2010-01-17 » Listing my books.
I could write here about how Howie failed the Project 52 challenge in week 2 after Kevin failed in week 1 and just call that my post for this week. But I think that all this meta discussion is starting to get redundant, so I’ll spare you and write about my books instead.
One of the things I really like to do is read books. Now that I’m taking public transit to work, I’ve got almost 2 full hours to read during my commute each day. Combined with the other time I spend reading, this means I’ve been going through more books. An hour or so ago I finished reading the 3rd and final book of Peter F. Hamilton’s “Night’s Dawn” trilogy (pretty good by the way, but ~4000 pages). Then I started thinking that I should put up a list of books I’ve read. There are a couple motivations for this. I figure it will:
- help me remember which books I’ve read
- allow other people who are interested keep track of what I’m reading
- allow people who want to buy/lend me books to know which ones I’ve already read
- increase the amount of content on this site
In order to make it easy to keep this list up to date, I wanted to find a service I could use that would let me just select books I’ve read or am planning to read or want to get and it would sort things out for me. When I looked, the 3 best options I could find seemed to be reader2, bookwormr and shelfari. I tried to look at these and none of them seem to work for me:
- reader2 is currently not accepting new registrations (blaming spammers)
- bookwormr doesn’t seem to have an API that lets me pull out my data and integrate with this site
- shelfari doesn’t seem to have an API and seems a bit weird with their “virtual shelf” concept
Does anyone else have any recommendations? If so email them to <josh@wilsdon.ca>.
Until I find a service that I like I’ve just created a simple list page which includes the books I could remember reading recently. I’ll update it as I read or remember other books. This new page has also been added to my new menu/sidebar.