I made a bot to open all your books! ππ€
Late yesterday night, long after I should have been off the computer and watching Game of Thrones, I sent a tweet:
Book Opener is a bot that listens for URLs posted in your Slack team. If any links to books are posted (right now it only works with Amazon links), it checks OpenLibrary.org and helpfully (obnoxiously?) posts a link if the book has a page in the public catalog.
Why?
Because Amazon is a place that sells books, but Amazon isn't really concerned with availability of information β not the way a library ought to be. And a library has all kinds of other benefits too! Yet the ol' Amazon link is the most common (and typically easiest) way of sharing books.
Open Library exists to combat exactly this problem:
One web page for every book ever published
I built Book Opener as a small effort to help push that bigger effort forward, and also as a small step in a much longer journey I've been plotting for a while. I deeply believe in the power of open information and free exchange of ideas.
On a more processes and execution side: it's the first project I've completed entirely on my iPad Pro. Using Glitch on the iPad was a crazy cool experience. Maybe a bit rough around the edges (and some of that is how the iPad handles a keyboard) but there's so much promise. I've been a huge fan of Glitch's "starting from something that works" approach since they launched.
I used a starter bot kit by the ever-inspired and inspiring Jenn Schiffer and added some regex magic and an http call. Itβs very limited, both by the nature of being little more than a sketch and due to the Open Library catalog, which can be a bit slim on newer titles. In fact, part of the motivation for building this is to help improve awareness of the project and thus increase contributions.
So what's next?
There are a few key features I plan to add. The bot could use a bit of personality, the code could stand to be restructured and published on Github, rich link previews are up next, maybe integrating with more than just Slack would be nice.
If you want to help or just play around with it, check out the Glitch. If you've got ideas, I'm all ears. If you want to find out a bit more about what I'm doing and why, skim through some of the other things I've written that are especially related:
βοΈ a time for reading, a time for hacking
βοΈ Tapestry of timelines
βοΈ A Community Cloud
More to come. Stay tuned.