Tag: Booksites

Double Digit Victory!

~ Bookstooge ~ 41 Comments

Ever since Leafmarks folded in 2016, I have been working on my own personal, offline library of reviews using a free program called Calibre.  I started with roughly 2400 entries and by May of this year had whittled that down to Triple Digits. Victory was within my Grasp!

Today, I am proud to announce that I have succeeded into whittling that number down into the double digits!!!! I’ve been lazy but the last couple of weeks Booklikes, where I have all my reviews as separate entries, has been giving me a lot of 502’s. I’m really hoping to get this job done by years end. It’s my unofficial book project.

99problems

 

I’ve included a couple more screen captures from Calibre in hopes of enticing at least one of you to start using it for your offline data keeping. Well, ok, it’s more about me showing off my numbers. I admit, I’m vain about it.

 

calibre1
Combined with the last 99 entries, that means I have read 3180 books since April 2000.

 

 

calibre2
Info, info everywhere! Sortable, exportable, backupable.

 

calibre3
Having the option for half stars within Calibre is great.

 

I realize that most of you won’t care or need this level of personal data entry.  But since I use Calibre already to manage my ebooks, and it has all these great capabilities, why not make the most of it? It’s free, constantly being updated and has a whole forum of people who want to help others use it.  It fits my needs.

Of course, once this project is done, I have to pick another. I have NO idea what I’ll do for that. Maybe undertake the gargantuan task of putting all my reviews into separate entries here at wordpress? I don’t know if I can do that, as I did that at Booklikes, then Leafmarks and now in Calibre.  It would be nice to have a fully functioning, fully searchable and fully linkable site, but honestly, I’ve got a small enough audience (no offense to any of you!) and no plans to “go big”, so why bother? We’ll see though. I might do it just for something book related to do!

legoscribes

 

As an aside, I’m going to be working in a remote location monday, with no wifi. Going to be on small island quite a ways away from the office, so my coworker and I will be spending the night there. So after Sunday night, I’ll be gone until Tuesday night. See you all then.

 

Victory is Within My Grasp!

~ Bookstooge ~ 35 Comments

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.

 

calibre

Working Library: Where the Magic Happens

 

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The Review Library: What the Magic Looks Like

*smiley face*

I am pretty happy today. Thank you for your time.

bookstooge

Librarything.com Lifetime Memberships

~ Bookstooge ~ 32 Comments

If you’ve wondered about joining Librarything, but were put off by their 200 free book limit and balked at the onetime $25 lifetime member fee and you’d missed earlier opportunities to get a lifetime membership for free [exactly like me, how coincidental], there is now a opportunity to get a lifetime membership for free.

Join Tinycat for a 30 day free trial:

https://www.librarything.com/wiki/index.php/TinyCat

Use your librarything account when signing up and voila, you’ll get a free lifetime membership at Librarything. I can’t tell you much about tinycat except that it appears to be some sort of electronic library lending thingy. It is only a 30 day trial and there was no billing setup for me and when I looked, I had the $0 activity because I chose the Personal Library when signing up.

The plus side to having a lifetime membership at Librarything is that you can import your old Leafmarks tsv file, they have a specific option for that under their import section.

I realize that this is yet ONE MORE thing to have to deal with, especially with booklikes going all 522 for over 12hrs now. But if you need a book database, this is an option to explore. YouKneek is active there and I’m starting to crosspost my reviews there as well. No posts or comments, hence I’m still going to be using WP for all my social’y needs, but if book stats are important to you, LT has them in spades.

Finally, I don’t know how long this will last, so get it while you can.

(Thanks to Grim and YouKneeK for pointing this out before Booklikes hit the skids last evening)

 

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Bookstooge at aNobii.com

~ Bookstooge ~ 8 Comments
ETA:

After messing around quite a bit, getting some info from a librarian and reading some of the rules, aNobii is out.

You can’t have both the real author and a pseudonym as “authors”. You have to have the “main author” and then the pseudonym in the description. So for Richard Bachman books, you have to have Stephen King as the author and then add Richard Bachman as the first part of the description. I don’t think that makes sense at all.

Then the killer for me was that you “could” create non-isbn book pages, but not for ebooks or indie books. Which means all those kindle exclusive books? No go! Can’t add them. And since I read a TON of kindle edition books, it just isn’t going to work.

I GIVE UP!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Original Post
So, TheReadingRoom.com was pretty much a bust, as it didn’t have a book database and just didn’t have the “oomph” that I want from a booksite. If I was just looking for a social site and didn’t have wordpress, TheReadingRoom could have filled in the gap, but with no group and no real way to search for people besides looking at random books to see who else has read/reviewed it, it just wasn’t for me.

Plus, it WAS one giant ad site 😦

It took me until sometime this afternoon to really realize that I would end up being super frustrated at TheReadingRoom and I couldn’t go there. Sorry to drag you all through my time with that. All the comments on that post, oy vey! But because I’m a masochist and pig-headed, I couldn’t leave well enough alone and wait to recover. I had to immediately jump right back into the search. This time around I was checking out Anobii.com.

I concentrated on book things this time around instead of checking out the people/social side of things. I was able to import most of my books, albeit without ratings, reviews or read dates. That actually isn’t a big deal for me now that I’ve got most of that in my Calibre library on my computer.

Pluses:

Book Editions

Groups

Tags [even though that I’m still figuring out]

Import books by various means

Shoutout Box on each members page. It’s a comment box, whoo!

 

Minuses:

Reviews have a distinct lack of formatting options. Bold and Italic is it I think?

NO HALF STARS. Please be aware of that. I’m pretty spoiled here.

I can’t find a Blog Option

 

 

I figured I’d better start this post instead of commenting even more on the TRR post. Thank you all for your patience as I wander afield here.

Bookstooge At the Reading Room

~ Bookstooge ~ Leave a comment

I’ve just joined up at The Reading Room:

www.thereadingroom.com/Bookstooge

I can’t recommend or not recommend it at this point. Just giving everyone another way to stay connected.

I have linked my wordpress blog and updated my avatar, so it looks like me. Nothing makes a place feel like home like seeing that cowled figure with flames in the background 🙂

If any of you have used it, please let me know how it is. I think my Booklikes time is now a When and not an If.