[1] https://joinmastodon.org/communities
[+] [-] dictatorsunion|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] toyg|4 years ago|reply
Lol, I would have said "50yo vanity-obsessed male geeks" instead, judging by the activity in my feed.
I recently made a bit of an effort to use GR a bit more, to go through some of the challenges and increase my reading rates. The anglocentrism is tiring, though - all the "best" lists are dominated by mediocre Anglo writers. If I remember correctly, when "social lit" sites first exploded, they had basically segmented by language - I know Italians used Anubii rather than GR, for example. I picked GR because I was still somewhat in love with the anglosphere, I think I'm ready to move to something a bit more "i18n", but it's not clear what that might be.
[+] [-] Aeolun|4 years ago|reply
This explains a lot about the lists I see being popular on there.
[+] [-] bottled_poe|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] uncomputation|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] irrational|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Shorel|4 years ago|reply
Let it grow for a few months and see.
[+] [-] Krasnol|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] personjerry|4 years ago|reply
What does federated do for me at all in solving this problem?
[+] [-] rektide|4 years ago|reply
it means that there's a protocol there, at the heart, for having multiple parties cooperating. it means anyone is free to build their own server or client. it meams we're not all trapped in one walled garden, one silo, it means the freedom to innovate & evolve.
right now there is not a lot of models for how we the peoe can host things online in an interoperable way. we can still use http & the technology that we have (unlike block chain), but we can use well defined vocabulary (https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-vocabulary/#activity-t...) & protocols as a base to communicate & interweave social networking systems.
[+] [-] atatatat|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mdoms|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gverrilla|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ZeroGravitas|4 years ago|reply
If you're aiming to lock people in and own all their data, then you need to combine the two, but then you kill the social elements by sucking in lots of disparate communities. You can do something sub-reddit like, but if you're not actually interested in sucking up everyone's information then you can slice off the catalogue part to openlibrary and wikidata and have a much easier time building your specific social thing on top.
Bookwyrm (and inventaire.io) seem to have adopted this approach, building on OpenLibrary and Wikidata catalogues.
And in the background those two data projects interact at various levels and with other open data projects that build from the same sources. For example, there's wikidata projects that try to seperate out all the acadamic authors with the same name, so you can have multiple John Smith's and find the right one and connect them across different databases.
[+] [-] brachika|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] deck4rd|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] krono|4 years ago|reply
Essentially series/universe discovery and news. This used to be massive painpoint for completionist me before Goodreads.
If anyone knows of any alternatives I'm all ears by the way.
[+] [-] dsq|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] indigo945|4 years ago|reply
No idea about the US, though, where social platforms seem to sometimes come with clauses that make users waive their copyright (which would be unenforceable in Europe).
[+] [-] mejutoco|4 years ago|reply
I created my own solution for it and published it here:
https://what3books.com
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] streamofdigits|4 years ago|reply
the moment the open source community realises that open source is not just about freeing up things conjured up in proprietary context but opens entirely new universes will be a tipping point of sorts...
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Shorel|4 years ago|reply
I'm still waiting for mine to be delivered.
[+] [-] bookwyrm-social|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] newbamboo|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] patchtopic|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hirako2000|4 years ago|reply
An _Anti Corporate_ organisation adopting a very corporate measure in my view.
If taxes could lead to justice, then native Americans would be far less prone to poverty, alcoholism and depression.
About the product itself, it's hard to see how this is an alternative to goodreads. The federation is designed in a way that silos communities. A great model for decentralised moderation etc. The parallel could be made with reddit, not so much with goodreads where over half of the books in existence are listed, very often rated/reviewed.
[+] [-] rektide|4 years ago|reply
You seem to have taken the exact opposite view of what anyone in the fediverse would consider this as. This is many connected communities. Not siloed. That's what "decentralized" means, their very first major point on the website.
If there's real gaps in how federation works to connect, the fediverse is happy to discuss, adapt, & adopt: bring on your more specific complaints! This is supposed to be the cure for silos! Everyone can run whatever they want, and we can interoperate! Interoperate & co-evolve.
[+] [-] rektide|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]