SciFi and Fantasy Book Club discussion
All About Goodreads
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Book Catalog Alternative (preferably not in the cloud)
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I use LibraryThing for cataloguing my personal books. It includes ratings and reviews, although I don't use them much. It's cloud-based, like Goodreads, but like Goodreads allows tab-delimited export.
I use Calibre for real books too (in fact, I use the goodreads-sync plugin to yank the data right from here.)I think I probably have more real books in there than ebooks. Calibre doesn't care :) The new virtual library tabs in Calibre make it easy to sort them out, just make a virtual library with formats:true and voila, there's all your ebooks in a tab.
It's a two-way sync too, if you want you can shelve and write reviews in Calibre, and have it send them up here, so there's no risk of your data getting lost.
Krazykiwi wrote: "I use Calibre for real books too (in fact, I use the goodreads-sync plugin to yank the data right from here.)I think I probably have more real books in there than ebooks. Calibre doesn't care :) ..."
I'll have to try that plugin. I would prefer, though, that it just be one way (from GoodReads to Calibre) so that I can cut the ties cleanly.
Thanks for the suggestion!
Oh it's at your discretion, which direction. Rough and ready plan of attack how I did it: Use the sync plugin to fetch your shelves, it'll pop up a big list saying lots of books aren't listed in Calibre, go through and right click each one to add an "empty" book.
Then grab the gr metadata plugin (it's separate) and use fetch metadata to grab down all the metadata from here (publisher, etc) to fill in the empty book skeletons. I have it fetching only from GR (Ctrl-d, configure plugin, then uncheck all the others, and optionally fiddle with the GR settings), because all the empty books added this way have a GR book id, so it always gets the right edition/cover etc. Do in chunks of 50 or less, to avoid getting blocked by GR for mass data dumping :)
Don't think I missed a step, but if I lost you somewhere, pm me :)
Jon. What deletion and policy changes are you referring to? You said there was no announcement but where would I find the changes you refer to?
there us an announcement with thousands of comments in the GoodReads Feedback group.
There's some background on it at http://gigaom.com/2013/09/23/goodread... (or just google goodreads bullying and you'll find a lot of other articles), and the announcement thread is here http://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/1...
There's a great Android app called, funnily enough, Book Catalogue which I find pretty useful.As far as the Goodreads deletions go, I think things are being blown way out of proportion. Unless you are out to taunt authors I doubt the changes will have any impact. Still, having a backup of all your reviews and book catalog can never be a bad thing.
Crusader wrote: "There's a great Android app called, funnily enough, Book Catalogue which I find pretty useful.As far as the Goodreads deletions go, I think things are being blown way out of proportion. Unless yo..."
I have to disagree. I am a victim, an early one, mid Aug 2013, of their review deletion shenanigans. I had 89 reviews deleted without notice. I was outraged, but I had backups, as I export my GR book data every month.
I looked at Book Catalogue but wasn't excited about their import options. I'm trying out Calibre with the GR sync plugin right now.
Thanks, Jon
Just being curious: Why do you rule out the cloud?
I love the cloud. but ultimately I want to control my content and data. I give that up when I opt for free cliud services like goodreads or google.
>Just being curious: Why do you rule out the cloud? I don't rule it out, but I don't depend on cloud service to keep anything 'safe', or mine. Accidental or purposeful deletion of things I've 'bought' or written, companies can get bought out or change their TOS, cloud services could start charging, etc.
I'd just prefer not to keep all of my eggs in one basket. The first thing I do when I buy books or music is to strip off the DRM, convert them to a few different formats, and back them up on multiple devices/storage systems. I've lost enough physical books over the years to flood, fire, moving, lending etc., that I'd like to at least hold on to my ebooks. And of course there's a chance that 'computers' will just stop working at some point, but if that happens, my guess is that losing books will be the least of my concerns.
Jon wrote: "I have to disagree. I am a victim, an early one, mid Aug 2013, of their review deletion shenanigans. I had 89 reviews deleted without notice. I was outraged, but I had backups, as I export my GR book data every month."I seem to recall from a previous discussion that you had replaced your reviews with one line directing people to your blog for the review since you were unhappy that Amazon had bought GoodReads. I thought at the time that deletion of reviews that were no longer actually reviews was well within the scope of reasonable behaviour on GoodReads part.
The latest question of deletion of shelves and reviews that contain references to authors is a different one in my opinion.
Penny wrote: "Jon wrote: "I have to disagree. I am a victim, an early one, mid Aug 2013, of their review deletion shenanigans. I had 89 reviews deleted without notice. I was outraged, but I had backups, as I exp..."I had a short one or two sentence review of the book with a link to my blog.
Jon wrote: "I had a short one or two sentence review of the book with a link to my blog. "Oh, I was just going off what you wrote in your blog which says:
"Nearly ninety (90) reviews deleted. Most of them contained a single paragraph as follows:
Due to the acquisition of GoodReads by Amazon on March 28, 2013 and my existing and continuing boycott of all things Amazon, the review I wrote after reading this book has been relocated to my blog and can be found in its entirety by following this link:"
I didn't know they also had another paragraph about the book itself.
Penny wrote: "Jon wrote: "I had a short one or two sentence review of the book with a link to my blog. "Oh, I was just going off what you wrote in your blog which says:
"Nearly ninety (90) reviews deleted. M..."
Sometimes they did. Sometimes I was just lazy. Now, of course, my reviews will be solely at my blog.
In addition to GoodReads, I also use the websites LibraryThing, Shelfari, and BookLikes. Booklikes is more of a book blogging site though and as of right now it does not have discussion groups. When I think of BookLikes, I sort of think of it it like Tumblr with a GoodReads like style of shelving books.
Oddly enough though BookLikes doesn't seem to compatible with Tumblr in the sense that when using Tumblr I can't make pages that redirect to BookLikes pages or make link posts to any BookLikes pages. I contacted Tumblr tech support about this several weeks ago and they said that they had no clue why it was happening but that they'd work on it.
Anyway I also use Calibre as a backup offline book database. At first I just used it to manage my ebook collection, but then I made a separate database with tons of custom fields to actually track my reading as well like I do on all of my online sites.
I do know of several other social book sites, but I won't mention them because felt they were awkward or lacking in some way and I never used them past a brief period where I was testing them out.
I'm trying BookLikes, but the import is very very slow going.
In the meantime, I'm also looking for suggestions and recommendations regarding stand-alone apps (for Android) or software (for either Windows OS or Linux) that can catalog books, preferably that can import from a GoodReads export.
I already use Calibre for ebook management, but I need something for all my non-ebook reads.
Thanks,
Jon Moss