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!
@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.
@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.
@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.