Episode: 3760
Title: HPR3760: Bookwyrm
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3760/hpr3760.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 05:03:59

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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 Aoka 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 Aoka, welcoming you to Hacker Public Radio in another exciting episode.
This time in our Better Social Media series.
And 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.
This is a, you know, as part of the Fediverse, it's completely decentralized.
It uses the ActivityPub API and Protocol, and the reason that matters is that any application
that uses ActivityPub can communicate with any other application that uses ActivityPub.
So ActivityPub, so you could arrange to post things in Bookworm, and someone could follow
them and mast it on, or Pluroma, 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 there'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 virtue of 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 ActivityPub 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 Lithuanian, which I think is wonderful.
I don't speak Lithuanian, 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.
OK, let a 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 each their own.
Now to see what each instance requires, click the learn more button for that instance
when you are on the instances page.
Now 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.
I use some pretty standard technologies like Django, PostgreSQL and of course ActivityPub
on the back end.
And Doctor and EngineX for the server.
It also connects to OpenLibrary for book information.
Now, OpenLibrary is itself a 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 OpenLibrary 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 ActivityPub means you can post a book review on your bookworm instance
and have it floaty or mastodon feed.
Then someone who follows you on mastodon can read and post a response that flows back
to bookworm.
And of course if you're on one instance and you have 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
EngineX and Docker are things you're thoroughly familiar with you would probably be easy
for you to set up your own server if you wished.
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 username, email address, password and submit them and
then you get an email back with a link to confirm your email address, very, very standard
kinds of stuff.
Now once you've confirmed your email address and logged in you are 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 mastodon or pixel fed, which are two other activity
public applications I am using, however this might just result in seeing everything twice.
I found that when I added my mastodon friends to pixel fed I saw all of their photos on
mastodon and again on pixel fed.
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 mastodon 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 two this way.
I also posted about this on diaspora which I also used though it is not an activity pub
application unfortunately.
I wish it was but you know it is what it is for the moment.
Now adding content and that's the first step.
I added the book that I am currently reading which is called Hero of Two Worlds by Mike
Duncan.
Yeah, if you're curious about what I read but I have a bunch of books I have already
read that are on good reads 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 and 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 good reads.
First I have ebooks from multiple sources.
Some I've bought from places like Google Books, Amazon, Kobo and Nook and I do have a few
physical books still.
Some others I got as ebooks like directly from the author such as Michael W. Lucas' books
or 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.
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.
Just months ago when I first looked at 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 and now that can be good if all or 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 was about
1800 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 there are 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 but 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 Hacker Public Radio signing off and encouraging everyone to support
free software.
Bye bye.
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