2017/reading

Reading posts was a session at IndieWeb Summit 2017.

Notes archived from: https://etherpad.indieweb.org/reading
Video at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_RMvxy9J7g

When: 2017-06-24 15:00

Participants

Notes

Tom: goodreads user, interested in all that functionality, keeping track of book collection, possibly when I shared a book

Jack: doesn't use goodreads or anything like that, but would like to keep track of research he's reading. Would like to publish citations.

Anton: wanted to keep track of highlights. Kindle lets you pull highlights into goodreads. Would like to keep personal notes. Markdown and generating static pages didn't work either, lack of semantic search.

Michelle: spent 3 years obsessively recording pages per day that she read in spreadsheet, with Excel generated graphs. Spreadsheet doesn't do much, would like a way to share it, more interesting way to track it.

Pete: 1) Ward suggested his fedwiki is a good tool for reading journal. Pete started one but hasn't populated it much yet. 2) within wikipedia there's been an ongoing discussion about having a database of citations, e.g if a certain article is cited in 5 WP articles shouldn't it be a central thing rather than duplicated in each article.

Amin: no strong need, just curious.

Ben: mostly interested in discovering what other people are reading. Want people to share what they find interesting on their own means.

Pete: Evaluating the quality of what you're reading, increasingly important to assess, e.g. fake news, research

Michelle: Has trouble finding new books to read because she's read so many already

Pete: Wikipedia has templates that take ISBN numbers and return all the information, uses Worldcat? / OCLC to look up data.

Key wants from the group

Keeping track of books to read
Discovering new books to read
Keeping track of research read, citations
Keeping track of highlights, personal notes
Keepng track of reading progress
Commentary and reviews

Micropub Client

gRegor: Interested in building a very minimal MP client tomorrow to post "want to read" books

Ben: Ideal UI would be start to type in the book title and it would search / fill in the ISBN / additional info

Jim: Could also do photo of cover

Anton: Goodreads has restrictions on how long you can retain data from their API

Ben: collaborative databases of books other people have added

Discovery

Ben: I explicitly want to break out of my "bubble" to find new material. A network of recommendations. Personal recommendations are more important than anything else.

gRegor: there could be an IndieNews-like hub that people could webmention their /read posts to and it could aggregate / aid discovery

Tracking Progress

Michelle: Interested in tracking pages read per day, not just current page number.

Amin: reading a lot of academic papers, skims them doesn't read in-depth. Doesn't spend time to log his notes with it. Wheras with a book he's vested more time in it. The overhead of switching between academic papers and tracking it is too much.

Michelle: has favorite blog articles on certain topics. e.g. "If you're trying to learn flexbox here's my recommended 3 articles"

Jack: If metadata could be extracted from academic articles you could populate information more easily and make posting quicker.

Amin + Jack: Interested in tracking academic articles and notes, possibly articles that they cite e.g. "you read this article and it cites these two articles so you might be interested in them"

Tom: Interested in a book club using this. Ben suggested POSSE to Twitter with hashtag

Next Steps

gRegor working on MP client tomorrow
Jack looking into Google Scholar API to retrieve academic article info