this post was submitted on 29 Oct 2024
43 points (97.8% liked)
Books
4531 readers
2 users here now
A community for all things related to Books.
Rules
- Be Nice
Official Bingo Posts:
Related Communities
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I want to replace goodreads, because it kind of sucks and my preference would be showing (and tagging/blurbing/listing) books by author/series instead of individual books, but none of the alternatives do what I want and I never seem to have time to roll my own version.
But on the plus side you can export your lists through the website, so I keep up the tracking I can there with the intent of eventually doing it myself and doing some basic self hosting.
I just care about cataloging books, with proper info, and LibraryThing is great for that. My only non-complaint is that it's not self-hosted, but I semi-regularly export my books, so it's all good.
I can understand about not getting time to roll your own version. I have been trying to do that for a game cataloging app for over a decade, starts with some new tech every year or so then get busy with stuff and forget about it.
I can't function without the bulk edit tool goodreads has. My actual goodreads list is 1400 books and I need to be able to go through groups of 50-100 checking boxes to make lists. My real preference for fiction would be to be able to tag by series/author.
Just remaking my "high quality psychology/adjacent" books list by typing every name one at a time is way more than I can stomach.
There are some features for that in LT, power edit or something, though I haven't actually explored them in depth, or even looked at them in years, so I could be wrong about those.
It could have evolved since I tried it. I think I'll probably still end up targeting my own, though, because I don't care about any of the social stuff, but do really want to be able to treat series and authors as first class citizens. (The idea being to share a list of favorite series with brief blurbs about what I like about each, ideally kind of ad hoc so I can quickly create a list without rewriting every thought I've had about it but tailor it to a specific person or conversation.)
But yeah, limited by my commitment to it I guess.
I would look forward to it! Do remember to let us know whenever it reaches any kind of usable state.
I understand that it can take a long time due to other priorities, but now you know there are some other people waiting for it too, so it may give you some additional motivation!