Hello everyone,

Books are still one of the most important sources of information we have as a human species. However, the media on which this information has been stored has changed considerably over time and with it its accessibility and influence on our society.

Nowadays you can find an enormous range of books and texts online. Most of the time, however, access to them is extremely fragmented, difficult to find, subject to a fee, incompatible with the software platform of your choice or, in the worst case, goes under with its provider over time.

To counteract this, annas-archive was founded to make the knowledge stored in the texts and books openly accessible and to preserve it for future generations. On the other hand, there are platforms such as Goodreads that aim to simplify the joy of reading and the exchange of information, as well as the review and discussion of books and texts.

Unfortunately, Goodreads is a centralized, proprietary solution that in addition also happens to be owned by Amazon. BookWyrm is a decentralized, open source alternative in the fediverse that steps in right here.

Now here’s the kicker: what if we combined the power of both platforms? What if we combined the enormous book database of annas-archive with the fediverse, i.e. BookWyrm? Annas archive could benefit from reviews and discussions about the books and BookWyrm could expand its still very limited database many times over.

From my point of view, this would be the perfect combination of two already great projects. What do you think?

TL:DR What do you think about combining annas-archive with the fediverse (BookWyrm)

  • ChunkMcHorkle@lemmy.worldEnglish
    21·
    1 year ago

    There are a lot of lists that are public too so don’t worry about that.

    Cool, but if I need an account to see them then they’re not really public. Maybe it’s me but I did not see any link to any actual open content. If you could point me to one I’d be happy to look again.

    • ᴇᴍᴘᴇʀᴏʀ 帝AEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      If you could point me to one I’d be happy to look again.

      Try this.

      BookWyrm is designed to be a replacement for Goodreads, so it operates in a fairly similar way.

      • ChunkMcHorkle@lemmy.worldEnglish
        11·
        1 year ago

        That IS very similar to Goodreads, and then I was able to follow a random reviewer link to more content to browse. Thank you.

        • ᴇᴍᴘᴇʀᴏʀ 帝AEnglish
          2·
          1 year ago

          No problem. The whole.point of it is as a federated Goodreads replacement - the data is freely available, so all Goodreads has in its favour is it’s momentum and the sunk cost fallacy.

          Ever since Amazon bought Goodreads I’ve been waiting for something like this, although I haven’t found the time to.impott my data and get properly stuck in. The main downside is I now want a BookWyrm for films,.comics, action figures, etc, etc. They’ll turn up eventually I suppose.