Goodbye, GoodReads! Liberate Your Reading With BookWyrm

“Library cat” by Olivier Gutknecht is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0

Good things always seem to find me at the most random moments. As I was hanging out on Mastodon the other day, I saw a site called BookWyrm casually recommended in the thread. The same day I signed up there, I deleted my GoodReads account. And I hope you’ll want to do the same.

In a nutshell, BookWyrm is de-Amazon-ified GoodReads. You can keep track of your reading progress, set yearly goals, create reading lists, discover new books, post reviews and updates, and interact with others. All the good stuff with no ads, manipulative algorithms, and corporate data mining.

BookWyrm has a refreshingly simple, easy-to-navigate, uncluttered interface. Compared to a large number of websites these days, it does feel like a breath of fresh air. And if you’ve spent any time on GoodReads, you will find your way around in no time.

Home Timeline, indeed, has that homely feel.

If this is not enough awesome, BookWyrm implements the ActivityPub protocol, making it a part of the fediverse. Any update, be it a rating, quote, review, etc., is a federateable post, which means you can like, reply, or boost it not only from your instance but also from any other one. Of course, you can do cool things like remotely following BookWyrm profiles from your home Mastodon instance.

What about the book catalog? Depending on the instance, you may not find a lot of books, but thanks to integration with Inventaire, Wikidata, and other BookWyrm instances, the missing title can be pulled in one click. If your taste is more esoteric, you can add the missing book manually or by scanning a barcode.

Even if your instance lacks books, you rarely have to add them manually.

As I am gradually trying to break out of walled gardens and embrace more free/libre services, GoodReads seemed to be the one without viable alternatives. But that was before I came across BookWyrm. It has everything I need, sans the algorithms, ads, and data mining. It’s an excellent service, regardless of how much you read and comment on reading.

The list of instances to join can be found here. And of course you can run your own one, it’s the fediverse after all!

What do you think about BookWyrm? Have you tried it already? Let me know! If you want to keep in touch and see what I’m currently reading, here’s my profile!