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Book Web Services

This weekend, I saw a Hacker News post about BookWyrm, a federated social network for communicating about books. The topic is related to FeedPipe, so I found the comments interesting to explore.

BookWyrm

The post title advertises BookWyrm as a replacement for Goodreads, and the supported features do indeed include the primary functionality of Goodreads. The distinguishing feature of BookWyrm is that it is distributed. It uses ActivityPub for communication between separate instances as well as other federated services. I think that it looks really nice, an I really like the decentralized nature of the project!

I investigated to see if BookWyrm supports the primary goal of FeedPipe: to make it easy to discover new items of a specific category via RSS. If an instance is created specifically for Haskell books, then perhaps an RSS feed could be used to track the registered books, for example. I checked out the bookwyrm.social flagship instance and was unable to find such an RSS feed. Perhaps it would not work well with the way that books are imported into the instance. By searching the source code, I found that the software creates RSS feeds for user activity, and I was indeed able to find feed links on user pages, but such feeds have a low signal to noise ratio for my goal.

BookWyrm supports reviews and ratings, like Goodreads. If the community uses a BookWyrm instance to review books that are indexed by FeedPipe, then links can be provided, like the Goodreads links in the Haskell Books index.

Goodreads

There is a fair amount of discussion about Goodreads in the post comments. Some people seem to really dislike the service, perhaps because it is owned by Amazon. The primary benefit of Goodreads over other services is that it has had many users over many years, resulting in a lot of content.

LearnAwesome

The top comment in the post is about a service called LearnAwesome, another federated social network. Content is organized hierarchically by topic and grouped by type (also referred to as format in some places), and each topic has an RSS feed. For example, check out the programming-languages/haskell topic. While I am not a fan of the tech stack (Ruby) or user interface design, I really like the project goals and look forward to seeing how the project matures!

LearnAwesome also supports reviews and ratings, though I was unable to find a good example. If the community uses a LearnAwesome instance to review content that is indexed by FeedPipe, then links can be provided, like the Goodreads links in the Haskell Books index.

Open Library

I learned that many book web services retrieve information about books from Open Library, an Internet Archive project. I was surprised to find that even Open Library supports reviews and ratings! I plan on adding Open Library links to the Haskell Books index.

LibraryThing

Open Library includes links to a site called LibraryThing. This site has been around since 2005 and became free in 2020. It also supports reviews and ratings!

Author

Travis Cardwell

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