personal library
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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
- Personal library at https://macwright.org/reading/ , includes ratings
- Details: 2017-12-11 : Owning my reading log (archived)
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
- Maggie Appleton keeps a personal "bookshelf" on her website at https://maggieappleton.com/library
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.
- He's written some brainstorming about reading/library posts here: https://adactio.com/journal/16803
Hidde Devries
Hidde de Vries has a personal library on his site at https://books.hiddedevries.nl/ , including ratings
- 2021-01-04 How I turned my Goodreads data into a self-hosted website with Eleventy is an article with details about design decisions in the process as well as some details using Eleventy. Also included is a link to the source code at https://github.com/hidde/books
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.
- Article: http://www.vox.com/2015/12/29/10634416/reading-list-books
- Spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1f6OqC9c9wpZooYW0hip8QtoCwkNjsjbwXHY8hCDbTtU/edit#gid=952505333
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
- Alex Chan keeps their personal library at https://books.alexwlchan.net/reviews/
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
- Site also includes highlights made in each of the books as well.
- 2018-07-23 How I export, analyze, and resurface my Kindle highlights: Using a serverless approach, natural language processing, and SMS
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.
- Library: https://amandapinsker.com/reading
Michael Beckwith
- Michael Beckwith keeps his personal library at https://apiratelifefor.me/books/ as an intended replacement for GoodReads.
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/
That's why I did this https://t.co/X7IuIxEExi (not much publicly visible and no Performance at all...) but I was sick of Goodreads for a lot of reasons
— gealion (@gealion) March 24, 2022
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
Library Thing
Libib
Libib is a website & app that catalogs books, movies, music, and video games.
Oku
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
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
indiebookclub is a Micropub client for publishing read posts on your site.
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
- Used by Erin Jo Richey (listed above)
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?
- Maintaining DRY principles with relation to read, bookmark, acquisition and other similar posts.
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
- 2020-04-15 Tom CritchlowLibrary JSON - A Proposal for a Decentralized Goodreads: V0.1 for an experimental open bookshelf spec
- 2020-04-16 Matt Webb Re: Tom Critchlow’s proposal for a decentralised Goodreads-like system, how about using RSS?
- 2020-04-24 Ton Zijlstra Federated Bookshelves
- 2020-04-25 Jeremy Keith Reading
- proposal for microformats to create a decentralized Goodreads
- 2021-05-06 Ton Zijlstra Federated Bookshelf Proof of Concept
Databases
Potential sources for book/library related data for importing/supporting one's own personal library:
- Open Library (API)
- ISBNdb (API)
- Google Books (API)
- Amazon
- Goodreads
- Worldcat (API)
IndieWebCamp Sessions
Previous IndieWebCamp related sessions related to personal libraries, books, and reading:
- 2022/Pop-ups: Personal Libraries
- 2020/West: Keeping Track of Books and Reading Progress
- 2020/Austin: Reading
- 2019/New_Haven: Books
- 2016/LA/readingiw
- 2015/Books!_Metadata!_Microformats!
See Also
- read
- collection
- ISBN
- book
- library
- highlights
- annotations
- marginalia
- Books about the IndieWeb
- IndieWeb Book Club
- indiebookclub
- read receipt
- reader
- read later
- academic samizdat
- Indieweb for Education
- OER (aka Open Educational Resources)
- commonplace book
- Readlebee - An attempt at a viable alternative to Goodreads, has a solid list of features for implementation/UI
- josephine - Book catalogue system in Python 3/Django3, modeled after GoodReads and books.hansdezwart.nl. Comes with a GoodReads import script.
- Hans de Zwart's Books - Interesting example on a personal site with some reasonable UI design on presentation. (apparently done in php, but not opensource)
- Nice reads Twitter/Google-based app on Glitch
- Pre-indieweb example of a personal library and index/catalog: 2019-04-10 The Guardian: 'Extraordinary' 500-year-old library catalogue reveals books lost to time / The Libro de los Epítomes was a catalogue for Hernando Colón’s 16th-century collection, which he intended to be the biggest in the world
- Litsy is an older platform that is mostly photo-based. BookSloth is another relatively new one.
- List of Goodreads alternatives: https://www.libreture.com/blog/alternatives-goodreads/
- https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/24/realestate/why-do-people-keep-books.html Review of an analog book about physical personal libraries.
- Example of a list of books, but which appears visually as a stack of books https://johannesklingebiel.de/wiki/Bookshelf/
- Article: 2022-02-20 Interoperable Personal Libraries and Ad Hoc Reading Groups / Exploring ways to build social infrastructure around books and reading on the open web
- example: Chuck Grimmett (using WordPress) at https://cagrimmett.com/reading/
- custom book plates for books in your personal library https://getstamped.co.uk/ex-libris-stamps/
- 2024-04-29 Tantek Çelik: The Library of Infinite Loan
Summary: lend a #book from your personal library to a friend, on the conditions that they do not donate sell or dispose of it, and instead when they are done with it they return it or lend it to someone else who agrees to these conditions.
- Why a bookplate: ▶️ Sometimes, a rare book is interesting because of who owned it in the past. With: Rebecca Romney (YouTube short)