Show HN: A better way to keep track of the books you've read?

http://www.mylifethroughbooks.com/phil/

by iamphilsharp • 14 years ago

39 34 14 years ago

evoxed• 14 years ago

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?

mikecane• 14 years ago

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

jekky• 14 years ago

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?

iamphilsharp3• 14 years ago

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.... 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 :).

joelrunyon• 14 years ago

Seonded. Is this a proof of concept or a prototype available for others to try?

zalew• 14 years ago

integrate it with goodreads

marquis2• 14 years ago

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

iamphilsharp3• 14 years ago

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?

marquis2• 14 years ago

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• 14 years ago

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• 14 years ago

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

peapicker• 14 years ago

On my iPhone it is not a good user experience.

eps• 14 years ago

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

iamphilsharp3• 14 years ago

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

gbog• 14 years ago

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.

kaarlo_n• 14 years ago

Already have http://www.librarything.com

terSonya• 14 years ago

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

hosh2• 14 years ago

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• 14 years ago

"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• 14 years ago

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.

thatmiddleway• 14 years ago

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

dfc• 14 years ago

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...

stock_toaster2• 14 years ago

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

zeroonetwothree2• 14 years ago

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

stock_toaster2• 14 years ago

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...

binarydreams• 14 years ago

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

lakeeffect• 14 years ago

this would be a great feature for goodreads.com

zeroonetwothree2• 14 years ago

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• 14 years ago

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!

binarysolo• 14 years ago

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. :)

kosmogo• 14 years ago

only 3 ?

wrath• 14 years ago

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.

tablet• 14 years ago

I use http://shelfari.com

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

Show HN: A better way to keep track of the books you've read?

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