Library JSON - A Proposal for a Decentralized Goodreads

There’s been a lot of discussion around a “better” GoodReads and at some point almost every side-project-slinger has tried their hand at building a “books website”. Myself included.

Back in 2010 I built a site called 7books - the tagline was playlists for bookworms and it looked like this:

There is a large graveyard of these books sites.

But there are (at least) three fundamental problems with building a GoodReads competitor:

1. Amazon owns the only good book index

As far as I know there is no good reliable book index that’s open. Books come in so many different formats, re-issues, versions, languages and publishers that maintaining a canonical reference for a specific book is very tough.

2. A books website is a cultural black hole

Same is true of music social networks. Cultural black holes. Seductive and imaginary ideas about social networks that just don't work.

— Tom Critchlow (@tomcritchlow) August 22, 2019

It’s one of those alluring ideas that just does. not. work.

3. The only path to monetization is Amazon

Closely related to point #1 - the only (effective) way to monetize a books website is through Amazon. Any books site of meaningful size would get cut from the Amazon affiliate program in a heartbeat as it would compete directly with both Amazon and GoodReads.

But…

Web of Books

On closer examination I realized that I’m not really interested in building a “startup” or a “business” around this - what I really want is

Would love to see a "web of books" emerge from the indie web rather than via fixing goodreads

— Tom Critchlow (@tomcritchlow) September 7, 2019

There are lots of really really great indie sites that maintain structured reading lists. I’ve got a running list in my wiki: web of books. Probably my all time favorite is Mandy’s A Working Library.

Decentralized Architecture

Thinking through building some kind of “web of books” I realized that we could use something similar to RSS to build a kind of decentralized GoodReads powered by indie sites and an underlying easy to parse format.

I created a proof of concept by converting my own bookshelf into a JSON file https://tomcritchlow.com/library.json.

If you think of several sites publishing their bookshelf as a library.json file you can imagine a bookshelf “feed reader” that let’s you keep track of friends bookshelves something like this¹:

And combined with a “feed” something like this:

Groups & Control

The great thing about this being an open spec is that people can choose to participate in the centralized GoodReads-esque hub or… not. In fact people can hack on top of it in many ways - extending, modifying and so on.

In particular it would be very easy for a small group of people to form a book club and host a summary view of a handful of library.json files completely independently of any open aggregator.

V0.1 of a library.json spec

So this brings me to my “spec”. Let’s imagine a library.json file that roughly looks like this:

• Title
• URL
• Bio
  • Lists
    • List
    • List

Where each book list contains a series of book objects something like this:

• Book
  • Title
  • Author
  • URL
  • Date_finished
  • ID
  • Notes (can be text or a link to a full review/note)

I created some dummy example files in this gist:

Feedback? Next?

So where to next? Three obvious things:

1. Further research into a universal book ID solution. Without it this whole idea is going to be shaky ground.
2. Building an MVP of the feed reader experience slurping in some sample library.json files
3. Gather feedback on the json spec above

If you are interested in building something in this space and/or maintain a page that’s part of the “web of books” I’d love to hear from you on the above proposal.

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Update #1 - Ravern Koh has built a working proof of concept parser! This is lovely and shows the instant power in a kind of open remixable format:

Have created a quick client for the libary.json files at https://t.co/nAeYTQhM4Y!

Some samples:

- https://t.co/6Mn62YfpAn
- https://t.co/Ire3MVGqfr
- https://t.co/Z0Yw6uqLJH

— Ravern Koh (@ravernkoh) April 16, 2020

For example - here’s my bookshelf displayed on Ravern’s tool. How cool is that! The ability to easily and quickly hack on top of this is super fun. Thanks Ravern!

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Update #2 - Ravern also had the great suggestion to build the list of people (urls) you follow into the spec… I think that’s a pretty great idea that I will loop back in:

This is a great idea.

This still requires some kind of centralised listing of library files though. What if instead we added a "following" section where you own library contains links to the libraries of others?

Clients can then build "webs" starting from a seed file

— Ravern Koh (@ravernkoh) April 16, 2020

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Update #3 - Matt has posted a really thoughtful reply proposing building this all as an extension of RSS: Re Tom Critchlow’s proposal for a decentralised Goodreads-like system, how about using RSS?.

Having built my own RSS feed reader already I’m very wary of RSS - it’s battle tested yes but also just one massive clusterf&%$. Parsing and understanding RSS is much harder than JSON (imho!). But - Matt raises some good points and I do like the OPML version of aggregating bookfeeds… Lots of exisiting infrastructure and ideas there… Thanks Matt - plenty to chew on here.

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Update #4 - Via twitter I found Tom’s bookshelf and his goodreads CSV to yaml converter!! I tagged him and he posted a lovely reply. I don’t think he saw Matt’s reply yet but he echoed the idea of leveraging Atom/RSS for this. Hmm. That said I do love this quote which strikes to the heart of why I like json here:

That said, the thing that kills the indieweb is too much enthusiasm for specs, too few parsing implementations, and, ironically, too much focus on the ‘indie’ (building complicated self-hosted everything-machines) and not enough on the ‘web’ (noticing if anyone’s using any of the things you built). So if there’s a killer implementation and good content at the start, then momentum would potentially just carry you through.

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Update #5 - This thread from Cory Doctorow:

Last September, @tomcritchlow proposed a federated, decentralized "web of books" as an alternative to Goodreads, the monopoly platform of booklists owned by the monopoly platform of bookselling.https://t.co/FoBrSOZiyY

1/ pic.twitter.com/VWrnG5mVhn

— Covered Dish People (@doctorow) April 16, 2020

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Update #6 - Gregor posted some nice thoughts. In particular I’m curious about this JSON file. Not sure where it comes from but looks quite a lot like my library.json file! More exploration needed….

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Update #7 - Phil posted some great thoughts with a strong book-flex!

Having spent some time writing code to track the past 22-40 years of my reading (22 consistenly, 40 with gaps) I thought I’d share a few things I’ve done or thought about, in terms of the data

! Oh my. Thanks Phil - great insights.

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Update #8 - Ton Zijlstra has posted up some experimentation with an OPML file implementation! Lovely. Lots to explore here.