I'd love to get some messages on my Feedback post

[Lisa]

https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

Is this the middle of the end?!

[Mir]

I heard from people who deleted that they had to send messages asking for their reviews to be removed, and wait over a week. I guess Amazon doesn't want to lose all that data they paid for...

[Debbie's Spurts (D.A.)]

I hope it gives them a clue as to how much members trust them.

I know not everyone is outright leaving goodreads, but if they don't trust their content, particularly shelves and book catalogs, to be safe then of course they are constantly backing up via export.

I'm not suspicious of them saying the import/export was hogging site resources.

I am paranoid enough to wonder if export will be resumed only after all the kindle holiday buys to make sure the reviews and books stay available long enough to encourage kindle users to integrate to goodreads.

[Krazykiwi]

I can write up an explanation how to use Calibre to keep your book data up to date against GR using an existing CSV export if anyone is interested. It'll even keep your reviews up to date (and you can write the reviews in Calibre and send them to the site, if you want). Probably won't be until tomorrow though.

Caveat: They can't really turn the entire API off, because that would disable the apps, but they can disable a specific application from using it, as we saw from BookLikes.

[Susanna - Censored by GoodReads]

Wow. Desperate much, GRAmazon?

[Mir]

Krazykiwi wrote: "I can write up an explanation how to use Calibre to keep your book data up to date against GR using an existing CSV export if anyone is interested. It'll even keep your reviews up to date (and you ..."

I don't even know what Calibre is, but I'd certainly be willing to read your explanation and try to understand it. Thanks!

[Heather in FL]

calibre-ebook.com

Software to manage your book collection. Free, unless you choose to donate. IMO, it's definitely worthwhile software.

[Krazykiwi]

Calibre is a desktop ebook manager. It does lots of things, like convert formats, manage your kindle or e-reader, etc, and it keeps a local database of your books. But it doesn't care if you put entries in that aren't ebooks, just to have them in the database.

It has a set of GR plugins that let it fetch data from here, including your bookshelves - but GR don't like if you fetch too much at once (more than 50 books), so if you have more than 100 books or so, you'll probably want to bootstrap it with a CSV, then update from there unless you want to spend hours fetching the data. Once it's done though, you can synch your shelves as often as you want, since it'll only be sending/fetching changes.

It's got a scary amount of features on first glance, which puts people off a bit, but once you're up and running it's super simple to use.

[Lee]

Sounds amazing! Thanks for the explanation, I'm going to take a look.

[Lisa]

Oh, I'm also going to take a looks at Calibre. Thanks, kiwi and all. I don't read e-books yet, but it sounds as though that's okay.

I'm not deleting my books from Goodreads, not yet anyway. I always export copies, I leave data as it is here but export a copy to keep on my computer. Well, I did.

Now, every time I try to do it, even if it worked the last time, I doubt I'll ever trust it again.

Everything here feels so sad now.

Thanks, All.

[Lisa]

I know. I'm worried. Many other times here things have been shut down "briefly" and it's turned into forever. If that happens, I guess I'll have to leave. It's already so much less fun here, ever since the Amazon announcement. For me, that was it. I didn't need the September announcement to know some of what was coming. Such a shame. I'll stick around for now, but I know from now on I'll never trust the feature to work. Next up?: I'm waiting for us to not be able to remove all our books if that's what we want to do.

[Debbie's Spurts (D.A.)]

I am deeply, seriously insulted that goodreads can make a sitewide announcement advertising the new kindle fire.

But still can't announce a September change in shelf naming policies that could cause your carefully constructed book catalogs to be vandalized.

[Lisa]

Yes, I think we all feel that way, most of those who know about it, at least.

[Dawn]

Lisa wrote: "...'ll stick around for now, but I know from now on I'll never trust the feature to work. Next up?: I'm waiting for us to not be able to remove all our books if that's what we want to do. "

Ah don't say it ...

[Lisa]

Well, I'm going to try to stay, as long as I have friends here. But for me the Amazon announcement was the end of trusting and loving the site. And much of the fun has gone out of it for me, especially given the departure of many friends, and all the discord here now.

[Debbie's Spurts (D.A.)]

With goodreads integrated into kindle fire, the Mayday operators should kniw something about goodreads. (No clue and although every tech gadget, book app, tablet, operating system is usually something i'm dying to try -- not the goodreads kindle integration. Maybe five year's down the road I'll regret that decison or have to backtrack if work projects require using or it's something that has overtaken social media. Except that kobo let's you shelve only what they sell, I actually liked how they have been doing their community and app/device stuff so maybe they or nook and others will jump in to compete by integrating with booklikes, The Reading Room, Reader Rabbit, Fictfact or others?)

[Debbie's Spurts (D.A.)]

Randolph wrote: "Hey, when's that booklikes link feature coming back? I would have thought it was top of the hopper before import/export fix or before Kindle "sharing." What's the deal goodreads?"

If they were smart, they'd put it back so it can be the scapegoat for all sorts of issues the goodreads site might have. Getting kinda hard to keep milking it as the reason behind site bugs since been disabled for weeks (not that it stops the support emails from blaming third party api as being the culprit).