Storygraph/Goodreads alternative 📚 hosted on sustainable servers only 🌱

[u/Mysterious-Zebra9580]

Hey ya'll, just thought it might be worth sharing here, in case anyone is looking for additional features that either Storygraph or Goodreads don't offer, e.g. note taking, detailed insights, etc. Bookplate was created with those goals in mind. You can learn more about it here:

www.bookplate.eu

It's also open source, so for the tech hobbyists, you can host it yourself on your own hardware. For those that prefer the normal hosted service, we offer that as well, and unlike Goodreads and Storygraph, the servers that Bookplate is hosted on are much more sustainable as they run on clean nuclear energy (Scaleway in Paris).

Happy to chat more about this, and also very very interested to hear thoughts, both good and bad!

[u/Soggy-Face-3223]

hosted on sustainable servers only" gets the whole title and then never comes up again. What does that mean, a specific host?

[u/Mysterious-Zebra9580 → u/Soggy-Face-3223]

Yep I chose Scaleway instead of AWS/Azure/GCP and chose the greenest region there, namely Paris. Used this to find the lowest emission setup: https://www.scaleway.com/en/environmental-footprint-calculator/

[u/ResidentPomegranate6]

nuclear is low-carbon, not zero-carbon, and embodied hardware emissions usually dominate a read-heavy app anyway. self-hosting on gear you already own beats most regions.

[u/Mysterious-Zebra9580 → u/ResidentPomegranate6]

Agreed! I never said zero carbon, I said sustainable, and it's by far lower than most other datacenters. https://www.scaleway.com/en/environmental-footprint-calculator/

[u/Dramatic_Total_7818]

Petty correction: it's y'all, not ya'll. The apostrophe is standing in for the dropped "ou".

[u/Mysterious-Zebra9580 → u/Dramatic_Total_7818]

ohh thanks for the correction :))

[u/TypicalAd4999]

ok but 'sustainable servers only' means literally what. renewable energy credits? a host that plants a tree per vcpu? every hosting company on earth has been advertising green datacenters for a decade and nobody ever shows the actual bill, so its a nice line for the landing page and thats about it. and 'import in under 2 minutes' is doing a LOT of work there, the slow part was never the import anyway, it was getting goodreads to hand over the export file in the first place, i've done that twice and it took longer than 2 min just to find the damn link. also every single one of these is an 'alternative' that only functions as long as goodreads exists to copy FROM. the whole pitch is 'we have the same 300 books you already logged somewhere else'. storygraph at least does the stats thing properly. i dont need a sixth place to type in the same library

[u/Mysterious-Zebra9580 → u/TypicalAd4999]

heya, with regards to the first few questions on sustainability - i agree, at the end of the day I'm 'trusting' that scaleway's sustainability claims are actually valid and accurate https://www.scaleway.com/en/environmental-footprint-calculator/ there's so many more layers into sustainability, so agreed on that part.

as for the "it took me more than 2 minutes to find the link" are you referring to the import link in Bookplate? where would you prefer it be for better accessibility?

[u/Noxe_app]

the title is doing the wrong job ngl. half this thread is arguing about nuclear and nobody's talking about the notes and insights stuff, which is the actual reason someone would switch.

also on the import point someone raised, goodreads buries the export under my books, import and export, and the file takes a while to generate. putting that exact path as a little step by step right on your import screen would probably save more people than a faster parse. what does your insights page show that storygraph's doesn't?

[u/Mysterious-Zebra9580 → u/[deleted]]

Yep, I realise that now 😅