A year ago I blogged about federated bookshelves, in response to Tom Critchlow’s posting Library JSON, A Proposal for a Decentralized Goodreads.

As I reread both postings this morning as well as some of the links Tom points, specifically Phil Gyford’s posting as he starts from the reading experience, not from the tech, and Matt Webb’s for suggesting RSS/OPML, I jotted down a few additional notes.

• Since the previous posting I stopped linking to Amazon and Goodreads, and having a way to point others to books and vice versa, for discovery is of more interest to me now
• I envisage myself and others having multiple lists (by topic of interest, genre, language, year, author maybe)
• I’d like to be able to point from one of my lists to another (from an author field in one list to an author centered list e.g.)
• I care less about ‘factual’ reviews, more about reasons why people chose a book (‘the cover design jumped out at me in the store’ or ‘this book touches upon X connected to the topic Y that I’m currently exploring’, which goes back to my notions of social filtering
• Similarly I don’t need images of book covers, which also potentially carry copyright issues, but links to author websites or their publisher would be useful, as is a link to a list sharer’s/reader’s blogpost
• I’d like to be able to see/get/follow other people’s lists
• I’d like sharing a list of other people’s lists I follow
• I’d like to be able to adopt entries in other people’s lists into one of my lists (e.g. an authour, a book or thematic list
• It would be great if such lists could be imported somehow into tools people might use, e.g. Calibre, Delicious Library, Zotero
• I don’t think you need a unique ID for a book, like Tom originally suggested, if the aim is discovery. It’s enough to be able to build triangles that allow navigation and discovery, from me to a title or author, to another reader or more books by an author, or other books in lists where this one shows up
• OPML with our without RSS seems the most simple approach here, as the type of info we’re talking about is very well suited to outliners. OPML outlines, and outlines of outlines, can be machine readable and human readable at the same time (case in point, my OPML list of blogs I follow, which is human readable as a blogroll and can also directly be imported into any feedreader
• The first list I think I should make as an experiment, is the list of things I might read, my current non-fiction Anti-Library

That last point I’ve added to my things to do if I find some spare moments.

The other side of a book case, image by Ton Zijlstra, license CC BY NC SA