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 3 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

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 1 points 11 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] warmaster@lemmy.world 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I was thinking:

User installs plugin
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.
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?
Shows you a progress of what is being synced
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 1 points 11 months ago

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

[–] conciselyverbose@kbin.social 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

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 1 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

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 2 points 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.

[–] antrosapien@lemmy.ml 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Don't bookwyrm also uses inventaire.io too?

[–] BrikoX@lemmy.zip 1 points 11 months ago

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