ElectricMari

The past.

I've always liked the idea of book communities. Even when I was younger, going to the library, I would some times peek at the bulletin board hoping to find, like you see in the movies, a flyer advertising a book club looking for new members. To no avail. Being super shy, the idea of creating one of my own was unfeasible, so I resigned to the idea of relegating one of the most important part of my life, one of my most driving passions (reading, obviously), to the pile of activities I'd do alone.

Sad music.

Then came the internet and my first experiences with online book communities. I made my first attempt with Anobii. I remember the pleasure of seeing all those beautiful book covers put one next to the other, forming kind of an ever growing virtual gallery what I was reading at the time. It is definitely difficult for me to dissociate my experience with these kind of sites from their design as it is to dissociate my choice of the books I'll buy from their book cover. I am a book cover snob. I will judge a book by its cover. So to me, Anobii was an aesthetic experience, more than a social experience. I didn't find book clubs, didn't really interact with other users... was it because the site made it difficult? Was it because I am shy even on the internet?

Shrugs.

Then came Goodreads. Well, I'm pretty sure it was well established when I signed up, but I had been oblivious about its existence up until my crush at the time told me about it. Of course I immediately signed up. A simpler design than Anobii, but the idea was the same. I liked it. Up until I stopped reading. This happens to me from time to time. It's not as easy as “life gets in the way”, it's not always as difficult as “depression gets in the way”. It just happens. I stopped reading, I stopped using Goodreads.

The present.

Last year my partner gave me one of the best presents I have ever received. A Kobo reader. Never in my life, or at least in my life after the release of the first eReader, I would have thought something like this would happen. I started to love reading eBooks. Me, the bookworm, the girl who would stay at the library up until midnight, the girl who never felt shame for sniffing any type of book in any circumstance. It came at the right time, while libraries and bookstores were closed due to covid restrictions, while I was reluctant to get out of my house due to a resurgence of panic and anxiety attacks. Books being readily available through the internet, I started reading again. I even started reading books written after the end of the nineteenth century! Oh my!

And with that came the wish to share my reading, to organise it, to keep track of it. As opposed as I am to Amazon, I decided to look for alternatives, especially open source ones.

The first one I tried was Inventaire.io. As its name suggests, this website helps you keep an inventory of your books and gives you the possibility to lend your books to the people around you. This website didn't really work for me because I didn't know anyone there and, being in Italy at the time (and in a not so populated zone), there was literally no one around me using it.

I then tried The StoryGraph. To be honest, I am still there (you can find me here ) and that's because it is still the best option I have found in the open source realm. Am I satisfied with its design? Not really. It still has some cool features, like a page where you can see your stats (how many pages you've read, what kind of books...) and the possibility to go through a list of Content Warnings related to each book.

Today I started a new experience (wow, I make it sound very serious and ominous) and that is with Bookwyrm. Take all of the above and make it federated, they said! The jury is out for now, but I am liking it so far. It really does integrate all of my online book communities experiences (I can see the book covers, yay!) with my Mastodon experience. Which is what is making me hopeful to maybe start a real book community. My profile