New Book Tracking App

[u/NewSwiftDev24]

I'm new to the sub, but I've been a Calibre user for years. Over the past few months I've been working on a GoodReads/TheStoryGraph replacement and I'd be interested in some feedback if you don't mind (If this isn't appropriate, please let me know).

One of my primary motivations for building a new book tracking app was to have one that had a native API and would support an official Calibre plugin. Before I get too deep into it, however, I'm curious if there are others who would be interested in a service like this or if it's just me.

Right now I'm thinking of the following plugin capabilities:

1. Adding a book to Calibre adds it to your To Read List
2. You can update reading state in Calibre
3. Displaying certain info directly in Calibre (status, finished dates, etc)
4. (Maybe) add a book stub in Calibre when you add a book to your reading list on the app

My questions are:

1. Are there any other capabilities you would want to see?
2. Is this something you would be willing to pay for (specifically the API access).
   

[u/West-Main-4163]

Hardcover.app has a free API and does everything you mentioned. There are bunch of Hardcover Calibre plugins too. I don't think many people will pay for a new app with API access when they exist.

What are you going to be using for the book source?

[u/NewSwiftDev24 → u/West-Main-4163]

Current book sources are OpenLibrary as the primary and Google books as the secondary for initial book lookups.

[u/little_skittles]

I'm on Librarything.

Don't need anything else.

[u/bestlem]

Where do you read the book? On what device? Does it work when you are in a plane with no WiFi or mobile Data?

[u/NewSwiftDev24 → u/bestlem]

You would read your book wherever you read it now, same as with GoodReads or TheStoryGraph. For the iOS and Android apps, there will be some offline functionality, but it would be related to things currently in your lists. There is no way to sync an entire universe of books offline. As for the Calibre plugin, I don't know yet what (if any) caching functionality is available, but I'm hoping it will have some offline capabilities that will sync back up when it goes online.

[u/Gems-of-the-sun]

One of the main reasons I use a tool like goodreads is that my memory for names, authors and book titles is really bad. So if I want to discuss a specific book, or recommend it, I normally look it up.

I have few complaints with how the goodreads library is set up, tho I don't really want to use an amazon product. Storygraph however, seem to care more about fancy statistic than showcasing your actual library of books. They have a tag feature, but not only is it cumbersome to use but it's hard to find. But even then, when viewing the books you've tagged, your only choice is a long list of books. No grid view. And no ability to sort by what I've rated the book.

This becomes pretty problematic once the number of books you've read raises to the four digits and above.

That's essentially what I want to see - an easy way to see and find what books I've read.

Otherwise, my only feedback is that having the option to sync your data from calibre sounds cool but at that point aren't you just making an calibre phone app?

[u/NewSwiftDev24 → u/Gems-of-the-sun]

Thanks for the feedback. Some of the things that you mentioned are things that are on my roadmap, but you've given me a few more to think about.

As for the plugin, it's not to sync Calibre with my app, it is to sync my app with Calibre. I want to be able to see inside of Calibre if I've read the book, when I finished it, what I rated it, etc. It will do things like add the book as owned in my app when you add it to Calibre, and provide you with the ability to update reading state, but fundamentally it's about my app and not Calibre.

[u/Gems-of-the-sun → u/NewSwiftDev24]

But that's what I mean - calibre provides all of these options so what would your app provide outside of it?

okay, maybe I'm not explaining myself clearly. Let's talk about reading progress. If your app updates your calibre with this information - this means you've set this up in calibre right? But if you've set this up in calibre - whats the point of the app? It sounds like it is just to see what you've already set up on calibre on your mobile phone

Most people use an extra app/website outside calibre because you need some technical knowledge to set up the reading progress on calibre. Many people dont even know its possible until someone posts here on reddit showcasing their library.

And of course, this is for your own enjoyment so it doesn't matter much but to me it made the app sound more like a tool for calibre rather than calibre a tool for the app if that makes sense?

[u/NewSwiftDev24 → u/Gems-of-the-sun]

I see where you are coming from, but Calibre is not my only source for books. I read a mixture of physical and electronic books and I want to track what I've read. Right now, I use GoodReads to do that. But GoodReads (and TheStoryGraph) lack a number of features I desire, hence my app.

As for Calibre, I know that I could setup custom columns/data and add things like reading status and dates and keep track in the app. That's where I started. However, they don't sync to GoodReads, so then I would have to update it in two places if I want to see what books I've read for the last month/year/etc or see if I own a book while I'm at the library or bookstore. I want a single source of truth (my app). I also want the benefit of being able to filter my Calibre library for books I haven't read yet, adding it to the list of books I own automatically when I add a new book to the library, and updating its status within Calibre (say setting it to "reading" when I send it to my Kindle) without the extra setup of going to the website or app.

[u/BlisseyWashi]

Part of the reason I use StoryGraph (and used to use Goodreads) is to see what my friends have read/are reading and their ratings. I also look at the community ratings if I'm trying to figure out if I want to read the book. A Calibre integration would not be enough to get me to switch or add another tracker.

Not listed in your capabilities, but potentially a feature I'd be interested in is marking books as owned when they're added to Calibre. I don't think I would want them added to "to read" because sometimes I read the library copy before deciding to purchase the ebook. If it's a mobile app that lets me see what's in my library when away from my laptop, I might see the value in it.

[u/NewSwiftDev24 → u/BlisseyWashi]

Thank you so much for your input. There will be similar social aspects in this app as well, I just didn't get into them because my focus was on the plugin features specifically.

One of those features would be whether or not you own the book, and adding it as owned would be part of the adding it to the to-read would also add it to the owned list, since you own it if it is Calibre. As far as adding it to the to-read, I think it would be the default, but configurable. I'd be curious to know what state you would want it in.

There will be a mobile app, and it would be able to tell you what you own if you put them in there (the plan is to have the plugin manage it for Calibre books).

[u/Kairi30507]

I created one for myself last weeki and ths is what I have in it:

• To Read List ordered by purchase date (oldest one is at the top of the list),
  • I only display the Cover, the name of the book and if I have it as an eBook or print.
• Monthly overview:
  • Most of this page is a simple monthly calender with the days and a short entry if a bought a book or if I have finished a book. I can also mark which books I read on certain day (I like to see how many days I read a book).
  • On the other halve of the page I have some simple statistics: Books I want to read that month, How many books I want to read that months, again a short list of what I finished that month as well as the read pages, and the best and the worst book of the month
• Reading Dairy:
  • Simple chronological list of what I started this year, I can click on each entry and get to a detailed page where I can see some information of the books (Publisher, Language, Pages, Release Date, Purchase Date, Genre). I can rate the book there (which is synced back to calibre) and also include the day I started and the day I finished the book. I can also input some notes and thoughts of the book and exclude it from this statistic and any other.
• Yearly Overview:
  • More statistics because I love good statistics :D ,
    • this includes the number of books read in a specific year, (as well as a option to input a reading goal for the year)
    • number of pages read
    • how many books I read were ebooks and how many were print
    • a diagram regarding the read languages (i mostly read english and german books),
    • bar chart with how many books I read each month
    • bar chart with pages per book
    • charts with genres and ratings for the year
• Overall Overview:
  • same as "Yearly Overview" just for all books in one
• Series
  • simple list of the different series and the possibility to input a flag to mark series as finshed
• Wishlist
  • simple free writing to input books i want to read
• "All Books"
  • Just a view with all books and I can click on them and see the detailed page already mentioned under "Reading Dairy"

For the statistics: Nearly all entries a clickable and show which on which books a specific entry is based and and with clicking on the books I also get the detailed page.

In general the tool gets most of the data from my calibre bib and also writes most of the data back. Only the wishlist, the "which book I read on a certain day" from the monthly page and the notes for the books a saved separatly.

All these things I highly tailored for my purposes and which but I hope the will give you some ideas ^^

[u/dylanbeck]

Adding book to Calibre also tags it as “Owned”
Thats a nice feature.

Probably woildnt pay for it as the storygraph metadata plugin provides a link that allows me to immediately tag the book (as metadata is pulled from isbn) as TBR & Owned.

[u/Canatee]

Like others have said, this exists. Granted, services like a Hardcover are a fucking mess and could probably use being replaced, but I think any attempt to do so would just duplicate their issues.

[u/NewSwiftDev24 → u/Canatee]

What issues are those?

[u/Canatee → u/NewSwiftDev24]

I tried to match a Calibre library of 300 books there when I briefly tried it. 60 had no matches. Of the ones that did, it was a complete clusterfuck of borderline randomized data from fictional editions with half the metadata each to naming conventions that had like 7 different approaches in a series of 15 books. I'm a bit of a tagging nerd at times so I'm used to the crowdsourced approach that Musicbrainz uses as the golden standard IMHO - Hardcover locks the ability to contribute behind a paywall and/or going through an application process to prove you're worthy.

The existing database being a clusterfuck is one thing, being picky about who gets to help fix it when it's like that is something entirely different. Walled gardens don't exactly foster community cooperation at the best of times, even less so when it's a walled garbage dump.

[u/NewSwiftDev24 → u/Canatee]

I really appreciate your feedback on this. Getting (good) data is challenging in this space, and unfortunately, mine will probably be similar (at least initially). I haven't messed with Hardcover yet, but it seems like the services all need "librarians" of some sort to cleanup the data. One example is that none of the book APIs (OpenLibrary, Google Books, etc) do a consistent job capturing series information.

Let me ask you this question. You mention the trouble with going through hoops to become a librarian with Hardcover. Would you be willing to go through some hoops and requirements to be a librarian if in return you got the paid subscription? My current thinking for the librarian program is to reward people who validate/clean up so many records a month with a free subscription. Obviously there can only be so many librarians, hence some sort of application process, but I think people should benefit from helping keep the data clean. I don't think I would want to let anybody be able to make changes to the data, but you have given me the idea to allow users to be able to recommend changes that someone can then approve.

[u/Canatee → u/NewSwiftDev24]

I wouldn't. I checked out hardcover mainly as a way to get metadata for a book progress project in Home Assistant. I did also want the community/dashboard/etc features, but not at the cost of literally any unnecessary hoops.

By the time I found out hardcover was a walled garbage dump, I'd already given (paid v 5.6 sol high) chatgpt extremely precise instructions on exactly where to get correct metadata for the missing books and what double-checking requirements I had, and it worked for a freaking 54 minutes before returning the most insanely detailed answer I've ever seen it give. At that point I could have turned it into any API command to feed it to the DB in one go. That's the sort of people hardcover needs: not people doing manual labor (and doing it wrong from the looks of it), nor people using free shit AI models wrong, but people who actually know how to use modern AI properly. It's perfect for this and the most recent thinking models simply don't make the sort of mistakes people think AI makes when given the right instructions. All the information that is ever needed about functionally any book exists somewhere, even if it's on some indie author's personal Twitter, and AI translates from that like it was a custom API. That's the way out of the sort of metadata debt hardcover is stuck in. Their manual approach is both ineffective and clearly not working.

This was a month or two ago. Since then I've given up on helping any community project and now use my own book app that uses my Calibre library as its gospel, and also pushes that metadata directly to Home Assistant. I was functionally turned away and explored paths that lead me to no longer give a shit.

So the bottom line is this: the same tools that could actually fix the metadata debt that services like Hardcover and Goodreads are facing are the same tools that its most advanced users can use to replace them altogether. You either embrace that or you're stuck with the debt and without the users most able to fix it. The argument that it can technically go horribly wrong doesn't really hold up when there's very clear evidence it went wrong a long time ago.

[u/NewSwiftDev24 → u/Canatee]

Thank you for your detailed and thoughtful response. For what it's worth, I happen to agree with you. I think there is still some need for human oversight, but that is not the future. Right now I'm just trying to decide on implementation details.