In the top-left of the page (or top of the page on mobile) you will find a small selection of your books. It will include up to 5 books, from your Currently Reading, Read and To Read reading status shelves.
To see all of them, you may need to horizontally scroll, or pull on the horizontal scroll bar.
If you have 3 or 4 currently reading, the To Read section will not be displayed. Similarly, if all 5 are currently reading, the Read section won't be available either. However, if you have more than 5 currently reading, it will still only show 5 of them.
By clicking on one of these books, it becomes the focus of the interact and review section.
Below the display of your books is a section that displays basic information about the selected book, and lets you interact with it. It includes:
On mobile, you can temporarily hide this section by pressing the X in the top-right corner of it.
If you scroll down below the Your Books and post form, you will see your progress towards your reading goal this year.
As a new user you will see a prompt to set your reading goal when you start using BookWyrm. Otherwise, you can set it by navigating to Your Profile > Reading Goal. Once set, that is also where you can see your progress and all the books you've read this year.
Try setting a goal that is achievable, and will motivate you to read often.
On the top of the home page is a search box, which lets you search for books, authors, users or lists.
Beside it is a barcode reader which lets you easily find a book by scanning its ISBN barcode using the device camera. This is especially useful if you're in a bookstore or the library!
Timelines are filled with statuses from people you follow on Bookwyrm. It's how you keep up with what your friends are reading, reviewing and recommending. They take up 2/3 of the screen, or on mobile are found below the reading goal section.
As a new user, you will be suggested some accounts to follow.
You can also search for your friend's username to find and follow them.
If they are using a different BookWyrm website than you (for example, bookwyrm.social and ramblingreaders.org)
then you can still follow them - but you will need to use their full account name including the instance domain name, like this:
user@example.com or arthur@ramblingreaders.org
Your Home Timeline is a chronological feed of all the statuses about books posted by people you follow. This includes their reading status updates (want to read, started reading, finished, etc), reviews, ratings, comments, and quotes that they've shared. Read more about types of statuses here.
Your Home Timeline also includes any statuses that people you follow have boosted. This is similar to reposting or reblogging on other platforms, and means that status has been shared into your Timeline. Boosting is the best way to share good reviews with your followers, and helps them find interesting people to follow. This is especially useful since there is no algorithm deciding what to show you, only the real humans that you've decided to follow.
If you follow people on other fediverse apps, such as Mastodon, you will not find their normal text posts in your timeline. However, posts they boost or their replies to other posts will be included in it.
Your Books Timeline is a chronological feed that collects statuses posted about books that you have in your shelves.
It might not display all statuses, if your BookWyrm website doesn't know about some
You can reply to any status in your timeline to start a discussion, and boost or like the status. Under 'More Options' there is a link to send a direct message to the poster, report the status, or block them.
Both timelines have a Filters menu which lets you filter what types of statuses you'd like to see in it. You can include or exclude Reviews, Comments, Quotations, or Everything Else (including reading status updates). Then click the 'Apply filters' button to reload the timeline with the new filters.
A little badge called 'Filters are applied' will be shown after filters are changed, but this disappears after another page reload even though filters are still in effect.
There are many links within the main menu to navigate to other pages on BookWyrm.
In the top bar is the search box to go to the search page, and links to Lists, Discover (recent statuses from the local instance), and Your Books.
On the right hand side is your profile icon and name. When clicked, it has links to your Profile, the Directory of other users, your Direct Messages, Settings, and the Log Out button.
On the far right is the Notifications button. It will display a number if you have unread notifications.
On mobile, some of these options will be collapsed into a 3 dots option which will show them.
The website footer also includes links related to the administration of the site, link to this documentation and to re-start the Guided Tour.
If you are using a free BookWyrm instance, there might be a link to financially support the admins in the footer. Public instances require many hours of management and up to several hundred dollars a year to run. If you like using your BookWyrm site, please consider supporting them to keep it online and running smoothly!