Very interesting, thanks for sharing. Users of my book cataloguing app have been asking for "progress" feature and providing the page number seems like the easiest way to go.
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.
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 :)
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.
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
I'm intrigued by the idea of "bumping into something". Totally agree! How would you describe for a digital environment if it's not a pure recommendation algorithm based on similar books?
I was thinking to a 3D representation of a library or a zoomable interface. It could leverage our good spacial memory while also allowing accidental discovery of books
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...
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.
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.
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.
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
I find the mismatch between the cover and the spine somewhat dissonant. It would be great if an approximation of the background and text colors, and perhaps typeface as well, could be extracted from the cover image (perhaps with something like Tensorflow.js).
No, I don't. I was hoping one of our elder technonauts around the forum may be able to describe how it works to us.
I see my sibling comments think it's overkill. I wonder if there is a dialectic synthesis, or some best of both worlds, between your work and Stripe's implementation?
Basically if your models had the Stripe book models' spines. I see other people saying that's the tricky part though.
> 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?
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
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)
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.
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).
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
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!
Looks great Petar! A virtual book shelf is also an engaging virtual background for online meetings! I built https://booktapestry.com to make it easy (and free) to create animated virtual bookshelves from the books in your e-reader collection. These animated backgrounds work with most online meeting solutions including Zoom, Google Meet and MS Teams.
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.
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
Thank you for making the book timeline generation free. Could you provide a bit of information on does it work, do I need jekyll to generate the book page? Any hint on how to proceed with running that Makefile?
Let's say you want to use it in your personal website, you need to copy few files.
- public/js/book.js (all related js are here)
- public/css/books.css (css related to this page)
- books.html
The makefile contains two tasks
- book-json (convert goodreads csv to json)
- book-covers (gets cover images from goodreads)
This is the very high level picture. This is written for personal use and not designed with other users in mind, so you need to have some decent knowledge about css/js/html/nodejs to put together everything. Hope this helps.
My e-reader with e-ink shows percentage, but the visualization of how you did it looks much better. Not sure if its as practical in the e-reader situation given you hold it in a certain angle, have black/grayscale/white. Anyway, the nice thing about an e-reader is that it has this feature. It allows you to track where you are within your books, and its quite a portable device not requiring much battery.
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.
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.
I expected somone to create a Zoom backdrop with photo realistic but personalized books in a bookshelf.
But didn't find one when I looked a while back.
This highlights one issue, that front covers of books are easy to come by, but not spines. I wonder how hard it would be to generate one from the other automatically.
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.
This guy yas some work with books in VR [1] and there is a full library example out there somewhere but I don't have the link handy. Some memory palace solutions make use of bookshelf type interfaces also.
self-plug: https://MyBookList.club
Latest features: cover OCR (plus barcode), library value and finding people with common books.
Looking to add reading progress... any ideas welcome!
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
