Tom Critchlow last week wrote about a decentralised format for shareable bookshelves he came up with. I like the concept, it’s like the FOAF of old but for books, BOAF maybe? Like he mentions in the updates, while providing JSON is probably more fitting technology for the now, there is a world of RSS and OPML out there that might mean a more ready made environment. After all RSS can have very different payloads, as podcasting shows.

I’ve been writing here every now and then since a year or so about (not all of) the books I read. Like Tom says, there’s no getting around the dominance of Goodread and its owner Amazon, other than doing something yourself. I started writing here about my reading, not for the first time in the past two decades, precisely because I don’t want to add my effort to Goodreads. Although I do post affiliate links to Amazon here, as there is not reliable other way to link to books so that it makes sense for most readers. No way to dynamically link a book to your ‘local’ bookstore. Maybe I should just stop doing that, linking to Amazon. People can search a book in their own preferred way easily enough.