Share what you’re reading with your neighbours around the world! This site is developing into a place where we can link up around our reading interests. Please leave a comment to let us know what social reading sites you like and use. And what kinds of features you’d appreciate.
A little history
After all these years no one has managed to create a real challenger to the dominance of the GoodReads/Amazon nexus of public reading data.
By 2023-24 BookTok was getting all the publicity for setting the popular reading trends, but that’s also as commercial as anything. I’m still looking for a reading recommendation site/app/community that just works, without exploiting the data of its users.
Will we be waiting forever?
The Big Bookshelf began as an idea for the 2011 Libraryhack contest. People who liked our idea could wish us luck by visiting the site and tweeting about us or ‘liking’ us on Facebook. In the meantime, here’s the original entry:
Our village is some distance from the nearest library and so we are keen on swapping books with one another. We do this very informally and easily lose track of who borrowed what from whom. There are no doubt more people out there who would like to swap books, but we don’t necessarily know who they are or how to contact them. What we need is a website where we could list what’s on our bookshelves and what books we’re currently swapping with whom. The difficult part is keying in all the book details – the authors, titles etc. But of course the State Libraries already have these details in their catalogues. If we could have access to existing book data we could use this as the basis of our own bookshelf listings and build our book swapping site on top of that.
This is all a bit hard for us since we don’t have the web development skills. But fortunately quite a lot of the work has already been done by a developer in the UK called Adrian Short. He kindly made his booksharing software ‘open source’ so anyone could use it. And we want to.
Our proposal is to build on this, using State Library catalogue data and create a book sharing site for our small village on the banks of the Hawkesbury River in NSW. If it’s successful, we could roll it out to every community in Australia that wants to share their books easily and neatly: the Big Bookshelf!
Just because there’s a website doesn’t mean there’s no face to face engagement, of course. In fact one of the attractions of the scheme would be that it would encourage people to come together in person to swap the actual books, maybe chat about them a little and in that way get to know one another better. On top of that we would love to run the odd ‘Big Bookshelf’ event in our village hall, where we all bring lamingtons or ANZAC biscuits and a book to share.There’s a version already working, to give you an idea of what the project could look like. And we’ve already started a blog to share ideas and resources:
bigbookshelf.org
Site credits:
Header Image courtesy of wheelo28 on flickr (CC by -NC2.0)
The Big Bookshelf 