[HN Gopher] I made a virtual bookshelf
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I made a virtual bookshelf
Author : petargyurov
Score : 257 points
Date : 2022-05-07 11:35 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (petargyurov.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (petargyurov.com)
| mellosouls wrote:
| Would be a nice coding project for somebody to add a pull from
| GoodReads etc to populate the books for people with accounts.
| mmetcalfe wrote:
| I have an old project where I tried rendering books as a shelf
| and pulled the data from GoodReads. Petar's book design is much
| nicer
|
| e.g. https://bookshelf-maxmetcalfe.vercel.app/?author=7 (books
| authored by Bill Bryson)
| compressedgas wrote:
| Perhaps related: https://github.com/andysylvester/federated-
| bookshelves
| esclear wrote:
| A nice virtual bookshelf that also has reviews / notes for all of
| the books is https://books.rixx.de/. It also has categories and a
| graph of relations between books. The code is open source as
| well: https://github.com/rixx/books.rixx.de
| petargyurov wrote:
| Oh I really like that. Thanks for sharing!
| Brajeshwar wrote:
| This is nice. I didn't try but to get a pseudo-random variation
| of the book height, will it be possible to do a pre-defined
| Cicada Principle[1] method, say, pick 20-30 heights and keep
| picking them up.
|
| There seem to be quite a lot of people who have their own book
| collection. I'm still looking for something simple that can spit
| out a HTML front; and yet to find something I like.
|
| On another note, recently I was looking for a Library Management
| System for a small community, with a current book collection of
| over 25,000. I looked a bunch of Open Source Solutions (most are
| too complex). I also do not want to do build anything from
| scratch.
|
| I settled on Libib[2] and the subscription is economical enough
| for what we are looking for.
|
| 1. https://lea.verou.me/2020/07/the-cicada-principle-
| revisited-...
|
| 2. https://www.libib.com
| lawgimenez wrote:
| Curious Incident of the Dog in the night time was the last
| physical book I bought. Such a good read. I really enjoyed that
| book.
| justhw wrote:
| Very cool. Are you getting the images manually? I built something
| similar a while back but never took off.
|
| https://bookshulf.com/
| petargyurov wrote:
| Nice! Yeah, the images are manually added in; in fact, all of
| the book's metadata is.
| alephnan wrote:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shelfari
| vibbix wrote:
| I love this!!! I was hoping one day to getting around and making
| a virtual bookshelf myself to outline ideas in books I liked.
| TheGoodBarn wrote:
| I did the same in 2020! I haven't updated the site in a few years
| and track on Notion now, but it's fun!
| https://spaghet.me/bookshelf
| tzury wrote:
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| do you really need to belittle someone here
| doovd wrote:
| Or anywhere really tbf
| aaron695 wrote:
| gus_massa wrote:
| I have no clue about the personal life of the OP, but I can
| share my case.
|
| I have two small children (and an old one). During 2020 we had
| no kindergarten, no visits to grandma and no babysitter,
| because the lockdown was very strict here.
|
| Also I teach in the first year of the university, and we had
| everything ready for the presencial clases as usual. We had to
| switch to virtual clases with a head-up of one month [1] [2].
|
| So I had to drop my hobbies and reduce my research time and
| other not urgent activities.
|
| [Note: A fixed weekly Zoom/Meet/Teams meeting with your friends
| helps a lot to keep your mental sanity.]
|
| [1] How do you replace a blackboard? A real blackboard is very
| difficult to read in a Zoom/Meet/Teams meeting. A few of my
| coworker bought one, but had to switch to other methods.
|
| [2] Moodle has like a thousand of options and it takes a lot of
| time to find the combination that is more similar to what you
| want and coordinate with your coworkers to find the best one.
| petargyurov wrote:
| I get your point, but like I said, I didn't have the habit.
| tintedfireglass wrote:
| Maybe this project gave you the motivation to read I guess?
| tzury wrote:
| Obviously I wrote this with humor. Seeing it was not welcomed
| by the super serious members.
| sronors wrote:
| To provide more anecdata, I consistently read more than in the
| original post. But I found myself reading less during 2020 even
| though I had more time to read.
|
| I guess 2020 just sucked.
| anandchowdhary wrote:
| Looks super nice! I myself use GitHub Issues to track my reading
| here: https://github.com/AnandChowdhary/books. It has a GitHub
| Action that tracks reading and generates a summary and API:
| https://github.com/AnandChowdhary/bookshelf-action
| cjlm wrote:
| Your repo gave me the inspiration to do the same with Eleventy
| [0] Thank you!
|
| [0] https://cjlm.ca/reading/
| rohithkp wrote:
| This is very cool! I just setup an instance for myself!
| petargyurov wrote:
| Very cool! I like that you can use labels on issues as tags.
| Neat project.
| nathias wrote:
| very cool
| offbyewon wrote:
| This is a cool idea. It motivated me to stash a list of the books
| I've listened to on Audible. I wrote a blog post that has a JS
| snippet you can run against the Audible webapp, which makes it
| easier to get the list of titles (it just parses the DOM and
| gives you a plain text version).
|
| https://blog.techotom.com/post/2022-05-07-get-your-audible-b...
| mahastore wrote:
| Does not work in Safari
| jws wrote:
| More specifically, in desktop Safari the books curtsey but are
| behind the unmoved books and you can't really see their covers.
| soheil wrote:
| I was hoping it to be divided into two bookshelves one for "books
| read" and much much more importantly one for "books have not
| read".
|
| You don't learn much from what you already know.
| avinassh wrote:
| This looks so cool! Thanks for making it open source and sharing.
|
| This instantly reminded me of Shelfari, I had lots of fun adding
| and cataloging books on it.
| rland wrote:
| > While the Linux open source operating spans 15 million lines of
| code across 40,000 software files, Google engineers modify 15
| million lines of code across 250,000 files each week.
|
| Depressing. Can you imagine the utility to the world if all of
| this activity weren't being focused on selling ads?
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| To be fair they primarily offer services that attract people to
| their ads and a lot of those services are highly useful and
| generally beneficial. That said, yes, I wish they had found
| some other way to monetize and support their services that
| wasn't so useless, annoying, and privacy invasive
| nmstoker wrote:
| Just a little thing: it's nice that it works on mobile too (many
| hover activities don't but here it's fine). And the text of the
| titles is selectable even though it's vertical (thanks to CSS)
| CyanDeparture wrote:
| Looks great! Two things you could do to make it super smooth is
| speed up the animation by about two thirds, and make it so one
| book is put back before the second one gets animated outwards.
| mysterioushat wrote:
| I've tried similar myself but I love the visual simplicity of
| this. Much nicer than a list. If you're interested I came across
| this year's ago ... some nice inspirations and ways of finding
| new stuff.
|
| https://tomcritchlow.com/wiki/books/bookshelves/
|
| My favourite is this one with the little toggle for reviews or
| comments:
|
| https://daverupert.com/bookshelf/
| robertlf wrote:
| Nice idea but the vertical titles are too hard to read. Why not
| just stack the books one on top of the other for the sake of
| usability?
| Xeronate wrote:
| I think the vertical tiles could be okay, but color contrast
| needs to be improved.
| dilippkumar wrote:
| I see a lot of Demon Cycle books. Are they good?
|
| I'm finishing up on the last few Malazan books, looking for
| recommendations on what to read next.
| petargyurov wrote:
| I fell in love with the first book and wholeheartedly recommend
| the entire series. It's great.
| twodave wrote:
| I read the title as "VR bookshelf" and imagined someone scanning
| in an entire book and representing it in the 'verse in some way.
| Not to derail from the content here too much, but I think this
| other idea could actually be pulled off pretty elegantly.
| drBonkers wrote:
| I'd love this in the style of Stripe Press's page [1].
|
| [1] https://press.stripe.com/
| petargyurov wrote:
| Holy crap, that's beautiful and way better than mine! Any idea
| how they made it?
| TheRealNGenius wrote:
| I agree with codazoda, stripe page is borked on safari, but
| yours works
| codazoda wrote:
| I disagree that it's better than yours. Looks like crap on my
| phone and is significant overkill for this. Yours is better.
| ReenD wrote:
| This is really nice
| janvdberg wrote:
| Fun! I also did a similar thing [1] which is or more or less a
| GoodReads clone.
|
| Still looking for a syndicated/federated booklist share tool, so
| I can track friend's books/reading lists.
|
| [1] https://j11g.com/2019/11/16/foster-how-to-build-your-own-
| boo...
| ananthakumaran wrote:
| self-plug: https://ananthakumaran.in/books
| petargyurov wrote:
| I really like the vertical timeline. Lots of stats and charts,
| great stuff :)
| FR10 wrote:
| This is really nice, I like the graphs and the layout overall.
| How do you manage adding new books, JS?
| ananthakumaran wrote:
| All the information comes from the Goodreads CSV export.
| After I complete any book, I export the CSV file and run make
| task[1]
|
| 1: https://github.com/ananthakumaran/ananthakumaran.github.co
| m/...
| ibudiallo wrote:
| I had done a similar one, just without the images. My intention
| was to add a blurb for each of the books, but friction is the
| enemy of reading.
|
| https://idiallo.com/library
| 867-5309 wrote:
| very nice!
|
| looks similar tech to some virtual birthday cards which didn't
| have enough time to be physically sent halfway across the planet
|
| https://abbey-decorators.co.uk/cards/hoj.html
|
| https://abbey-decorators.co.uk/cards/mij.html
| cheeko1234 wrote:
| Wow, that's amazing. Can you imagine if this was added to
| lazylibrarian?
| petargyurov wrote:
| Haven't heard of LazyLibrarian, but I've licensed this with
| "Unlicense" so it's effectively free to use for all purposes.
| Perhaps the authors of LazyLibrarian can use it in some way?
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| That's cool.
|
| The one thing that would be nice, is if the book that you are
| examining, appeared _over_ the book to the right of it. The other
| book 's spine gets in the way.
| Dachande663 wrote:
| Love this. Reminds of when I spent countless hours using a webcam
| to scan in all books, movies, and games to Delicious Library[0].
|
| [0] https://delicious-monster.com/
| bredren wrote:
| What happened to all the data? Did you end up using it?
| Dachande663 wrote:
| Lost to the sands of time. It had a feature where you could
| export as HTML and I did used to put it online (with all the
| thousands of small thumbnails and covers). It's loss is
| what's making me better at preserving history.
| auggierose wrote:
| Great idea!
|
| By the way, on the newest safari it doesn't work properly. I
| tried it then out with Chrome, and no problems there.
| chromejs10 wrote:
| Came here to say this... The book animates behind all the other
| ones. I was like "...shouldn't the book be in front of the
| others so I can see the title? you know... I bet it's because
| it's Safari". Sure enough Chrome works as expected
| guico wrote:
| So cool! Would be nice to make the color of the edge match the
| dominant color of the cover, somehow
| guico wrote:
| You could use this: https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/extract-
| dominant-colors-of-an-...
| MaggieL wrote:
| I just use Librarything
| edmundo wrote:
| Very cool! I might borrow some of your ideas and implement them
| on my own reading log (https://edmundo.is/reading). Right now
| it's just a list of all books I have read, but I'm working on
| implementing filters for genre and year (year only shows on hover
| for now, or by tapping the book on mobile), and maybe breaking
| the grid by year like you have!
| benibela wrote:
| I wrote an app to track all my read books in a table:
| https://videlibri.de/
|
| The main feature is to import the books from a library account.
| At that time I was getting all my books from a library, so I
| never had to add any book manually, they just appear in my table.
|
| But it is in German, because I only have Germany library cards. I
| cannot get any more library cards because the libraries refuse to
| talk to me
| karaterobot wrote:
| This is cool. It would be neat if I could click the book to view
| the Librarything page for it.
| mat_jack1 wrote:
| I'm very interested in visual ways to explore ebooks, papers,
| articles.
|
| A physical library helps discovering new stuff or occasionally
| bumping in something. With files you need to be much more
| deliberate and I feel like you can accumulate a lot without
| really knowing what you have.
|
| Even if this is a simple visualization it already gives ideas on
| how much more information you could convey with something
| similar. Like number of pages, color of the cover, to remind you
| of the book, different font, etc. A set of cues that can help you
| navigate in the list of books, at least I suspect :)
| aheilbut wrote:
| I would love a way to flexibly view and move around lots of
| PDFs at different scales, to simulate piles on a desk or the
| floor. For some purposes, something is lost by constraining
| organization to a regular grid or table.
| WalterBright wrote:
| When you've got thousands of books, you lose track of what
| you've got, just like with files.
|
| It's not necessary to ask how I know this :-)
| mat_jack1 wrote:
| Sure you lose track, but it's so much easier with physical
| things to bump into already seen items and recognize them. Or
| also casually being interested by a cover or by the size of
| the books.
|
| I feel like there could be a better way to handle lots of
| digital books/articles/songs/films/photos/etc
| WalterBright wrote:
| Have your lock screen show a random book cover from your
| collection!
| f0e4c2f7 wrote:
| I've thought about this before as a physical item. Like maybe a
| breadbox size ePaper screen that looks like a tiny bookcase with
| a API back to Goodreads or something to get the book spine
| images.
|
| You could also have a section that displays random quotes from
| books in your library.
|
| Unfortunately for now the licensing on color ePaper is still
| prohibitive and doing it with an lcd seems somehow tacky to me.
| user_7832 wrote:
| I've also had a similar, but slightly different idea for a
| practical desktop display - get it to show nice tidbits like a
| wallpaper. For example, a Newton's cradle, or a spinning top,
| or a lava lamp or whatever folks put on their desks. Though
| coding it would be a bit of a challenge for a non-CS guy like
| me.
| petargyurov wrote:
| I've been thinking about something very similar too but given
| the challenges I opted for this approach... for now.
| teleforce wrote:
| The physical display of the virtual bookshelf is one of my
| wishlists and this is my comments when ArtFrame was discussed
| in HN last month [1].
|
| Perhaps if you can make the book width in proportion of the
| book's number of pages it will be great. Well done for the
| software, will try this soon.
|
| [1]ArtFrame: E-paper wireless artwork for your living room:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30839762
| 300bps wrote:
| Nice job! Reminded me a bit of the e-reader Calibre.
| mftb wrote:
| That is a lot of fun, great job!
|
| You might think of adding a link or two for each book. Say to the
| Wikipedia entry for the author, or a review of the book. I was
| curious about the, "Demon Cycle" for instance, and would have
| liked to read more about it.
| egypturnash wrote:
| https://www.goodreads.com/series/46817-the-demon-cycle
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Very cool! I wanted to try to make something like this so that I
| can make my own bookshelf background for zoom calls. I got as far
| as finding no book spine artwork data sources.
| zeristor wrote:
| Interesting there's cover art for books, but it would be handy to
| have spine art too.
|
| I used to buy lots of books and now have them stacked up, I've
| bought lots of eBooks and whilst I don't trip up on them I don't
| get into the habit of progressing them. From Physics I've set up
| collections for books I've got to 1%, 2%, 5%, 10%, 20%, 50% which
| roughly works out as equal, and I have the little triumph of
| moving a book forward.
| dyldev wrote:
| I like the 2d idea! Throwing my reading page out here like
| others: https://www.dyl.dev/reading
| rsolva wrote:
| Nice! Simple and effective. For those looking for something more
| goodreads-looking, I can recommend BookWyrm.
| WHA8m wrote:
| Well done! Looks very charming :)
|
| Like the other commenter, I've thought about something related
| before. But I thought about it more like on a platform. If I
| may... You could make an account and digitalize your bookshelf
| for you and others to see. You might pin notes, quotes, ratings,
| open a discussion thread (about paragraphs or the whole book),
| etc. to a book. The cover art that is displayed could be changed
| (like a book that was published multiple times under various
| publishers), but not only to original covers but also community
| made cover art (pixel art, collages from movie screenshots and so
| on). You could tag your books and rearrange them accordingly. And
| so much more...
| petargyurov wrote:
| Thank you!
|
| I suppose Goodreads or Oku fill that space?
|
| I wanted something a little... visual, hence why I made this
| instead of using those services myself (also I wanted to learn
| about CSS transforms).
|
| Since this plugs easily into Jekyll, I have structured it such
| that each book entry is kind of like an empty blog post. The
| plan is to enter my notes or review in the .md file for each
| book and display that somehow.
| jagged-chisel wrote:
| Perhaps using one of those services as the data source for a
| library
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(page generated 2022-05-07 23:00 UTC)