This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3,760 for Friday the 30th of December 2022.
Today's show is entitled Bookworm.
It is part of the series' social media.
It is hosted by Aloka and is about 14 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is.
This episode looks at a relatively new but promising alternative to goodreads that is firmly
in-day.
Hello, this is Ahuka, welcoming you to Hacker Public Radio and another exciting episode.
This time in our better social media series.
What I want to do this time is talk about an application that I'm very interested in
called Bookworm and it's spelled B-O-O-K-W-Y-R-M.
Now, this is a competitor, I think, to goodreads and I've talked about that before.
I use goodreads, it does certain things for me in terms of managing what is actually a
fairly large library, mostly of e-books and it's okay but it's owned by Amazon so there's
some incentive there to start looking for alternatives and particularly something that's
in the Fediverse is always attractive to me and that's where Bookworm comes in.
As part of the Fediverse, it's completely decentralized, it uses the activity pub API and protocol.
The reason that matters is that any application that uses activity pub can communicate with
any other application that uses activity pub.
So, you could arrange to post things in Bookworm and someone could follow them and
master it on or for Roma and they could see your posts there, they could reply to them,
they could share them, you know, all of the kinds of things that you would want to
do.
So, it's a lot to like here, so to get started, you go to joinbookworm.com and I've put
the link in the show notes for you and click the join bookworm button.
Now, as with all federated media, you have to pick an instance to get hosted on.
Remember that the virtual federation is that there is not a centralized server that everyone
is on but instead a whole lot of servers that communicate with each other and that is what
the activity pub protocol facilitates.
So your first decision will be to pick an instance, there are several of these.
Some of these are in languages other than English, I saw one in Lithuania, which I think
is wonderful.
I don't speak Lithuania, I probably never will, I'm still all I can do to learn Spanish.
I saw one that was private and you had to request an invitation.
No, okay, let the thousand flowers bloom as far as I'm concerned.
And again being decentralized means you can have all kinds of options without causing
problems.
Also like all federated media, each instance can have its own set of policies.
These mostly can be summed up as act like a jerk and we kill your account, which doesn't
bother me particularly.
But you might want to look for what they have as a written code of conduct.
Most fediverse instances have one, although some of them might just say, hey, we don't care
what you do.
So to reach there on, now to see what each instance requires, click the Learn More button
for that instance when you're on the instances page.
Not right now, honestly, there are not a lot of instances.
This is still a fairly young project.
But it looks promising to me.
One thing I noticed was several highlighted instances.
They don't guarantee anything in terms of uptime.
And that it is up to you to back up your data.
Now personally, when I write a review of a book, I have read.
I also posted on a blog on my website and that is my backup.
Now I'm a strong believer in having my own website and controlling my content that way, instead
of relying on a social media site to do it.
Now for some of the technical details.
The bookworm project is hosted on GitHub and I've put a link there and uses some pretty
standard technologies like Django, PostgresQL, and of course activity pub on the back
end, and Dr. and Nginx for the server.
It also connects to open library for book information.
Now open libraries itself are project at the internet archive that aims to be a library
catalog that includes building towards a web page for every book ever published.
Note that the open library also lends out electronic copies of books, although that has
been a subject of controversy, with the author's guilds suing them claiming it is nothing
more than a flagrant violation of copyright law.
Now the use of activity pub means you can post a book review on your bookworm instance
and have it floaty or mastered on feed.
And someone who follows you on mastered on can read and post a response that flows back to
bookworm.
And of course if you're on one instance and you're of a friend on a different instance
you can follow each other, read, respond, and so on.
Now right now as I write this, it looks like there are about 11 contributors to the project.
So as I said, it's still pretty early, but that means you could if you wish get involved
and help shape the direction of the project.
Now how do you join, get on a server, or set up your own.
All right, if you are sufficiently capable, technically, and things like Django and
GeneX and Docker, things you're thoroughly familiar with, you would probably be easy for
you to set up your own server if you wish.
I'm not actually that technically capable.
So what I did was I went looking for an instance to join.
So I went to the site and bookworm.social looked like it was the largest instance and
it was self-described as the flagship instance.
So I decided I would try that because I figured that would give me the best look at
how it works.
Just click a join button, put in a user name, email address, password, and submit them.
And then you've got an email back with a link to confirm your email address for a very
standard kind of stuff.
Now once you've confirmed your email address and logged in, you're invited to create
a profile, add some books, and find people to connect with.
Since this is a federated application using activity pub, they don't even have to be on
bookworm.
I could just add some of my friends from MasterDawn or PixelFed, which are two other
activity pub applications I am using.
However, this might just result in seeing everything twice.
I found that when I added my MasterDawn friends to PixelFed, I saw all of their photos
on MasterDawn and again on PixelFed.
Of course, there may be a setting that I've missed that would make that a little easier
to deal with.
In any case, I decided to try a slightly different approach.
First I posted on MasterDawn, looking for anyone I know there who may be on bookworm.
Then I noticed when I added the book I am currently reading that had been reviewed and
rated by another bookworm user, so I clicked on their profile and requested an ad.
Yeah, I might make a new friend or do this way.
I also posted about this on diaspora, which I also use, though it is not an activity
pub application, unfortunately, I wish it was, but it is what it is for the moment.
Now, adding content, and that's the first step.
I added the book that I'm currently reading, which is called Hero of Two Worlds by Mike
Duncan.
You know, if you're curious about what I read, but I have a bunch of books I have already
read that are on goodreads and I can copy that content.
Now this is where I have to prepare by creating some shelves.
Now shelves is used metaphorically, of course, because we are used to putting physical
books on physical shelves, really what we're talking about are tags or labels.
Any book can have multiple of these shelves.
So the three default shelves are want to read, reading, and read, and that's okay.
But I've used custom shelves for a variety of other things and goodreads.
First I have e-books from multiple sources.
Some have bought from places like Google Books, Amazon, Kobo, and Nuk.
And I do have a few physical books still.
Some others I got as e-books, like directly from the author, such as Michael W. Lucas's
books, where from a story bundle or a Kickstarter.
Then I also like to indicate the genre.
I have lots of books in history, science, science fiction, music, politics, and so on.
Now those happen to be my main interests.
So to meet my needs, I really have to have those custom shelves.
It is now easy to do.
There's a button on your homepage to do this.
Six months ago, when I first looked at the bookworm, it was not easy to do.
This is a good thing, because as I'm saying, this is an actively developed project.
If you don't see something you want right now, you can ask for it, or maybe in a few months
it will just show up.
Now, the next thing the bookworm offers is to import from a CSV file.
And that happens to be how you can export from goodreads.
So if you wanted to switch, you could.
Why would you want to switch?
Well, as I said, goodreads is now owned by Amazon.
Now, that can be good if all are most of your content is on a Kindle, as it allows
for pretty good integration.
But I suspect that for some people, at least Amazon is a dirty word, and not using Amazon
is important, so you do have a path to switch.
That said, at the time, I'm writing this, which is in April of 2022.
And yes, I work a lot ahead on these things.
So it's coming out on hacker public radio a lot later than when I first wrote it.
But at that point, the import function still had some issues.
Maybe by the time this comes out, they'll have solved those issues.
And that can add to the work of moving things.
Now, I have to point out, I have a ridiculous number of books on my goodreads account, which
may contribute to the problem.
But when I tried to import my entire collection, which is about 1,800 books, about 60
failed to import for some reason, in many cases, I'm not quite sure why Bookworm offered
the Fellowship of the Ring as an alternative to the book I actually had.
Why that one?
I don't know.
But they were at least 15 different books for which Bookworm suggested Fellowship of the
Ring.
So when Bookworm doesn't have a book listed, you have to add it.
Now, I've run into this because some of the books I like come from smaller publishers.
Like, as I mentioned, I buy books from Michael W. Lucas, who self-publishes all of his stuff.
And sometimes Bookworm will have the book, but not the particular edition.
Now, when I run into that, I try to be a good citizen and add the information.
But then, my wife says I was meant to be a librarian.
And given her track record, I'm going to think, she's probably correct.
She usually is.
Now, overall, what's my impression?
Bookworm is not quite mature enough at this moment to replace goodreads for my uses.
And as I said, it's being actively developed.
I've seen major features added over the last six months or so.
So what I did is I made a small cash donation to the developer, and I'll keep following
this project, and I'd encourage all of you to check it out as well.
So this is Hookah for Hecker Public Radio, signing off and encouraging everyone to support
free software.
Bye-bye.
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