Recently, Ton Zijlstra wrote about the concept of “federated bookshelves”, in which he referenced a post by Tom Critchlow on a similar concept called “Library JSON”. I have played with this idea based on Ton’s proof of concept. I also read through the postings flowing from Tom Crichlow’s post in 2020, and the ones from Ton Zijlstra’s post this year, and thought it would be helpful to provide a chronology of the development of this idea. To this end, I have created a Github repo with a chronology and links to tools and other distributed book info concepts that I have come across in reading on this topic. Pull requests and other comments are welcome! I am planning to spend more time on this in the next few weeks, so hopefully more prototypes and ideas to come….
There has been some chatter on the interwebs about the idea of using OPML to share book libraries. The good part of this is that a decentralized listing library may be the only way to develop alternatives to Amazon. But I caution that the library has to enable people to access and read the books seamlessly. Otherwise, what’s the point? This post points to a GitHub repository that brings together recent discussion on the idea. It begins (where else) with Dave Winer’s Little Outliner, which looks beautiful but is awkward to use (IMO).