Bookrastinating update: I imported my completed books from 2021 onward, 269 books. Of those, 35 items failed to import, and a few more are missing cover images. 12 of the 35 which failed have ISBNs, so those failures were somewhat surprising, although most of them are either very old (first published in the 1920s), or clearly Amazon-only (the entire Hollywood Alphabet series by M.Z. Kelly makes up 20 of the 35).
For all of the faults of GoodReads, I’m not sure I’ve ever tried to add a book to my library that it didn’t already know about, other than the book I wrote myself.
It is in the nature of open platforms not owned by corporate behemoth’s to require a bit of effort, so I’ll add cover images for the books missing them. I’ll also poke around this weekend to figure out how to add the 35 books it apparently doesn’t know about, which I note includes a book by Erle Stanley Gardner, author of the Perry Mason series of books. It’s not a Perry Mason book, though, it’s another series of his.
@pwinn Unfortunately this comes down to where the data is coming from. The #bookwyrm project can't afford to pay (and might not want to if it could) for closed data held by publishers and ISBN agencies. There is no complete open dataset of ISBN codes. If your #BookWyrm instance doesn't know about a book it searches other instances and external databases like #OpenLibrary. It does the best it can from the data available. I've also read that GoodReads exports may sometimes contain errors.
So many errors! I’ve posted a few times about how badly GoodReads has mangled my library.
In any case, I’ll manually add and edit the “missing” books, after which they won’t be missing for anyone else.
@pwinn yes, by adding them, or improving data for existing books, you are contributing back to the project!
@pwinn
So what's the problem people have with Goodreads?
I don’t know that I can speak for people generally, but my problems started when Amazon bought them in 2013. I deleted my account at the time, though I created another one two years later, which is the one I use today.
I got pretty tired of one of the biggest, most wealthy companies in the world operating the slowest, most buggy website I used. They have finally thrown some resources at it in the last year or so, but I had already decided to leave by then. It was only during my first attempt to import data into Bookrastinating that I realized how badly Amazon had corrupted my Goodreads database. Just absolute garbage data.
Generally speaking, I favor independent things over concentrations of corporate power, so even a site operated by a corporate competitor would be better in my view.
@pwinn thanos cor your feedback!
The more I dig into GoodReads exports, the more I realize how utterly broken they are, almost to the point of uselessness.
Assuming I manually edit the CSV file to eliminate the corrupt data from the GoodReads database, I’m still left with a file which contains “date completed” but not “date started,” and nearly every “date completed” is wrong. Usually off by one, sometimes by more.
I’m not sure which is worse, the missing data or the wrong data, but both require me to manually look up each book. Which I wish I had done before the very-recent rollout of the new book page, because I seem to recall both dates being visible directly on the book page, while now they require scrolling, clicking, and clicking again. It’s possible the new book page is more usable for people who want to keep using GoodReads, but it’s abysmal for people trying to leave and realizing the GoodReads export function is no good.
On the positive side, it’s easy to add missing books to Bookwyrm, and some have turned out to not be missing, just missed while importing.
#blog #Bookwyrm #GoodReads #amazon #nerdery