And once again, as with any social media related site, the technical aspect is the smallest problem or hurdle to overcome rather than who's going to curate, who's going to moderate, etc. etc.
Everyone builds alternatives thinking it's like the freaking field of dreams...
I have switched to StoryGraph, and I don't look back.
I read books in five languages, and I read a lot of old ones, too, that are from pre-ISBN era. Not finding them on Goodreads and not being able to add them was a serious drawback. GR demands an online book webpage to add a book, which don't exist for a lot of niche books I read.
StoryGraph totally solved it.
And I also use Bookmory [0] for regular tracking and sharing pretty visuals. You should give Bookmory a try.
I don't really care for the social aspect of goodreads, I just like to find other people's reviews and have a meta-data rich way to track what I've read and my TBR, and for that OpenReads is incredible. Pretty damn featureful, fetches metadata and reviews from various sources really well, beautiful modern Material You UI. Highly recommended
I’ve been using StoryGraph for a long time, since it was a PWA. It’s come a long way and the developer is great at listening to feedback and taking suggestion. Highly recommend it
I’m a little bit embarrassed to share it at this point, but I’m developing an application, called Biblish, that is meant to offer small utilities that augment the process of reading, writing, publishing, and distributing literature. One piece of that is a note taking software, called Papertrail, that allows you to take notes for books you are reading in print, and other users can subscribe to these notes and see them on a page by page basis as they read the book themselves.
I am a writer of literary fiction first and foremost, and I never really understood the interest in tracking or reviewing books. I can see its usefulness for a certain segment of the market, but what I come to read is mostly the result of following the map of influences of the authors who inspire my writing. The quality of these works is thoroughly vetted by their centuries of survival. Little reviews do not seem like a useful mechanism for finding the best in contemporary literature either.
In any event, little reviews and social features are a much better way to develop a user base for your platform. Papertrail works fairly well as intended, and I use it extensively, but we found pretty early on that asking users to take extensive notes on books was too large a barrier of entry for people to cross and start producing the content the site needs to grow. My lead developer, who really functioned, perhaps a little too well, as cofounder, found a good job opportunity elsewhere, and I have not been able to replace him. Me and another developer are still working on it, but it looks to be on the road of another application that did not quite find a market.
Hey, author here. First of all, thank you for sharing my post on Hacker News, and secondly, thank you for all the comments. Based on them, I updated the post and added StoryGraph and BookWyrm to the post, both lovely recommendations and alternatives.
I really love my Bookwyrm instance bookrastinating. I've moved off of other social media entirely to mastodon, lemmy and bookwyrm. it's just enough with nice people without the horror show of the commercial ones. I donate to my instances. It's a good time.
> There is room for a platform that not only allows people to track their reading progress and books, but also connect with fellow readers. At the same time, I would like to take one step further and state that the very same platform could allow readers to connect with authors, and allow authors through unique social features to interact with their readers. And to go another step further, why not use the same platform to highlight independent book stores in the regions of the users whenever they discover a new book
Doesn't Goodreads do all of this (except the last), just hidden behind a poor UI?
My main interaction with Goodreads is to take part in a discussion group called "Evolution of Science Fiction". They read and discuss a scifi novel and a short story every month, cycling through the decads from old to new. It's very social and I've had a tonne of recommendations through it.
The author of this article should give Hardcover a fair shake, rather than admitting "I felt a bit of a social reading fatigue from Goodreads, Oku, and Literal, and since Hardcover also has a dedicated focus on connecting with others and explore their bookshelves, it was not the alternative I was looking for."
Yes, Hardcover has some degree of social component - but it also isn't a component that is in your face or that you have to use. Indeed, it isn't as dedicated to the social component (yet) as TheStoryGraph is... and yet the author highly praises TSG.
Full disclosure: I've been a paying Supporter of both TSG and Hardcover for a couple of years now, and I'm a Librarian in both systems. I'm also the staff-level Head Librarian at Hardcover. :)
The line you just cited from the article were my personal feelings/emotions while giving it a try, published in a personal post, on my personal publication, and if I decide after that, that it is not the alternative I was looking for, it is simply a personal decision.
Also, I am not *praising* StoryGraph but simply add an overview of it after it got suggested by a couple of readers.
While I can understand why you may think the license is doomed in the face of any litigation, why would that prevent you from recommending it? How would that license being found illegal would affect any regular end user?
Surely any legal challenge would just allow a corporate entity to use the software as they see fit, unfortunate but ultimately not mattering to the original software.
I haven't read the license, but it's kinda normal to have an intro describing the intent that is more or less unrelated to the actual terms of the license. Unless it requires you to affirm that you don't operate by capitalist principles, it's not preventing you from following the actual terms of the license.
Thank you so much for posting my site!!! So awesome to see this randomly in HN. Just got the 500th user. Launched last friday
I definitely wanted to curate a high-brow community (50% of our users are in NYC/London), and the weird corners of the internet with alternative perspectives and taste. It's focused on user customization and """brutalist""" UI. the manifesto of the site is probably either going to be a turn-on or turn-off for you: https://www.literary.salon/about
The underlying book and author data for many of these is sourced via a lower layer of openlibrary.org and wikidata (which in turn are building on isbns and the collective records of many national libraries) and when they aren't, they should be. The underlying data should be a shared endeavour.
Openlibrary.org provides book tracking (want to read, currently reading, have read) itself, as long as you can cope with it being neither beautiful nor social, which seem to be the key selling points of many of these.
I really wanted to like open library but last time I tried it (over a year ago tbf), the UI was extremely slow and frustrating to use. I just gave up and started tracking things in a csv file.
Does anyone know of a good offline or at the very least local-first app for keeping track of read books, to read books, and search for books by ism, author, etc.
I don't care about any social features. I'm asking for essentially a glorified crud app with a nice UI and isbn lookup and goodreads scraping.
Goodreads has a one-button link to the Amazon listing, where I can read the first twenty-some pages. That's a "competitive moat", and it's a mile wide.
It's a great product in terms of functionality, but I choose privacy over convenience in this case because Tencent will track all sorts of things within the app. In addition, once you are used to reading on WeRead, you are also limited to the selection of censored content. I don't think many people are willing to subject their reading choices to the censors in China
I think what all these sites get wrong, is that the reading and the tracking is separate. The reason why for example Spotify playlists work really well is because the proximity between the music and the tracking is very close to each other.
I have a bunch of bookcases at home, thank you for your suggestion. However, I will keep using apps, since that bookcase is not really helpful when I am visiting a book store, strolling around, and adding new books to my wishlist or checking if I already own it. The bookcase also does not recommend me new books based on my reading habits, sadly.
Some people love to catalog the collection, to add metadata to it, to know what books and/or editions they have when looking at purchasing more books, and to use it to enhance their overall collections.
Also, care to explain how we can store ebooks on a bookcase?
And once again, as with any social media related site, the technical aspect is the smallest problem or hurdle to overcome rather than who's going to curate, who's going to moderate, etc. etc.
Everyone builds alternatives thinking it's like the freaking field of dreams...
I have switched to StoryGraph, and I don't look back.
I read books in five languages, and I read a lot of old ones, too, that are from pre-ISBN era. Not finding them on Goodreads and not being able to add them was a serious drawback. GR demands an online book webpage to add a book, which don't exist for a lot of niche books I read.
StoryGraph totally solved it.
And I also use Bookmory [0] for regular tracking and sharing pretty visuals. You should give Bookmory a try.
[0]: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.tonysoft.b...
I don't really care for the social aspect of goodreads, I just like to find other people's reviews and have a meta-data rich way to track what I've read and my TBR, and for that OpenReads is incredible. Pretty damn featureful, fetches metadata and reviews from various sources really well, beautiful modern Material You UI. Highly recommended
Oh, that one looks awesome too, thank you for the recommendation, will update the post and add that one too. Thanks!
https://www.thestorygraph.com/
Looks nice, needs some kind of API so I can import my own data (which is not in GoodReads).
Yeah I have seen some other discussions on an API, it’s on the roadmap but the lone developer is not prioritising for now.
I’ve been using StoryGraph for a long time, since it was a PWA. It’s come a long way and the developer is great at listening to feedback and taking suggestion. Highly recommend it
Yup, author overlooked this one that I give five stars. Switched long ago and never looked back.
Updated the post and added it as an alternative, thank you for the suggestion.
Thanks for adding it based on comments- both mine and others'.
I'm also using this and it's really not bad.
I’m a little bit embarrassed to share it at this point, but I’m developing an application, called Biblish, that is meant to offer small utilities that augment the process of reading, writing, publishing, and distributing literature. One piece of that is a note taking software, called Papertrail, that allows you to take notes for books you are reading in print, and other users can subscribe to these notes and see them on a page by page basis as they read the book themselves.
https://papertrail.biblish.com
I am a writer of literary fiction first and foremost, and I never really understood the interest in tracking or reviewing books. I can see its usefulness for a certain segment of the market, but what I come to read is mostly the result of following the map of influences of the authors who inspire my writing. The quality of these works is thoroughly vetted by their centuries of survival. Little reviews do not seem like a useful mechanism for finding the best in contemporary literature either.
In any event, little reviews and social features are a much better way to develop a user base for your platform. Papertrail works fairly well as intended, and I use it extensively, but we found pretty early on that asking users to take extensive notes on books was too large a barrier of entry for people to cross and start producing the content the site needs to grow. My lead developer, who really functioned, perhaps a little too well, as cofounder, found a good job opportunity elsewhere, and I have not been able to replace him. Me and another developer are still working on it, but it looks to be on the road of another application that did not quite find a market.
My profile on Papertrail can be found below.
https://papertrail.biblish.com/russell
It's great to see someone also interested in annotation on physical books, I had a really rough prototype using Hypothesis for the notes here: https://github.com/rlueder/hypothesis-hardcopy https://github.com/hypothesis/product-backlog/issues/1229
I'll give biblish a go!
Hey, author here. First of all, thank you for sharing my post on Hacker News, and secondly, thank you for all the comments. Based on them, I updated the post and added StoryGraph and BookWyrm to the post, both lovely recommendations and alternatives.
I really love my Bookwyrm instance bookrastinating. I've moved off of other social media entirely to mastodon, lemmy and bookwyrm. it's just enough with nice people without the horror show of the commercial ones. I donate to my instances. It's a good time.
> There is room for a platform that not only allows people to track their reading progress and books, but also connect with fellow readers. At the same time, I would like to take one step further and state that the very same platform could allow readers to connect with authors, and allow authors through unique social features to interact with their readers. And to go another step further, why not use the same platform to highlight independent book stores in the regions of the users whenever they discover a new book
Doesn't Goodreads do all of this (except the last), just hidden behind a poor UI?
My main interaction with Goodreads is to take part in a discussion group called "Evolution of Science Fiction". They read and discuss a scifi novel and a short story every month, cycling through the decads from old to new. It's very social and I've had a tonne of recommendations through it.
The author of this article should give Hardcover a fair shake, rather than admitting "I felt a bit of a social reading fatigue from Goodreads, Oku, and Literal, and since Hardcover also has a dedicated focus on connecting with others and explore their bookshelves, it was not the alternative I was looking for."
Yes, Hardcover has some degree of social component - but it also isn't a component that is in your face or that you have to use. Indeed, it isn't as dedicated to the social component (yet) as TheStoryGraph is... and yet the author highly praises TSG.
Full disclosure: I've been a paying Supporter of both TSG and Hardcover for a couple of years now, and I'm a Librarian in both systems. I'm also the staff-level Head Librarian at Hardcover. :)
The line you just cited from the article were my personal feelings/emotions while giving it a try, published in a personal post, on my personal publication, and if I decide after that, that it is not the alternative I was looking for, it is simply a personal decision.
Also, I am not *praising* StoryGraph but simply add an overview of it after it got suggested by a couple of readers.
here you go lol https://github.com/bookwyrm-social/bookwyrm
It's part of fediverse. Open source, decentralized software
Unfortunately I can't recommend bookwyrm due to its license, which starts with:
> This is anti-capitalist software, released for free use by individuals and organizations that do not operate by capitalist principles.
I don't disagree with the politics here but surely it's hopeless as a legal document.
While I can understand why you may think the license is doomed in the face of any litigation, why would that prevent you from recommending it? How would that license being found illegal would affect any regular end user?
Surely any legal challenge would just allow a corporate entity to use the software as they see fit, unfortunate but ultimately not mattering to the original software.
I disagree with the politics here.
I haven't read the license, but it's kinda normal to have an intro describing the intent that is more or less unrelated to the actual terms of the license. Unless it requires you to affirm that you don't operate by capitalist principles, it's not preventing you from following the actual terms of the license.
Thanks for the pointer. Added to my social advertising bot.
What exactly is your "social advertising bot"? Is this a bot that makes contextual comments like the one you're replying to?
A new alternative that I came across recently: https://www.literary.salon/
Thank you so much for posting my site!!! So awesome to see this randomly in HN. Just got the 500th user. Launched last friday
I definitely wanted to curate a high-brow community (50% of our users are in NYC/London), and the weird corners of the internet with alternative perspectives and taste. It's focused on user customization and """brutalist""" UI. the manifesto of the site is probably either going to be a turn-on or turn-off for you: https://www.literary.salon/about
The underlying book and author data for many of these is sourced via a lower layer of openlibrary.org and wikidata (which in turn are building on isbns and the collective records of many national libraries) and when they aren't, they should be. The underlying data should be a shared endeavour.
Openlibrary.org provides book tracking (want to read, currently reading, have read) itself, as long as you can cope with it being neither beautiful nor social, which seem to be the key selling points of many of these.
I really wanted to like open library but last time I tried it (over a year ago tbf), the UI was extremely slow and frustrating to use. I just gave up and started tracking things in a csv file.
Does anyone know of a good offline or at the very least local-first app for keeping track of read books, to read books, and search for books by ism, author, etc.
I don't care about any social features. I'm asking for essentially a glorified crud app with a nice UI and isbn lookup and goodreads scraping.
Calibre. Mainly for eBooks but you could add an empty book for those that are paper. It'll do metadata lookup and what not too given a title etc.
Hmm. Hadn’t considered it for that. I’ve only used it for conversions, never kept things there since their ebook reader is quite bad.
It's quite bad? It's the only one I've ever used.
On Mac at least is it quite laggy and janky overall, especially when compared to Apple’s Book app.
Apple doesn't let you copy and paste from books. I've moved to thorium on the computer and Moon+ on my phone
It’s extremely hard to defeat “good enough”.
Goodreads has a one-button link to the Amazon listing, where I can read the first twenty-some pages. That's a "competitive moat", and it's a mile wide.
Browser extensions have also been made for Goodreads that ping my library's Overdive/Libby API for availability, and that's positively addictive!
I wrote a quick userscript to hop over to Libby. Nothing complex, just a link to search your default library for you:
https://gist.github.com/joeinnes/12dfa3c2c76f5f9433837d575ef...
https://hardcover.app/
I don’t care about the social features so I just made my own that I use myself. But that way I get to make it work exactly how I want :)
WeRead (微信读书) by Tencent is the best reading app. I immediately turn to WeRead even if I have tons of reading history in Goodreads about 3-year ago.
They introduce social aspects in the book you are reading, and you can see how other comments on the sentence you read.
They also provide the insights on what book you reads, how much time you spent on this book, etc.
It's a great product in terms of functionality, but I choose privacy over convenience in this case because Tencent will track all sorts of things within the app. In addition, once you are used to reading on WeRead, you are also limited to the selection of censored content. I don't think many people are willing to subject their reading choices to the censors in China
Not sure what you are reading, but I'm not sure I want Tencent to be reviewing my reading habits. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tencent#Censorship
Edit: To be fair, I also don't want Goodreads to be doing that either.
I remember using Librarything some fifteen years back before switching to Goodreads. I wonder if anyone still uses it.
I think what all these sites get wrong, is that the reading and the tracking is separate. The reason why for example Spotify playlists work really well is because the proximity between the music and the tracking is very close to each other.
I would be fine with just a better UI
[dead]
Why do you need apps for books. Stop. Buy a bookcase.
I have a bunch of bookcases at home, thank you for your suggestion. However, I will keep using apps, since that bookcase is not really helpful when I am visiting a book store, strolling around, and adding new books to my wishlist or checking if I already own it. The bookcase also does not recommend me new books based on my reading habits, sadly.
Because different people do different things?
Some people love to catalog the collection, to add metadata to it, to know what books and/or editions they have when looking at purchasing more books, and to use it to enhance their overall collections.
Also, care to explain how we can store ebooks on a bookcase?
A bookcase would look ridiculous with just the one kindle on it
>Why do you need apps for books. Stop. Buy a bookcase.
This is a particularly idiotic take. These apps help you track your reading, they don't replace books or bookcases.
[flagged]
OK, either you're not well read at all or clearly trolling. Have a nice day.