personal library

From IndieWeb

A personal library is an online collection of books and other media that reflects either physical or digital items one owns, wants to acquire, has bookmarked to read/watch/listen to, is currently doing so, or has in the past.

For pages about read posts or books distributed or readable online, please see those pages and examples.

There is also a broader notion of a library of things which include tools and other useful objects that individuals loan to others for temporary use and return, however there are no known IndieWeb examples of that yet.

How to

(this section is a stub)

How to maintain a personal library:

There aren’t any required practices, however, sometimes a personal library is maintained as an archive, or collections on individual page(s).

IndieWeb Examples

Christian Weiske

Christian Weiske keeps a list of books he has read. Markup as h-cite with u-uid for the ISBN.

Paul Munday

PaulMunday has a page on his site for each of his books marked up with microformats as documented here: http://paulmunday.net/book-microformats.

Erin Jo Richey

Erin Jo Richey publishes her personal library of books she owns (and has likely read most if not all) on her website:

Sebastiaan Andeweg

Has a page with a few books he knows (either owns/owned or borrowed or read or want to read) on https://seblog.nl/bieb

Ryan Barrett

Ryan Barrett keeps a list of books he has read (including ratings) and would like to read:

Tom MacWright

Xavier Roy

Xavier maintains an online personal library. There is also a new [antilibrary] available (blank as of 1/2021) with books he wants to read.

Maggie Appleton

Jacky Alcine

Jacky Alciné kept a static list of books he reads at https://web.archive.org/web/20210421180358/https://jacky.wtf/library/. Work is being done to restore it using Micropub channels.

Greg McVerry

Greg McVerry keeps a collections of books he read at My Bookshelf, along with brief reviews

Beyond books Greg McVerry keeps an extensive library of readings of academic journals as pdfs and stored in a semi public directory. He doesn't advertise the directory and does not allow it to be crawled but will often embed links to files when working on academic or long form writing.

Tracy Durnell

Tracy Durnell logs yearly reads with filterable views of main categories

Jeremy Keith

Jeremy Keith has some minimal reading posts on his site at https://adactio.com/notes/reading sinc [2017-01-02 https://adactio.com/notes/11683]. He also syndicates to Bookshop at https://uk.bookshop.org/shop/adactio and Open Library.

Hidde Devries

Hidde de Vries has a personal library on his site at https://books.hiddedevries.nl/ , including ratings

Sara Jakša

Sara keeps the list of books she read and the books she currently owns.

Pablo Morales

Pablo Morales has a list of various items in his personal collection. He shares books, dvds, cds, tapes, and vinyls. He updates JSON files to display the data.

capjamesg

capjamesg is passionate about personal libraries. He has built a tool that lets you create clickable versions of physical bookshelves that you can put on your website:

James also has a bookplate stamp he can use to print on a card that a book is part of his library, that reads "Ex libris James" (translation: "from the library of James"):

Other Examples

Other interesting or notable examples of people posting about reading on the web, perhaps lists of books they have read, perhaps on another site but not on a "read" post silo.

Amy McLay Paterson

Amy McLay Paterson read 164 books in 2015 and tracked them all in a spreadsheet.

Mandy Brown

Someone mentioned Mandy Brown's digital library at IndieWebCamp LA 2016 as a good example of someone reading and including some of their notes in posts.

Alex Chan

Horst Gutmann

Example at https://zerokspot.com/reading/

Sawyer Hollenshead

Sawyer Hollenshead keeps a digital personal library at https://highlights.sawyerh.com/

After stewing in frustration for quite awhile about the current state of digital reading platforms, I decided to do what any sane programmer would do: Devise an overly complex solution for a seemingly simple problem. The prompt: How might I gather all my highlights from Kindle and put them into a personal online archive, where I can share, browse, and reflect on everything I’ve read? The result: highlights.sawyerh.com

Amanda Pinsker

Amanda Pinsker, a product designer at GitHub, maintains a list of "Books I've read and where I read them" which is sort of a list of book checkins and actual location checkins. Each book includes a list of the underlines she's made in them.

Michael Beckwith

Marc Littlemore

https://www.marclittlemore.com/books/

"This page is generated using the Goodreads API and built using the static site generator 11ty. This allows me to automatically update this page each time I publish the site with any books I add to Goodreads."

Gordon Brander

Gordon Brander has a library at http://gordonbrander.com/lib/ with categories by topic

Josh Branchaud

Boris Anthony

Boris Anthony has a libarary at http://boris.libra.re/library, generated apparently using data from Calibre. This example also includes the uncommon ability to sort books by the primary color of their bookcovers.

gealion

gealion has a bookshelf site at http://books.gealion.fr/

Petar Gyurov

Petar has a bookshelf page at https://petargyurov.com/bookshelf/ which shows the spines of books which reveal the cover on hover. They shared the code for the page at https://github.com/petargyurov/virtual-bookshelf

Silo Examples

Goodreads

Main article: Goodreads

Library Thing

Main article: Library Thing

Libib

Libib is a website & app that catalogs books, movies, music, and video games.

Oku

https://oku.club/

StoryGraph

Main article: StoryGraph

Literal.club

Literal.club is a silo reading and book cataloging service. It has iPhone and Android apps that allow archiving highlights and notes as well as syndication to Twitter, Instagram, and Whatsapp.

  • Invite only in late 2021


Tools

Tools to help publishing and interacting with personal libraries on your own site:

micro.blog

Main article: micro.blog

Micro.blog has bookshelves https://micro.blog/account/bookshelves, search https://micro.blog/books/search, and other UI for this. There is also an open source mobile app for books using Micro.blog called Epilogue.

indiebookclub

Main article: indiebookclub

indiebookclub is a Micropub client for publishing read posts on your site.

BookWyrm

Main article: BookWyrm

BookWyrm is built on ActivityPub for building social personal libraries. You can join a hosted instance of BookWyrm or run your own instance.

lending library

Publish a lending library on GitHub Pages using a spreadsheet: https://github.com/jlord/lending-library

3dbook.xyz

  • https://3dbook.xyz/ a tool to allow uploading a (book, album, other) cover, customize the settings you want, and embed the resulting 3D animated cover on your website.

add tools...

Brainstorming

How to mark up

  • Thoughts?

Reading list

Is there anything special about keeping a reading list beyond what you have in your personal library? E.g.

  • items in your personal library you want to (re)read
  • items you want to (temporarily) acquire to read
    • borrow from a friend
    • checkout from a public library

Notes from Jacky

Jacky Alciné 2021-03-22 08:35 AM PST:

Digital reading lists can be more rich than the conventional approach. Keeping track of when I paused on a book and to see when would be a good time to resurface it would be helpful (probably manually done). Also being able to see what other books my friends have kept on their lists could also help with getting back into them


Decentralized Goodreads Experiments


Databases

Potential sources for book/library related data for importing/supporting one's own personal library:

IndieWebCamp Sessions

Previous IndieWebCamp related sessions related to personal libraries, books, and reading:

See Also