We Should’ve Had A Web Of Personal Data Servers

Recently I’ve been exploring, once again, options for book tracking that aren’t Goodreads, prompted in part by this very long read about the site. Whenever I do this, it quickly becomes obvious that there simply isn’t one site or service that replicates everything Goodreads provides me: book tracking, author recommendations, and listings of new releases of the types of books I tend to read.

I’ve been spending a fair amount of time this past week checking back in with The Storygraph, a site I just didn’t seem to vibe with in the past when I chose to tinker for awhile on Literal and Oku instead. One thing I’m appreciating this go around is the ability to add missing data, and sometimes entire books, myself rather than having to go through a site librarian. My book data tends to be clean and accurate, and the changes Goodreads made to their process are frustrating.

As a tool to track your books and your reading, The Storygraph actually is pretty solid, but it doesn’t satisfy my other two needs: author recommendations and listings of new releases.

What I mean by “author recommendations” is that a substantial part of how I found new books to read, or new authors, was through the recommendations made by authors whose books I enjoy and whom I follow on Goodreads. (In fact, I only follow authors on Goodreads, no “friends”, in part in order to keep my feed clean this way.) The closest substitute I’ve found is BookBub which through a “data partner” offers a feed of books which have been “blurbed” by the authors you follow there. Just today I discovered a book because two authors I follow both blurbed it.

BookBub, which I’m perennially typo’ing as “BoobBub”, also has the added benefit of providing sales alerts for any books on your wishlist there—and here is where we start running into trouble. While I don’t mind potentially substituting Goodreads with a few different sites, each of which handles a different useful thing related to books, I really do not want to be maintaining a “to read’ wishlist in multiple places.

This is how this morning I ended up wishing that instead of the web we got, we had a web that had standardized and normalized the idea of maintaining personal data servers. Imagine if I could maintain a single books wishlist, and a single list of favorite authors, on my own server and then if I signed up to use a particular site or service for their book tracking or their new releases alerts or sales announcements, I only had to point that site to my existing lists.

I’m not yet sure which way I’m going to go regarding continuing to use Goodreads or splitting up various of its functions across different sites, but given my daily struggle to balance my available physical and psychological resources against the demands placed upon them, I’d need to find a solution that doesn’t involve maintaining the same lists in multiple places.