[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)
 
web link (petargyurov.com)
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)