When I decided to jump into the fediverse with both feet, I signed up for a BookWyrm account at @bookrastinating. When I tried to import my history/library, there were two big issues.
The first was timing. I joined and started an import at about the same time many, many, many other people did, and the server promptly fell over. The owner of Bookrastinating was helpful and friendly and eventually the queue started moving again, so that’s not an issue anymore.
The second was not actually a problem with BookWyrm at all, but with GoodReads! It turns out that a bunch of books I’d previously tagged as read on GoodRead were no longer the books they had been. No offense to Marc Blake, author of “How to Be a Sitcom Writer: Secrets from the Inside,” but I’ve never read that book. When I “shelved” it on January 9, 2017, I assigned it “baroque, cycle, fiction, hardback, series, read,” so it seems very clear that what I actually shelved was a book by Neal Stephenson, and checking now shows that GoodReads only knows I’ve read the second book in the tagged “baroque cycle” series, but it has lost the first and third.
I’m not sure when the GoodReads database was corrupted, and in a review of my Reading Challenge book lists for 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, and 2017, everything seems probably-correct. But my 2017 Reading Challenge also does not include the book I mentioned above, the book that caught my eye as clearly-incorrect.
When I look at books shelved in 2017, I see many that are definitely not right, although they don’t have “read” dates. I’m sure After the Martian Apocalypse: Extraterrestrial Artifacts and the Case for Mars Exploration is a perfectly fine book, but it definitely wasn’t what I tagged with “fiction paperback series dragon king trilogy” on January 9, 2017. Love on the Dotted Line could be a fantastic romance novel, but it’s not what I tagged “paperback anthology science fiction” on January 9, 2017. A dual-language collection of Italian women’s poetry is definitely not what I tagged as a volume of the “Writers of the Future” science fiction anthology series. And so on. The ones I notice most easily are the titles I would never read, but the date January 9, 2017, stands out. Sorting by date added, I can see that some of the books added on that date seem correct. I know the books, and the tags match the books. Most do not.
I’m sure there’s some irony in an import failure on the fediverse alerting me to serious corruption on Amazon-owned GoodReads, and the result stopping me from actually migrating.
I clearly cannot trust GoodReads, as they’ve broken the first and second rules of a database: they’ve lost data, and represented data falsely to belong to me when it doesn’t. I’m not sure which of those is the first rule and which is the second, but both seem bad.
I also cannot import my entire library from GoodReads into BookWyrm, because I don’t want to start with bad data. I think it’s time to let most of the past go, and create a cleaned-up import file with just my reading history from 2017 onward.
Good thing I have the day off tomorrow!
I’m not sure which is worse, exactly: GoodReads exporting my library with no “Date Read” filled in, despite having a “Date Read” on the site, or GoodReads exporting my library with the wrong “Date Read” filled in, one that is a day off from the one on the site.
How does that even happen? Given that it’s off by a day when it’s off, I’m guess it’s a time zone issue, with either the site or the export function using GMT and the other using my local time, six hours removed.
That doesn’t explain the many rows in which the date is just missing. Nor the missing ISBNs.
It’s been clear for a long time that Amazon doesn’t actually care about making GoodReads a GoodSite, but this is really, really bad.
What I’ve settled on doing is opening the export CSV in a spreadsheet in one pane, sorted by reverse “Date Added,” and looking at “My Books” on GoodReads in another pane, sorted the same way.
The Arc browser from https://arc.net/ is working pretty well for this.
The CSV spreadsheet is usually the one that’s a day ahead, so I guessed it was the one using GMT. Except… every now and then, it’s the one that’s a day behind. The inconsistency rules out GMT shenanigans, I think, but also, I don’t ever supply a time when marking a book as read. I select a year, month, and day. Which suggests it’s arbitrarily storing a time, and the fact that it’s off so often suggests it’s storing a time within five or six hours of midnight. And apparently inconsistently.
Another amusing bug anecdote is that books I finished reading on Oct 1, 2022, are just listed on the site as having been read “Oct 2022.” No date shown. The CSV spreadsheet has a date, of course.
It seems like there’s an entire class of date/time bugs on GoodReads, before we even get to the missing ISBNs and badly-corrupt data from 2017.
@pwinn @bookrastinating
Hmm. My memory isn't what it used to be. I run all the titles together and rely on these machines to help me keep track of what I have and haven't read. I have encountered issues with restarting books I've already read, because they were still marked tbr or unread. It hadn't occurred to me it could be skewed in other ways too.
@pwinn @bookrastinating If I even manage to finish a printed book these days I put a gold star on my forehead and call it a win.
@aethervision
There are ebooks. ;)
@aethervision I know it’s a lot to ask of someone who doesn’t like ebooks, but a Kindle Paperwhite changed everything for me. For me, an iPad is too heavy, too bright, too… I don’t know what. Marvelous device, but it didn’t work for me for reading. A Kindle Paperwhite, though, is perfect. It has the right size, the right weight, etc. The lights come in from the side rather than being back-lit, which seems to make my eyes happy. Not an ad, I don’t get commission, but those things are an essential for me now.
@pwinn I get that. My partner has a kindle and likes it. I’ve tried and it’s okay, but the muscle memory thing isn’t there. I’ll admit I also have trouble renting and not owning books as a core concept. I spent from 17 to 50 working in the publishing industry, watching a complex ecosystem devolve into a cartel of 3 or 4 companies and I don’t like supporting one of the main causes of that change.
@aethervision
There are a lot of sites where you can buy ebooks and actually own it. Store it on your harddisk or wherever (Calibre is a nice tool for it!) and keep them forever.
An iPad is just a tablet with a bright screen. I can recommend an actual ereader, a tablet with eink. Can be as cheap or as expensive as you want. I still use my ancient Sony PRS-T2 and so does my mom.
You also don't have to read it in one sitting, and you can start out with easier and/or thinner books too. I mean, reading books is a skill you have to develop, and it sounds like you're kinda out of it atm so don't expect to be back into it fully without flexing your reading muscles a little bit first.
As I continue to explore GoodReads with an eye to exiting that site, I am amazed at just how terrible it is. I exported my library, intending to delete everything that wasn’t read in the last five years, but the resulting CSV file is missing so much!
There is no “Date Read” for many books that are only present in the file because I read them, and a surprising number of books are missing ISBNs, too. I’m talking about books in print, not ebooks or audiobooks that might not even have ISBNs.
It is clear that Amazon does not prioritize accuracy in export files, and as I explain previously, they don’t prioritize accuracy in their own database either, although the effect is seen in different ways.
The long and short of it is that I’m apparently going to need to manually edit the CSV file in order to get anything like accurate data, and giving up the convenient GoodRead mobile app for a BookWyrm server seems more than ever like a fair trade. I’ll happily pitch a few bucks a month toward @bookrastinating for their help getting things set up, and to avoid propping up Amazon’s less-than-lackluster efforts with GoodReads.
This seems like a good way to spend a day off work, right?
#GoodReads #Amazon #nerdery #blog #Bookwyrm