I’m working on an ISBN database that fetches information from several other services, such as Hardcover.app, Google Books, and ISBNDB, merges that information, and return something more complete than using them alone. It also saves that information in the database for future lookups.

Mostly because I’m working on a personal library management service called Shelvica to solve my own problems[1], and none of those services provided all the information on a book. One might provide the series, the other might provide genres, and yet another might provide a cover with good dimensions, but none provided everything, so I decided to work on something of my own (called Librario).

While Shelvica is the focus, Librario could become its own thing in time, so I don’t mind the sidetracking.

I also plan on having a “ISBN Search” kind of website that feeds from that database as a way to let users search for information about books, which then feeds the service’s database, making it stronger for Shelvica.

I open source everything I make, but I’m still wondering if these will be open sourced or not. I’ll probably go with the EUPL 1.2 license if I do decide on open sourcing them.

[1]: My wife and I have a personal library with around 1800 books, but most applications for management are either focused on ebooks or choke with this many books. Libib is the exception, but I wanted a little more.