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.
I think this could be compatible with Fedireads https://github.com/mouse-reeve/fedireads — which more directly wants to replace Good Reads and do “social reading”. Supports ActivityPub for federation.
Ton made a post recently about federated bookshelves, sparked by a post from Tom. It’s an idea that Gregor has done a good bit of thinking about from an IndieWeb perspective.
Book recommendations is something I’m always interested in. At base, all it needs is a feed you can follow just of what people have been reading. I’ve set up a channel in my social reader called ‘Good Reads’, and subscribed to Ton’s list of books, as the sci-fi focus looks right up my street. If anyone else has a feed of read books, let me know!
I am keeping my own list of books I’ve read in my wiki – sadly not marked up in any useful way at present – something for me to do there.
Ton made a post recently about federated bookshelves, sparked by a post from Tom. It’s an idea that Gregor has done a good bit of thinking about from an IndieWeb perspective.
Book recommendations is something I’m always interested in. At base, all it needs is a feed you can follow just of what people have been reading. I’ve set up a channel in my social reader called ‘Good Reads’, and subscribed to Ton’s list of books, as the sci-fi focus looks right up my street. If anyone else has a feed of read books, let me know!
I am keeping my own list of books I’ve read in my wiki – sadly not marked up in any useful way at present – something for me to do there.
A year ago I blogged about federated bookshelves, in response to Tom Critchlow’s posting Library JSON, A Proposal for a Decentralized Goodreads.
As I reread both postings this morning as well as some of the links Tom points, specifically Phil Gyford’s posting as he starts from the reading experience, not from the tech, and Matt Webb’s for suggesting RSS/OPML, I jotted down a few additional notes.
Since the previous posting I stopped linking to Amazon and Goodreads, and having a way to point others to books and vice versa, for discovery is of more interest to me now
I envisage myself and others having multiple lists (by topic of interest, genre, language, year, author maybe)
I’d like to be able to point from one of my lists to another (from an author field in one list to an author centered list e.g.)
I care less about ‘factual’ reviews, more about reasons why people chose a book (‘the cover design jumped out at me in the store’ or ‘this book touches upon X connected to the topic Y that I’m currently exploring’, which goes back to my notions of social filtering
Similarly I don’t need images of book covers, which also potentially carry copyright issues, but links to author websites or their publisher would be useful, as is a link to a list sharer’s/reader’s blogpost
I’d like to be able to see/get/follow other people’s lists
I’d like sharing a list of other people’s lists I follow
I’d like to be able to adopt entries in other people’s lists into one of my lists (e.g. an authour, a book or thematic list
It would be great if such lists could be imported somehow into tools people might use, e.g. Calibre, Delicious Library, Zotero
I don’t think you need a unique ID for a book, like Tom originally suggested, if the aim is discovery. It’s enough to be able to build triangles that allow navigation and discovery, from me to a title or author, to another reader or more books by an author, or other books in lists where this one shows up
OPML with our without RSS seems the most simple approach here, as the type of info we’re talking about is very well suited to outliners. OPML outlines, and outlines of outlines, can be machine readable and human readable at the same time (case in point, my OPML list of blogs I follow, which is human readable as a blogroll and can also directly be imported into any feedreader
The first list I think I should make as an experiment, is the list of things I might read, my current non-fiction Anti-Library
That last point I’ve added to my things to do if I find some spare moments.
The other side of a book case, image by Ton Zijlstra, license CC BY NC SA