tsunami of books is long overdue

[kradeelav]

reading goals this year has been real weird and by that i mean nonexistent as i've not been able to read since .... last november since the cataracts started making themselves known. :D;; i literally just got reader glasses last week which means, halelujah, books!

i was that derp on goodreads doing 100-book challenges yearly so you can imagine how annoying this has been. :P 

I've been ... not real happy at openlibrary.org, who I thought was going to be my next steward-of-book-data after goodreads shit the bed last year. I imported about 2/3 of my book list, 1/3 never carried over because i had to manually import every single one and re-list them, and i finally gave up that task today when it started throwing me errors. so I'm switching to an .ods spreadsheet that's on the laptop.

something that compounded that decision is i .... do not trust openlibrary with my data. I trust openlibrary more than amazon/goodreads, mind, but I do not trust institutions these days not to stealth delete random ass "problematic" books/files, shut down suddenly, other folks to scrape my lists for nefarious reasons, or not throw me a gazillion errors when i want to export my info locally.

so! spreadsheet time for a few days, and then I'll start reading the frankly intimidating stack sitting next to my dining room chair. :P 

tl;dr, mostly good news for you all in that book reviews may be coming. organizing the data locally may be slightly a pain for me in the short term but overall a move i should have done a long time ago. :)

Comments

[flowersforgraves]

I also have an ODS spreadsheet (with backup on a USB) that I use to track books (and other media consumption)! I'm working on making a fancy one to also keep a backup of my airtable that I've used this year to track stuff I've created.

Looking forward to book reviews! (Also, glassesofjustice and I are gearing up to host another round of Beyond The Algorithm, a reccing fest for new things to consume which reveals on the new year, if that's something you'd be interested in participating in either as a reccer or rec-ee (?).)

[kradeelav]

I keep getting scared away with how complex airtable looks, but that sounds like a really good way to track books instead of being tethered to goodreads! (the one feature i miss so much is them letting you know how many books you've read per year so it was easy to keep track.)

having it track All The Media sounds like a fantastic idea as well.

definitely interested in looking at that Beyond the Algorithim! Not sure if I can commit yet just given ~life~ but depending on how many and how quickly i can pick up the pace with books, will keep an eye out for it. thank you for mentioning it!