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A comment on Show HN: I built a modern Goodreads alternative.

Re:Show HN: I built a modern Goodreads alternative by Meleagris on Sunday March 02, 2025 @02:20PM (#43233959)
I was looking into this space the other day, and the number of options has been growing. By my record there is:

- https://www.goodreads.com

- https://thestorygraph.com

- https://fable.co

- https://hardcover.app

- https://joinbookwyrm.com

I was actually trying to determine the best free source of metadata for books. I was hoping for something like MusicBrainz.

The best I could find seemed to be https://openlibrary.org. There is https://isbndb.com, but it is paid.

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Re:Show HN: I built a modern Goodreads alternative by vasanthk1125 on Sunday March 02, 2025 @03:31PM (#43234726)
I’ve always hoped that once we reach Goodreads scale, we’d be able to release database dumps like VNDB (https://vndb.org/d14) and Lichess (https://database.lichess.org/)

Since the metadata is contributed by volunteers in the first place, it only seems fair for it to be freely available rather than locked down.

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Re:Show HN: I built a modern Goodreads alternative by the_biot on Sunday March 02, 2025 @03:19PM (#43234594)
This has long been considered one of Goodreads' big advantages: its massive publication database, ISBN and all. But recently Anna's Archive has been making quite a bit of noise about their considerable ISBN database:

https://annas-archive.org/blog/

This may well be a great opportunity to seed a Goodreads alternative.

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Re:Show HN: I built a modern Goodreads alternative by npunt on Sunday March 02, 2025 @03:53PM (#43234953)
If you want the best UX for tracking and easiest/fastest Goodreads importer try https://margins.app (disclosure: I'm the designer)
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Re:Show HN: I built a modern Goodreads alternative by ssz on Sunday March 02, 2025 @03:03PM (#43234437)
My personal project, https://rate.house, is kinda like goodreads but for all types of media.
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Re:Show HN: I built a modern Goodreads alternative by moritzruth on Sunday March 02, 2025 @02:33PM (#43234090)
In case you don't know, there is also BookBrainz: https://bookbrainz.org/
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