When Leafmarks folded last year [Leafmarks was a Goodreads type site but without the censorship] I was able to export all of my book data to that date. It was becoming apparent to me that Booklikes wasn’t cutting it [and with no Export function, what’s the point?] and I couldn’t really go back to GR [as an aside, I did briefly join up, for the 3rd time with GR only to quit when they started sending me those “You’ve just read a book. Congrats!” emails which I had not signed up for. So instead of opting out of the emails, I opted out of GR. And it just reinforced my bitter dislike of the incompetence of those running the place]. I spent a month checking out all sorts of various places.
I checked:
- Librarything [ended up crossposting there and getting a free lifetime membership]
- aAnobi [which was an italian site and just as dead as Booklikes]
- The ReadingRoom [was just a huge advertisement]
- Some other sites that were so small I don’t even remember them.
Nothing was what I was looking for. Eventually, I chose WP as my social site. But what to do for my reviews? I wanted to be able to search them by as wide a variety as possible but putting them just into a Word document wasn’t enough. So I started using Calibre, which is an ebook manager. It can also manage empty books, so this was perfect for me. I had something like 2400 entries in a CSV file from Leafmarks that I imported. Then it just became a job of polishing everything up, ie, adding ratings, covers, splitting re-reads into their separate entries, etc. Today, I will get my Working Library under the 1000 mark. Going from 4digits down to 3digits is a significant morale booster for me.
Working Library: Where the Magic Happens
The Review Library: What the Magic Looks Like
*smiley face*
I am pretty happy today. Thank you for your time.
(*gasp*) Does it import reviews as well?
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Kind of. You can’t see it, but there is a place for “comments”. I use that to put my review. It is pretty formatable [I just copy/paste my reviews from WP without a problem]too.
If it an ongoing free product with tons of plugins by other people and a community that’ll bend over backwards to help others out with questions and answers.
I can answer some questions and if you want indepth answers, check out this forum:
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=166
Shoot me an email if you have questions…
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Will do. I’ll look into it tomorrow. Thanks for the tip.
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Here is a link to a pix of what the comment section looks like:
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No link. Can you resend it?
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You’ll have to visit my page. I’ve found that the WP notification bar doesn’t do pictures or links.
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Tnks
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Big fan of Calibre.
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I like it more every year. Always finding more ways to use it 🙂
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huh I didn’t know about the censorship on GR- I’d actually like to hear more about that, cos that’s a big issue for me.
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I heard of one high-profile person who was booted off the site. I’d like to hear more if there are other things going on as well.
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I’m not sure if you’ll get the notification or not when I replied to Orangutan, so I did, just so you know.
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I don’t know about recently, this was all back in ’13. It doesn’t help that all the high profile people who loudly proclaimed they were all leaving eventually came crawling back when they realized their thousands of followers weren’t following them off of GR.
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Back in September’ish of ’13 GR made a policy change that was extremely vague and only announced in the members feedback forum. The gist of it was that GR was now going to take down any shelves that people complained about and hide, or outright delete, any reviews that didn’t strictly stick to reviewing the book.
The biggest thing was that there were no hard rules. It was all vague language allowing them to do pretty much what they wanted. It was very obvious that the changes were brought about by author complaints and GR was trying to capitalize on selling stuff to authors, so screw the readers. I voluntarily left then.
I do know that someone, who dealt with computers, had their P2P shelf deleted because butthurt writers thought it was Pulled2Publish. You can ask her for more details if you desire:
http://donealrice.booklikes.com/
But basically in ’13 GR made it obvious that the readers/reviewers were a marketable item for selling to writers and hence anything that would rock the writers boat was not allowed.
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Gosh that’s terrible! Unfortunately I can totally believe that they would do that, because pleasing advertisers and suppressing free speech seems to be the trend these days. I shouldn’t be surprised- this is basically what’s been happening to every single social media platform out there
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Yep, it does seem to be spreading all over 😦
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😖
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I can kind of see their point. One time I wanted to see if a book might interest me, but all the reviews were just complaints that the author had made a contribution to a political group against gay marriage.
Of course, when sites try to clean up user-created information, they always hire a bunch of interns who just enforce their own petty biases, if they don’t outright set up a politically-biased committee.
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It’s not GR’s place to say what can or can not be in a review beyond what the law of the land is.
And that is why I quit.
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I hadn’t even heard of Leafmarks! At the moment I use mostly Goodreads, and a little bit of LibraryThing on the side. I’m afraid I’m too invested in GR to leave, though I got annoyed when they sent those “congrats, you finished ____!” emails as well. They were supposedly a new feature, which I clicked off, but seriously, who the hell thought that was a good idea by default?!
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I haven’t seen those emails, so they must be going into my spam folder or something.
I’m like you, I’ve got about 500 books rated, so I feel that moving would be a major chore.
I feel that there are some resources there to help me find good books or meet like-minded readers, but I haven’t had time to really explore them yet.
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You can always export your library into a csv file. Then you can either import that file into Calibre and start keeping your own off-line library or you can go to Librarything and they’ll import that file into your LT account. LT is a rather different setup from GR so the learning curve is steeper. I’ve been there over 6months and while I can use the site now just fine, I’m basically just doing basic things.
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Yeah, Leafmarks was started by some popular GR refugees in ’13 but it never really got off the ground.
The emails had me seeing red. I had unclicked everything so I wasn’t receiving any emails and suddenly, I’m opted in? When a site starts treating me like that, then it’s time to move on. At least in WP the PTB’s leave me alone.
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I thought about it afterwards, and I guess for an average person who reads like 5 books a year it wouldn’t be a big deal. But the way you and I read, that’s definite SPAM! 😛
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Indeed!
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Discovered Calibre last year, and while still learning and haven’t messed with it in a while since I started using my Chromebook, I do enjoy!
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It is a great manager, that is for sure…
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I need to utilize it more!
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Wahhh this is really interesting. I might have to look into it. I JUST finished creating my own Excel file containing all the books I own. I felt like I should keep track of the editions I had and the books I possess so that I don’t somehow accidentally buy a book twice, or buy the wrong edition that doesn’t make my bookshelves look… pretty. The columns for number of stars given and for date read are interesting. I might add those if this Calibre thing doesn’t want to work with me. 😛
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I know of a couple of people who use Excell and I thought about that route, but I couldn’t add covers or my reviews very easily, like I could with Calibre. Calibre has a plugin, I forget it’s name, that will import a csv file and you can set things up so it imports what you want how you want. It’s pretty powerful stuff…
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Can you manually add books? Like… if you only have physical books, can you use Calibre to manage your collection? Turn this e-book manager into a.. book manager? 😀
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Yep, that is exactly what I’m doing with my reviews. I add by isbn, so there is an entry, but no actual ebook file to go along with it. But even if you don’t have an isbn, you can add “empty” books and fill in all the info how you want.
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Alright, sweet. I’ll play around with my Excel document for now (I mean… all that effort can’t just be put to waste after JUST completing it, right? hhahaha) and check out Calibre when I feel unsatisfied. 😛 Thanks for sharing, sir.
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I know exactly how you feel. I’d recommend playing around with Calibre just to become familiar with it if you ever DO decide to use it.
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