Making A Place for My Reading and Research

I read quite a bit. I like talking and taking notes about what I read, what I'd want to read and build lists of this so I can refer to it later. I mentioned in a previous newsletter entry about the admiration I had for both Mandy Brown's and Jessamyn West's approaches to showing what they're reading and their thoughts on it. Last year, I read about twenty books, many of which I can't help but mention whenever they seem relevant. If books serve as a way to guide people to (or away from) an idea, then I have a yearn to see what more I could learn. With the Internet, books are a bit easier to find — digital borrowing services like Hoopla and Libro.fm make it easier to get them and immerse yourself in an audio-visual experience I find more captivating than video. I read Poverty, by America in this fashion and the narration made the heavy points hit a lot harder than I was hoping for (and made the sweet points stick closer to my heart).

I'm not that choosy about the medium I find books in. I have a preference for digital books because it makes it easier for me to cross-reference my notes and my handwriting is not improving. I also lean on my local library to get some physical books when I find myself wanting books I can't get online or finding myself itching for a physical read without having to buy it. Again, I'm not choosy — I take it how I can; it's a great age to be a reader. Being able to pick up my eReader, devour some pages, pop onto my laptop, sync those notes into Calibre and link that into my "Book Notes" folder in Obsidian is something I find that keeps me eager to go back and do it all over again.

But this is all locked up on my computer. I initially considered investing more in how I use Bookwyrm to update notes as well as looking at fixing my integration to something like Goodreads. There's also the rising star, StoryGraph, that I don't use enough. What I don't want to do is have to manage three different profiles - in fact, I want to get to a point where I don't even check them. One could lean into something like POSSE but that makes me still beholden to these platforms for discovery and connectivity with my friends. That's something that's falling apart, especially with Goodreads. StoryGraph also doesn't seem immediately interested in building out a third-party ecosystem as they've focused on building out the core product. The only option that seems to be completely open, has a database that's freely accessible and has some social functionality is the offering from OpenLibrary. Lots of places but all lacking in some way, either in community, data or access. I ended catching the same book-tool-I-must-make bug that Wendy Liu had with her own book tracking system because I began outlining what I wanted for myself.

Another thing that I've realized is that I want to write more about what I'm reading. It's not enough to just read as that information remains with me. In this online space, I find it more necessary to drive folks towards longer form content. That kind of content inherently goes against the short-form formats that drive the semi-noxious loop we find with social media. At this stage, there's some things that I clearly do want and things I don't. This is enough for me to begin experimenting with what I do want to have out there. Here's when I fire up Obsidian to begin planning.

The Book Thing .. App .. Site?

The thing about this is that I'm not going to try to make this work for many people. It's optimized to my particular reading flow which entails:

Reading digital books with KOReader, synchronized with Calibre Listening to books from Libro.fm or Playbook Physical books that I'm reading, either ones I borrow or own.

I also need to be able to do the following:

View all of the notes I've collected for a book (or link) See markers in the material that I've made (as highlights, simple bookmarks, etc) Full text search of the content I've produced (not of the material themselves)

This is enough for me to begin sketching out what the core bits of the application should look like. I've skipped writing any actual logic and decided to mock out a lot of it. You can check out the source code; I haven't yet focused on making automated builds for it.

The core of this is pretty simple and it's evidence that I immediately got carried away with defining the guts. Initially, I started with focusing on how to represent a book and information associated to it. After a stroll outside, I came back to realize that I could effectively do the same for links on the Web (and beyond).

The interface is extremely rough for now as I'm focusing on making the guts correct but I'm open to ideas on how to make it look right. I'm extremely tempted to make it such that people can make their own interfaces but this isn't Hypercard. What I'm focusing on is making the storage of this as flat as possible so that applications that use its core library can work seamlessly. I'm yo-yoing on doing something to how Neovim handles plugins or bringing in a Lua and JavaScript interpreter to allow for extensibility that way.

Feel free to shoot thoughts over to me via e-mail or social; this is what I'll be working on this week!