Announcing indiebookclub

I’m pleased to announce a new project I have been working on. indiebookclub is an app for keeping track of the books you are reading or want to read. It is primarily intended to help you own your data by posting directly to your own site with Micropub. If your site does not support Micropub yet, you can still post to your indiebookclub profile.

I’m keeping the functionality simple to start. You can select a read status of “Want to read,” “Currently reading,” or “Finished reading.” Then enter the title, authors (optional), and ISBN (optional). All posts on indiebookclub are public. If you are using Micropub, your posts will be linked to the canonical copy on your site.

I have no plans to make this a complex social network, but I might add some features to help discover new books, like a page of newly-added books. Each person has a profile which lists their posts and it includes the h-feed microformat, so you can subscribe to their posts in a feed reader. If you enter the ISBN, you can also click through to see other people’s post for that book.

I would love for you to try it out and let me know what you think. You can comment here or contact me. In the near future I will set up a Github repository for issue tracking and hopefully, eventually, to open source the code.

Background

I have really enjoyed keeping track of the books I am reading and want to read on Goodreads. However, I’m aware how easy it is for such a service to disappear as part of their “incredible journey.” As a result, I have been manually posting read posts on my site and syndicating a copy to Goodreads.

Previously I had tinkered with adding read posts to Aaron Parecki’s Micropub client, Quill. I was getting a bit ahead of myself at the time, so that didn’t work out (more on that). During IndieWebCamp Baltimore 2018, in a brief discussion with Marty McGuire, he commented that he will be more interested in read posts when there is “some aggregator like indiebookclub dot biz.” He was obviously joking about the domain name, but that has rarely stopped me before. The idea was planted in my mind and grew.

I decided to use Aaron’s other Micropub client, Teacup as the basis for indiebookclub. One thing I really like about Teacup is that it creates posts on your profile there, so even if your site does not support Micropub, you can start using it today. Later, when your site supports Micropub, you can import the posts to your site.

Many thanks to Aaron Parecki for making the Quill and Teacup code open source. It made getting this started much easier! And thanks to Marty McGuire for the great domain name idea.