Good book/TV/movie trackers à la Goodreads
As part of the ongoing quest to turn everything I enjoy into an exercise in statistical modelling, I had a look around today for a way to track what books I've read and which ones I may be interested in. I found a bit of a jumble of things in various states of development, half of which are owned by Amazon (which I'd prefer to avoid) and the other half with incomplete, confusing, and opaquely sourced data.
I use this kind of service for a handful of other topics, mainly untappd, AniList, and last.fm. I'm only really interested in the ability to keep track of read/watched items - I don't find myself rating things or making complex lists unless I started my journey with a hobby by using one of these systems. Of course for this to work out, it needs to have a fairly comprehensive library. I was unfortunately disappointed with OpenLibrary, which would otherwise be my top pick. I found systems like readarr and calibre a little clunky for this in the past since they're so focused on file management, but I'm open to retrying them.
Does anyone here have any insights in this space? Not just limited to books, I'm also interested in trackers for TV/Movies. Preferably not owned by a massive company like Amazon, I know a lot of people were disappointed when they deprecated the Goodreads API.
Letterboxd is the one to use for movies imo
For TV shows I've been using a trakt.tv client for many years. I never looked into who owns it until now and it's a bootstrapped startup funded by memberships. It works brilliantly, and while I don't use many of the extra features or movies option, it does the basic job of tracking shows and episodes very well for me.
I made an account there and use an app on my phone. I'm not sure about iOS but there are many Android clients available with different UI and features. I use SeriesGuide.
This looks like exactly what I want. It's a bit of a shame there's no "dropped" status to note down all the random loose episodes I've seen over the years, but it seems like most people proxy that by using the hide feature. Looks like there's even an API to export data if needed. Now to search my memory and the popular lists for all the random stuff in my brain...
This and this. SeriesGuide is great.
Trakt also tracks movies. Since I keep forgetting, and rate them on IMDb, I've set up a sync from IMDb to Trakt.
I have paid for the beta version for the official app but I believe that the app had a full launch a short time ago. I don't know if SeriesGuide is better but maybe it's worth it to give the official app a go.
Letterboxd for movies, Librarything for books.
Do you also model your statistical modelling?
Once I've expanded to enough types of modelling I can start performing meta-analyses on how I collect the data...
Similar discussion in ~books about a month ago. Not exactly the same question, but may have som good insights. https://tildes.net/~books/181f/alternatives_to_goodreads
Fwiw, from that discussion I started using StoryGraph and it's excellent! Such a breath of fresh air after dealing with Goodreads BS for all these years.
To totally hijack this conversation, is there something similar to Justwatch.com so if I wanted to see if something was available on Hoopla, or Kindle, or Scribd I can do that without having to have multiple queues on all these sites? My use case would be mostly for comics, but sort tools and aggregators are fun.
Why not Rate Your Music for film, since you already use it for music and games? Anything Letterboxd does better (I haven't used it myself)?
I watch a lot of movies and I've used Letterboxd for years to keep track of them. There's a lot of TV programs on there so you can use it for both. I don't really read books anymore so I don't have any suggestions for that.
I use Showly on Android for TV and Movies and it's been perfect for what I need it for.
Myself I would like to have a “landing page” for any book I want to share with people. Amazon comes closer to my needs than anything else (most likely to have a lot of reviews) but I think their page is distracting and I don’t like their market dominance. (And I just plain like AMZN less now that that Prime shipping slowed down from 2 to 5 days at my location)
Goodreads is still AMZN, less distracting but it has fewer reviews which is a problem for more obscure books.
Speaking of obscure, I like a lot of books from the 1940-1980 period that often are missing an ISBN so a system keyed by ISBN is a non-starter. It doesn’t help that a publisher run by a friend of a friend would recycle ISBNs when books went out of print.
I’ve been thinking about adding something to a static site generator that starts out with metadata from the library of congress and then lets me add my own short review.
I love StoryGraph as a replacement for GoodReads.
If you’re looking for an app that can track just about anything, Sequel is great (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/sequel-media-tracker/id1630746993)
I don’t know anything that does it all with the community of a GoodReads though.
I'm using https://literal.club instead of GoodReads.
It's not perfect, but just as simple as I want it to be to track my readings :)
I use storygraph and I'm pretty happy with it. The paid plan is not necessary to keep track of your books. You can input your good read data. The recommendations are usually spot on and it's easy to use.