Become a Github sponsor or buy the dev a coffee.
Same issue. Both rely purely on Open Library who have very limited database, so you pretty much have to enter all data manually. That’s not an issue if you have 10 or 50 books. But once you reach 1000s it’s not viable.
This makes me think:
What if we could contribute our Calibre metadata to Bookwyrm ? All it would take is a plugin to connect Calibre servers to the Fediverse, right?
Definitely should be possible. And in general there are ways to get the data in, it’s just not average user-friendly. Even a simple Calibre export can be imported by a Bookwyrm instance admin, it just requires some data parsing before that. Nobody is really willing to do that on a scale that matters.
Bookwyrm imported my goodreads export more or less fine, but (IDK if Amazon gave me them) my lists disappeared in the process, and trying to recreate them was the dealbreaker for me. My absurdly large book lists were casual and not something I needed to keep, but I have a few 50-100 book lists that I do care about and that would have required manually searching each title, and that’s where I drew the line.
It’s already enough of a hassle to go page by page through the 1000-1500 books I have on goodreads and check boxes. Typing them out is way too much work to migrate.
Eventually I’ll probably roll my own because I have other functionality requests none of the options meet, but goodreads lists are already not great, so not even matching them is a big step down.
I was thinking:
- User installs plugin
- Popup window prompts for Fediverse login and offers a prominent Bookwyrm create account button with default instance or chose another, it would be cool if it would autofill everything except email and password.
- Once inside, it shows you a list of checkboxes where you can chose what to share: book info (metadata), user reviews (stars), is there anything else?
- Shows you a progress of what is being synced
- Once “closed”, it will run in the background every time you run Calibre, unless you set it to manual sync.
Any ideas?
