Show HN: A better way to keep track of the books you've read?
mylifethroughbooks.com
mylifethroughbooks.com
I am moving from Atlanta to Seattle. In the process, I am shedding six shelves of dead tree books. When I get out there, I may have some of those books shipped out there ... but I'm getting a taste of living with most of my possessions in the cloud. (Besides, what is past is past).
Nothing really replaces the experiencing of having a wall of books you have read and curated. I'm thinking of a device that would allow me to display my collection to visitors. A tablet someone can walk up to and browse. (With sensors to softly light up the space, like you would expect in an awesome museum). It would not be like the iBooks UI (which sucks), but something more immersive. It should be more like playing with Second Life, without requiring someone to be a badass at first person shooters.
Ah well, I will figure it out. Who knows, maybe I'll even organize a kickstarter for the app.
As a long-time avid reader, over the past decade its been an interesting change going from a wholly physical library to mostly digital, thanks to my Galaxy Note and Kindle.
But something I truly miss is having friends come over and curiously rifle through the books on my shelf and the conversations that were started as they asked about each one (as well as the opportunity to show-off a bit). Almost as nice an experience was, sneaking a peek at the cover of the book a guy sitting next to me on the subway/bus was reading and going on to discover that it is another good read.
So far, none of the digital bookstores/libraries have been able to sufficiently reproduce this experience for me.. though I have hope they, or something else, will be able to in the near future. Until then, I will keep a physical copy of any favorites on my shelf for that next curious mind.
Now, I'm in the process of cutting them up, running them through a scanner, and throwing them in the recycling bin. I have apps for ipod and kindle that enable me to browse the books on my lan, and I enjoy poking through them that way from whereever I am in the house.
I'm looking forward to the day that I can store the entire thing on my ereader. So far, that would be 70Gb, but I expect it to rise by at least a factor of 10.
Sometimes, I look at a person and pick out a book that they need. Maybe it is because I am gushing over book X and pressing it into their hands.
If you don't have friends poking around in your library, it's probably best to drop it into the cloud. Those collections get heavy. That's why I am thinking of up designs to draw people into the virtual library.
What do you think of being able to send an email somewhere...and then a little bit later the book is added automatically?
That said: I use Goodreads for this. One big feature it provides for me is community curation, so it would be difficult for another service to usurp it at this point. My Goodreads account is also tracking 789 books - well past the breaking point of the GUI paradigm you're pursuing. A timeline is not really suited to administration either.
If you want to add a timeline for visualization, restrict it to visualization, then make it compact enough to accommodate more than one title per week across years of use.
I've never taken the time to know if the following is possible, but it would be really cool this app could automatically get the books you've read from your amazon kindle account or itunes account.
Either way, I could people using it and posting a link on their personal website (e.g. click this link to see a small bio about me, click this link to see what I've read, click this link to see my portfolio, etc..)
If you're really interested I would enhance it a bit, maybe make a video that explains the concept, and try to pitch it to non-techies to validate the idea further. Spend a few bucks in Facebook adds or something like that.
[1]: It seemed an ISBN stream was the best input to act upon at the time -- Amazon API might be another useful source, but then you would be beholden to a vendor's api requirements/restrictions.
[2]: http://www.bowker.com/en-US/products/servdatalic_license.sht...
One suggestion + one question: Add zoom, or some way to get a much broader overview. I'm using the scrollbar to see four books. If I read that many in a week, that's going to be a lot of scrolling! And so my question is, how does it perform with hundreds or thousands of objects?
I do have a "feed" type view that shows a subset of the books with pictures, but it's more for visualization rather than actually being able to find anything.
Right now I've moved so I made a list of all my books in a small spreadsheet but it's not enough!
b.t.w. is this service available for others to try?
I read a lot of books these days, but for the most part they're digital. Because of that, they're not staring at me on a bookshelf and I find myself forgetting what I've read. Most importantly, I find myself forgetting the memories attached to those books.
Before e-books, I'd have physical copies that would remind me of specific moments in my life. It was nice to see a few books and think, "Oh yeah, that was when I lived in San Francisco and met my girlfriend," or "oh yeah, that book reminds me of my family back in Southern California."
I wanted to get that feeling back. The feeling of being able to look through my past...but by using books. I put this together as something quick and easy to make me happy.
In fact, all the code can be found here: http://tympanus.net/codrops/2011/12/05/lateral-on-scroll-sli.... If folks are interested in the idea then please let me know and I'll see about making something that we all can use.
This is just my way of showing the quick idea :).
It is quite good, integrated with Amazon and even provides some stats.