2026/Nuremberg/books
Books and Personal Websites was a session at IndieWebCamp Nuremberg 2026.
Watch: ▶️ 38:44s
When: 2026-06-27
Hashtag: #books
Participants
capjamesg https://jamesg.blog (taking notes)
jo https://dead.garden (facilitator)- Christian
- Joschi
Paul Tibbetts (remote)- Add yourself here… (see this for more details)
Notes
- What do people do to share books on their websites?
- Having books related to personal websites
- Publishing summaries of books on websites that are in depth: what is good / not good in relation to other books.
- How to present 1,200 books on a website
- Figuring out when to put books on your website
- Jo's books page:
- Shows three favourite books
- Shows page numbers of all currently reading; useful if you don't have a bookmark or are on the go and can pick up another copy of the book.
- Book covers are not CC, maybe fair use but its a grey area -- we'd need clarification
- You can take a picture of a book
- What is it that Jo wants to improve?
- Making layout more interesting
- Lots of science fiction and non-fiction -- multiple genre
- Displaying genre on your website could be interesting
- A search bar could be interesting
- A book compass that shows dependencies between works.
- Business could go to marketing/strategy, etc.
- Related to a knowledge graph?
- Lists can be a bit boring; how to represent alternatively?
- How to manage books
- After you read
- When you are reading
- Manual work to update
- When you have metadata, you can make the choice about how to present pages
- Book recommendations for friends / for a specific genre
- Have a bookshelf on your website with names, when you click on book side, you see the book.
- Could be cool if it opens PDF for openly licensed books / Project Gutenberg
- Skeumorphic design
- Idea: create a personal shelf from your friends' books
- There are so many lists of books on the web already
- When you do something personal, you could, for example, write a summary or takeaways, etc.
- Organising books by lists -- Star Trek tie-ins -- you could do this on your TBR, your read list, etc.
- Write a summary of why you want to read
- if you're forced to write a summary about a book it helps you decide if you want to buy it
- you might buy less books if you have to write why you want it
- https://bookwyrm.social activity pub alternative to goodreads
- Goodreads is owned by Amazon
- and some people avoid Amazon owned things
- Goodreads is owned by Amazon
- book recommendations for your friends
- Building software specifically for managing books -- would help you manage all the information
- Markdown files for books that has metadata? Maybe ISBN could help?
- Separation of metadata and the creative side -- when you have the data, you can come up with all the different kinds of representation.
- map on website of where you read a book
- if you were travelling/reading in a local library
- do you own this book physically/digitally/audiobook?
- colour code books for sorting/filtering
- sort by ISBN? :D
- Tracking books would let you figure out how many books you buy
- Tell people when you give a book away, etc. / if you rebought a book
- giving away books
- life-cycle of a book: donating, giving to a second-hand bookshop / cafe
- harder to give away when you have annotations
- But the annotations contain meaning that someone might find interesting
- What if you have annotations on your books page
- writing in the margins
- handwritten font for annotations
- bringing personality into the language too? ("don't read this even though everyone says it's great"; "read this even though it's long because it's cool").
- Jo uses XKCD font for annotations
- How could you start a discussion about a book on your website? (is this something you'd want?)
- Book club
- indieweb book club: https://indieweb.org/IndieWeb_Book_Club
- private book clubs with public website
- curated blog posts about that book
- specialised for a particular group of people
- CTA on your website to invite someone to do a book club on a book?
- guiding others through a book
- summaries per chapter
- how can you help people feel more comfortable reading books that are seen as difficult, like classics, etc.
- How can you tell people about adjacent books (i.e. sequels, related like Wide Sarasago Sea which builds on Jane Eyre)
- Warning about how you don't support an author anymore if they have done something that is problematic
- The https://kwon.nyc/dad-hats/ format where you can drag/drop books could be interesting to explore: could people drag/drop and have a prompt, then share their results on their websites / with friends.
- maybe have an option to add a title?
- How can you make your website feel like an old library?
- Cobwebs
- How can you emulate the smell of old paper?
- How to emulate the physical experience of reading books
- James made an app that uses the Google Books API to recognise a book by a photo: https://jamesg.blog/2024/02/14/clickable-bookshelves
- Anyone can contribute to the Open Library (part of archive.org)!
- Would you show zines? Maybe linking to where to buy the zine?
- Maybe a zine library could have its own layout?
- Could you have a /zines page that has scans of the front pages of zines?
- self-published as its own filter/tag
- How can we make something that looks sooo different from regular books of links?
- Be creative with the design! Animations.
- childrens books
- "books I liked as a child"
- book recommendations for friends with children
- Does anyone feel inspired to make a books page now?
- We're inspired to publish lists!
- We are in awe
- Micro.blog has bookshelves
- has a micropub app for writing posts about books
- https://epilogue.micro.blog/
- you can show books you want to read on micropub
- helping build a community angle to books?
- How our favourite books have changed?
- Opening the eyes; lectures from a 12th century Japanese monk: Nitrian (sp?); Buddhist book, about opening the eyes of the reality we're living in, and how we should think about our perception of life.
- Don't eat alone
- Emotional intelligence by Daniel Goleman
