
Show HN: A better way to keep track of the books you've read? - iamphilsharp
http://www.mylifethroughbooks.com/phil/
======
hosh
I would rather try to bring some of the experience of physically browsing
through shelves online.

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.

~~~
NnamdiJr
"Nothing really replaces the experience of having a wall of books you have
read and curated". I strongly second that.

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.

~~~
WalterBright
I've had many walls of books for many decades, and can only remember a couple
incidents where anyone ever poked through them.

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.

~~~
hosh
Almost all my friends come over make a beeline for my library and start poking
around.

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.

------
dfc
Respectfully, I think this is a better way to _show off_ what books I read.
When I think of keeping track of what books I read I think of notes, subject
matter, author, etc. From the title I was under the impression that the
audience would be the reader not the reader's friends...

------
marquis
If you could grab this from your Amazon kindle purchases that would be quite
wonderful to have a beautiful reference of the book covers.

~~~
iamphilsharp
That's what I was thinking too. Not quite sure how to make it happen
automatically yet...so far this was very manual.

What do you think of being able to send an email somewhere...and then a little
bit later the book is added automatically?

~~~
marquis
You might need some kind of browser extension that reads your Media Library, I
can't find any other way of automating it at the moment.

------
grueful
Good job shipping.

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.

~~~
grantjgordon
Ditto. Although if I could pipe my goodreads collection into this I probably
would. Why not?

------
wrath
I love it. Probably not for me but I'm not sure if people here are your target
audience. We're all techies and we see stuff pretty black and white usually.
My father though would love it.

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.

------
stock_toaster
You know what I want? An easy way to be notified when my favorite authors
publish/release a new book.

~~~
zeroonetwothree
Yeah I might have to implement this myself since there's apparently no
existing service =\

~~~
stock_toaster
I have thought about it as well. I got as far as a bit of searching for
sources of ISBN data[1]. It looks like the only place in the US to get it is
from the entity that manages the US ISBN database -- R.R Bowker[1].

[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...](http://www.bowker.com/en-
US/products/servdatalic_license.shtml)

------
evoxed
Better? I don't know about that... Amusing though, with plenty of potential. I
imagine at some point things won't stay so vertical and begin to branch out,
and it would be interesting if you could start showing multiple timelines
side-by-side (per subject maybe).

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?

------
zeroonetwothree
I have a site I made to track the books I read. It's pretty much entirely
optimized for my own usage, but I've taken the opposite approach. The main
view is a table with sortable columns/searching. At least given the amount I
read (> 100 books/year) anything less dense is not very useful.

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.

~~~
koopajah
Would you be able to share it? I've been reading as much book as you for a few
years and it's a pain remembering what I read, what I did not like in a
specific book (to avoid buying same author if it was the writing), etc. And I
happen to read a book I've already read sometimes and remember only in the
middle of it "oh that reminds me something".

Right now I've moved so I made a list of all my books in a small spreadsheet
but it's not enough!

------
jekky
A very brave try. The concept of reading timeline is interesting (although I
agree with others' opinion impractical).

b.t.w. is this service available for others to try?

~~~
iamphilsharp
This isn't available for others to try yet. Before I put a lot of work into
the idea I wanted to see if anyone else found it worthwhile.

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...](http://tympanus.net/codrops/2011/12/05/lateral-on-scroll-sliding-with-
jquery/). 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 :).

------
binarysolo
Nice delivery. Since you got our eyeballs, and all things being equal... you
might as well add Amazon Affiliate links to your timeline product (or use a
third party service like Viglink or refer.ly to deal with things). An extra
bonus for yourself, if you will. :)

------
kaarlo_n
Already have <http://www.librarything.com>

------
mikecane
Heavy book readers will have hundreds of books. This is very pretty but also
impractical.

------
gbog
In you do this please let the data format be a simple text file with one line
per book. Then I'll have this list on some pastebin or github and give your
service read perm.

------
tablet
I use <http://shelfari.com>

It is quite good, integrated with Amazon and even provides some stats.

------
peapicker
On my iPhone it is not a good user experience.

------
thatmiddleway
I started a blog. It's nice to write a little something when I finish a book
too. 52booksinayear.com

------
terSonya
Love it! I want my fifth graders to track their reading this way. Brilliant.

------
eps
The site look messed up on iPhone. Not complaining (or whining), just FYI.

~~~
iamphilsharp
Uh oh. Thanks for letting me know. I'll add that to the list of "Things to fix
if people actually like this idea" :)

------
lakeeffect
this would be a great feature for goodreads.com

------
binarydreams
really nice, maybe could open source this on github with a small app that
would allow others to do the same thing :)

------
zalew
integrate it with goodreads

------
kosmogo
only 3 ?

