That’s what I listed a bunch of other book databases
Unfortunately, I don’t think there’s an equivalent of TMDB for books. The main issue is especially international coverage. You can probably find decent open data for books in a single language but I haven’t found a good database that covers multiple languages well.
I read books in four languages (English, French, German and Japanese) and tried many book tracking services over the years and couldn’t find one that had good coverage in all languages I need.
That’s not the case for Trakt/TMDB. While its coverage of non-English media is noticeably worse, it still has decent coverage, even for obscure non-English titles. Trakt is really creating a great UX on top of the TMDB data but they’re not in a capacity to start a database of this size and complexity on their own.
E.g. I just did a search of a Japanese book off the top of my head and only WorldCat found it, Open Library, GoogleBooks and ISBNdb all found nothing.
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Excellent list. I’d like to add one to it, if I may:
BookBrainz: from the same people that brought us MusicBrainz that’s likewise 100% free and includes an API and webservice for exposing the information. It’s very much a work-in-progress, but that offers its own advantages in that they’re still completely open to what it should record and how it can be consumed. Really all of their projects are a ton of fun to collaborate on, and in particular I find that ListenBrainz scratches a lot of the same itches with music that Trakt does with movies and television for me.
I’ve been searching for a Goodreads alternative and it would be great if I could track my books along with my TV shows and movies in one place.
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I’m honestly surprised nobody has developed a plug-in for Calibre to track reading activity for ebooks.