When will tech publishers build this for me? »

I wrote about this idea last night, but being the idiot that I am, I did not save it and lost it before actually getting it posted to the blog. So let me try it again tonight.

A version of this might already exist and I just haven't stumbled upon it yet (if so please point me to it), but here's a system I want tech. publishers to build me for my tech. book collection:

1. A simple little tool that let's me list out the books I own. This could be as simple as entering the book's ISBN or maybe the title and publisher and having that return a list that I can select from to say which one(s) I own.

2. Now that you know what books I own, let me do a full text search against all of them whenver I want. You've already got the digital version of all your books, so indexing them should not really be that hard for you.

3. Since there's no simple way for me to prove that I acutally own the books I say I do (or at least legally own them), you probably won't want to show me the full text results of my search. Fine. Just show me the books (and page numbers) that match.

4. While you're at it, show me some books (and page numbers) that also match but that I don't already list as owning...who knows I might want to buy them too (or maybe just the page/chapter with my solution if you offer that type of thing).

This type of system would make my own library collection 100 times more useful to me. At the same time, I would become a much more valuable person to the publishers because I would be sharing a lot of really good marketing information and data with you about my interests and habits. Plus, I would be giving you a lot of opportunity to sell me more things and request my feedback (ie. ask me for reviews and things).

Best of all, there's not that much work involved in any of this and in fact many of the pieces are already out there (especially on Amazon). They just don't seem to be all together in one service just yet, and not searchable, available, or workable as I would like.

Anyway, until that service actually exists, I've taken up a very little project of my own to catalog my book collection. Basically I wrote very simple little script that will take a book title (or snippet of a title) and the publisher, then search Amazon for the most likely match and log some details to my local database for me.

So now all I have to do is whip up a simple text file that has all my book titles and publishers in it (I've already gone through about 60 of my books testing it out)...and I'll have my entire collection sortable and linkable online.

I can't do full text searching across the data, but I can more quickly share the list of books I've read (or am in the process of reading). This will make it easier for me to write reviews of those books as well.

Writing reviews is important to me, because I hope to start doing more reviews of my books soon (Note: I'm a member of a 'Friends of Apress' group and writing reviews is one of the things they want us to do).

Since I also have inside knowledge of the reviews.com system (and data), I will probably whip up some type of API that allows me to post my reviews to that system as well (or at least get the reviews from others back out for the books I own and associate them for my own interests).

I will also most likley tie more into the Amazon API so that, long term, when I write a book review it can be published to this blog, reviews.com, and Amazon with one click (or some series of simple clicks). Who knows I might even go a little further and tie in some of the other popular reviews systems depending on how crazy I get with all this stuff.

Before I do get too crazy though, I've still got to finish getting my current book collection loaded...so I'm off to do more of that!