Some examples for how people create book lists / shelves on their own sites.

• Boris Anthony, library, sortable by various aspects into different shelves.
• Tom Critchlow, wiki of various book lists in markdown files, and proposal for sharing data with JSON
• John Johnston, a list of books read, by year, including remarks and starred rating
• Tom Macwright, list of books read since 2007, each mention links to a review
• Ton Zijlstra, a blog category ‘Books I read‘ with ocassional mentions and reviews of books read, and an OPML proof of concept for data exchange
• Tom Critchlow has a great and long list of other people’s book lists / sites.

Other things of interest:

• IndieWeb microformat for ‘read’, which you could aggregate into lists.
• Bookwyrm, an ActivityPub based federated book club platform. Can be self hosted. Allows creation and curation of ‘shelves’ and lists. It isn’t primarily meant for cataloguing or as a data-source for books, but it does do both of those things to some degree…The application is set up to share book and author data between instances, and get book data from arbitrary outside sources. Right now, the only connector is to OpenLibrary, but other connectors could be written.
• Open Library of the Internet Archive has list making functionality, as well as book records in json and rdf.