Trying Bookwyrm

Besides programming and all kinds of IT stuff, I really like reading books. Regarding my Calibre library, I am reading between 10 and 20+ books a year. The spectrum covers a couple of IT books but mostly Science Fiction and Fantasy books.

Bookwyrm?

And since I joined Mastodon and thus the Fediverse, I came across Bookwyrm a couple of times. Bookwyrm describes itself as “[…] a social network for tracking your reading, talking about books, writing reviews, and discovering what to read next. Federation allows BookWyrm users to join small, trusted communities that can connect with one another, and with other ActivityPub services like Mastodon and Pleroma.“

I admit I never really understood what it was for or why I would want to use it. I never actively used Goodreads, LovelyBooks or anything alike either. I simple never got used to the idea of discussing books. It’s just not my aim. I usually seek distraction and want to enjoy the read, that’s it. I also don’t need a progress tracker or a reading list. I have a Todo-List into which I put all the books I want to read.

Reviews and Series!

Yet what I often do is searching for all kinds of reviews before I buy a book or lend it from the library! Besides reviews, I also want to know if the particular book is part of a series and if so, if the series is finished and in which order I want to read the books.

And since quite a time, I noticed that whenever it comes to book reviews, I almost always end up at Amazon. Which is great because they do have a huge portfolio and a lot of reviews. But I also dislike the idea that it feels (or is?) like a monopoly for book reviews. And same as I contribute to OpenStreetMap rather than to GoogleMaps, I wouldn’t want to write reviews on Amazon rather than using some more open service.

Bookwyrm!

And this is where the Fediverse idea kicks in: A decentralized, community driven approach to the problem. And suddenly Bookwyrm could make sense. — If I convince myself to write reviews.

Well, long story short: I signed up for an account and started to play around with it. My aim isn’t to discuss books but maybe comment while reading and providing reviews — well, maybe at least in the form of stars, if I can’t bring myself to write reviews.

First Impression

Of course I started bold: “Let’s import my complete Calibre library of roughly 180 books!” With a bit of a surprising result that a lot of them were not found. Well okay – not sure what I expected, but let’s say that I had hoped for more.

So I started adding a couple of books, which worked all well. However, I had also hoped that simply providing the ISBN would be enough to gather the required information from “somewhere”. But instead, ‘adding a book’ usually meant adding all the information by hand. I wouldn’t mind so much if I only had to do it when adding a new book (maybe, even though it would be a bit tedious). But doing it in bulk for lots of books — well, that’s another matter. No thanks. I gave that up pretty quickly.

Way to go

But on the other hand: What would be the benefit (for me and my goals) of having the full library there — in parallel to Calibre — without providing reviews or rating? Not too much, I guess.

So I’m hapy as it is right now and I’ll just continue my test with the book(s) that I’m reading now and in the near future. Let’s see. I’ll keep you posted.