Comment by Meleagris | Hacker News Reader

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Comment by Meleagris | Hacker News Reader

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I was looking into this space the other day, and the number of options has been growing. By my record there is:

- https://www.goodreads.com

- https://thestorygraph.com

- https://fable.co

- https://hardcover.app

- https://joinbookwyrm.com

I was actually trying to determine the best free source of metadata for books. I was hoping for something like MusicBrainz.

The best I could find seemed to be https://openlibrary.org. There is https://isbndb.com, but it is paid.

This has long been considered one of Goodreads' big advantages: its massive publication database, ISBN and all. But recently Anna's Archive has been making quite a bit of noise about their considerable ISBN database:

https://annas-archive.org/blog/

This may well be a great opportunity to seed a Goodreads alternative.

I’ve always hoped that once we reach Goodreads scale, we’d be able to release database dumps like VNDB (https://vndb.org/d14) and Lichess (https://database.lichess.org/)

Since the metadata is contributed by volunteers in the first place, it only seems fair for it to be freely available rather than locked down.

My personal project, https://rate.house, is kinda like goodreads but for all types of media.

In case you don't know, there is also BookBrainz: https://bookbrainz.org/

If you want the best UX for tracking and easiest/fastest Goodreads importer try https://margins.app (disclosure: I'm the designer)

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