What this site does

Here's where I try and boil down how this site is meant to work

This is a site is a playground for some ideas about facilitating the curation of books online to create a website where it is enjoyable to encounter new books. One could use it to showcase a book collection, keep track of reading, share books and lists and reviews with others, or write about books one wants to promote or sell. It's not much to look at at present, but I'm building it up piece by piece.

The system is simple. Add a text file with an ISBN, and you have a book. Add a list of books (multiple ISBNs) and you have a shelf. If you don't enter details (title, author, description, image, etc.), a script will grab that for you from the web. Then it will spit out a website for those books and shelves: web pages, structured data, newsletter files, json and csv formats, opengraph images... a lot of things that will make it easy to explore, discover and share books and lists about books.

How it works

Bookshelves.dev takes either markdown files that have ISBNs in the front matter, JSON data of book lists in the json format, or API data (from a CMS, for example). It turns those into collections of books that are nice to look through using a static site generator which I love called 11ty. If placeholder content is turned on, it will scrape Google Books API (and elsewhere) for book data, any bit of which can be superseded by entered content. If you want a conversion link or button, you can set that up globally, per collection/shelf, or per title. If you have a record of books on hand (a local inventory) in a json or csv format, you can display that on-hand inventory status or use it to modify the conversion path.

What makes it interesting to me

The long-term goal is to start seeing books which appear on multiple shelves, and those other shelf links being jumping off points to other books you might be interested in. An example that is already on the site is this this book, which I have included on two shelves. If this system had all my books and all the shelves I could imagine, there would be an interesting set of connections discoverable here. To say nothing if the staff picks or other showcases of a good indie bookstore's curatorial prowess were stocking the shelves. To read some more about all of this, you might read the No Books but on Shelves post.

Finally, in addition to building the site, it also compiles ALL the ISBNs it finds in the various inputs (JSON data, markdown files, API data), and creates a master library.json for all the books. Tom Critchlow and others have laid a lot of groundwork for this idea: a format which can be shared via a community of readers and book enthusiasts, compared with individuals' TBR lists, etc. I would love for this standard to take-off, and help in some way to build a decentralized indieweb version of goodreads.