Tag: GoodReads

Replied to a post by Patrick Rhone (patrickrhone.net)
I created a shop on Bookshop.org for all the books I read this year for easier browsing and, if interested, purchase.
I like this idea Patrick. I’d recently used Bookshop to create a list of books I’m currently reading. Having finished one or two, perhaps it’s time to start a read shelf like you have?

It might be interesting to see them build out some UI to make a less corporate Goodreads-esque site as well.

Bookmarked Italic Type (italictype.com)
Italic Type is the simplest way to track your books, get trusted recommendations, and share the joy of reading with friends.
An interesting new competitor to Goodreads and Library Thing on the scene. The functionality is very limited in scope at present, but it’s rather pretty looking. Not nearly as fine grained as Goodreads in terms of data, but a good start.

I’ll have to look into the ease/value of starting into yet-another book silo though. I’d only really use it if I can get it to dovetail with posting to my own website as a syndication target (POSSE), or if I can use it to syndicate to my own site (PESOS).

 

Read Pirate Book Chest by Michael BeckwithMichael Beckwith (apiratelifefor.me)
If you’ve ever talked to me about books and reading, then there’s chance that I’ve brought up GoodReads and how I’m pretty active there. I can’t claim so active that I’m updating daily. I do, however, make sure to keep my current book statuses accurate. On the flip-side, as highlighted b...
Mad respect to Michael for going all in on the “pirate life” by reading Treasure Island and experimenting with reading/book posts and naming his digital shelves “Chests”!
Replied to a post by Katherine M. MossKatherine M. Moss (cambridgeport90.micro.blog)
I wonder how on earth one finds the ISBN of a Kindle-only book? I’m wondering whether or not the IndieWeb book resources should begin going by ASIN instead of ISBN … seems that the ASIN is easy to find if on GoodReads.
Each publisher should be assigning individual International Standard Book Numbers to each format for each different edition, but in practice they don’t always. Often they’ll assign a single ISBN number to all e-book versions (regardless of file format) and sometimes they’ll incorrectly use the same number as the paperback or hardback editions.

Things can be worse for more independent or self-published works where the author doesn’t know how these things work. These may often have no ISBN at all regardless of the format.

The least “indie” thing one could do would be to use the Amazon Standard Identification Number which is a number assigned by Amazon. ASINs are easy to find on Goodreads solely because they’re owned by Amazon. In many cases, there are far more editions on Goodreads than actually exist because of the lack of use of ISBNs and de-duplication of editions which they import from a variety of data sources, including Amazon itself.

To my knowledge, the only true way to find the “correct” ISBN is to copy it directly from the book/source itself.

Replied to a tweet by Katherine Moss (Twitter)
There’s a proposed session (IndieWeb GoodReads) to discuss just this at IndieWebCamp West 2020. If you have other ideas for sessions, feel free to brainstorm something or propose it in the etherpad.
Read Read feeder by Neil MatherNeil Mather (doubleloop)
Ton made a post recently about federated bookshelves, sparked by a post from Tom. It’s an idea that Gregor has done a good bit of thinking about from an IndieWeb perspective. Book recommendations is something I’m always interested in. At base, all it needs is a feed you can follow just of what p...
I love that more people are publishing their reading to the open web! It’s great to see more example of how people are doing it and how things could be better.
Replied to a post by Brett KosinskiBrett Kosinski (The “B” Ark)
Taking back control of my content, I’m pulling my (modest) book reviews from Goodreads back to my blog. An underrated favourite of mine is Last Chance to See by the astounding Douglas Adams. #ownyourdata

Congrats! I love the increasing number of people I’ve seen even in the last few days working on this! Are you using IndieBookClub.biz to post to your website?

I’m waiting for people to start documenting examples of owning their knitting on their websites and syndicating to/from Ravelry. #​IndieWebKnittingChallenge 

Read Posts with Read Status via PESOS using GoodReads and Micropub

Today I accidentally realized that both the WordPress Micropub server and the Post Kinds plugin support read-status values of “to-read”, “reading”, and “finished”. I’ve managed to tweak my PESOS work flow with Goodreads.com to also include these experimental pieces using the following additional snippets of code appended to the “Body” fields I’ve described before:

&read-status=to-read
&read-status=reading
&read-status=finished

I’ve added one of the three snippets to the appropriate IFTTT.com recipes for  Goodreads feeds to create the appropriate output. Here’s the first post I’ve made using the new recipe for bookmarking a book I’d like to read: https://boffosocko.com/2020/02/15/meditations-marcus-aurelius/.

Previously I’ve been using simple notes to create read posts for books and just adding a “read” category to give me more control over the data in the posts. (I only used read posts previously for online articles.) Now that I’ve got the ability to provide some better differentiation for my progress, I think I’ll switch to using read posts for all my reading (books and articles).

Incidentally following IndieBookClub.biz and Indigenous for Android which added support for these earlier today, my method may be the third to use these microformats in the wild. Thanks to gRegor Morrill, Kristof De Jaeger, David Shanske, Ryan Barrett, and Charlotte Allen for their prior work, experimentation, code, and examples for allowing me to get this working on my website. 

Read Add review to Goodreads from Schema markup by Terence Eden (Terence Eden’s Blog)
I write book reviews on my blog. I also want to syndicate them to Goodreads. Sadly, Goodreads doesn't natively read the Schema.org markup I so carefully craft. So here's the scrap of code I use to syndicate my reviews.Goodreads API Keys Get your Keys from https://www.goodreads.com/api/keys You will ...
I’ve just noticed that in addition to my relatively obvious user RSS feed on Goodreads, there’s a separate hidden feed of just my reading status updates. It’s of the form https://www.goodreads.com/user_status/list/#######-user-name?format=rss where #######-user-name is the typical user number and name combination at one’s profile page.
Dear Goodreads, heading into the stretch for the end of 2019, it would be great if there were a potential column for %finished in the master view for My Books >> Currently Reading (example URL).

This would let me sort the 30+ books in my currently reading list and figure out which ones I’m furthest through and could potentially finish quickest on my sprint for cleaning out my list for the end of the year.

You’ve got almost every other bit of sortable data in those lists, why not this one? I’ll take a simple numerical  view, but if you want to throw in the progress bar, there’s lots of bonus points in your developer Christmas stocking.