• BrikoX@lemmy.zip
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    11 months ago

    Same issue. Both rely purely on Open Library who have very limited database, so you pretty much have to enter all data manually. That’s not an issue if you have 10 or 50 books. But once you reach 1000s it’s not viable.

    • warmaster@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      edit-2
      11 months ago

      This makes me think:

      What if we could contribute our Calibre metadata to Bookwyrm ? All it would take is a plugin to connect Calibre servers to the Fediverse, right?

      • BrikoX@lemmy.zip
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        11 months ago

        Definitely should be possible. And in general there are ways to get the data in, it’s just not average user-friendly. Even a simple Calibre export can be imported by a Bookwyrm instance admin, it just requires some data parsing before that. Nobody is really willing to do that on a scale that matters.

        • conciselyverbose@kbin.social
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          11 months ago

          Bookwyrm imported my goodreads export more or less fine, but (IDK if Amazon gave me them) my lists disappeared in the process, and trying to recreate them was the dealbreaker for me. My absurdly large book lists were casual and not something I needed to keep, but I have a few 50-100 book lists that I do care about and that would have required manually searching each title, and that’s where I drew the line.

          It’s already enough of a hassle to go page by page through the 1000-1500 books I have on goodreads and check boxes. Typing them out is way too much work to migrate.

          Eventually I’ll probably roll my own because I have other functionality requests none of the options meet, but goodreads lists are already not great, so not even matching them is a big step down.

          • BrikoX@lemmy.zip
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            edit-2
            11 months ago

            Lists are not exported from Goodreads. They only allow exporting My Books section.

            But yeah, DIY solution is the way to go. I gave up on using any site for tracking books, they all either have partial functionality or limited database. These days, I just use SQLite database with a custom Python scraper that I turned into a basic website that offers everything I need.

            • conciselyverbose@kbin.social
              link
              fedilink
              arrow-up
              2
              ·
              11 months ago

              It’s why I wasn’t automatically blaming the other options. I never looked at the actual data to know if they were there.

              But trying to recreate them was absolutely brutal, and has been with every option I tried. I looked at implementing my own down and dirty tool to make it more manageable in bookwyrm, but there was just too much mental overhead to get a grasp of the code base in my limited dev time. Just making a basic database and a couple scripts to display my favorites on a couple web pages seems a lot easier. Plus I can treat series as first class citizens in lists and pages with their own blurbs, which none of the bigger options seems to think is useful.

        • warmaster@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          11 months ago

          I was thinking:

          1. User installs plugin
          2. Popup window prompts for Fediverse login and offers a prominent Bookwyrm create account button with default instance or chose another, it would be cool if it would autofill everything except email and password.
          3. Once inside, it shows you a list of checkboxes where you can chose what to share: book info (metadata), user reviews (stars), is there anything else?
          4. Shows you a progress of what is being synced
          5. Once “closed”, it will run in the background every time you run Calibre, unless you set it to manual sync.

          Any ideas?

          • BrikoX@lemmy.zip
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            11 months ago

            I think it’s worth exploring, but maybe not in here. This is way off-topic from the original post.

      • BrikoX@lemmy.zip
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        11 months ago

        They might be, but it has the same issue as Open Library, lack of books and missing details.