Sunday, April 11, 2010

Book Page Interchange

The "Amazon to Seattle Public Library" bookmarklet is pretty spiffy, but what if I want to go the other way? Or how about from Amazon to Goodreads, or WorldCat to Bookmooch? That's going to be a lot of bookmarklets...

What we need is a single bookmarklet that you can activate on a book page on any of these sites, and it'll pop up a panel with buttons for all the other sites. Well, there are hundreds of book sites, so we'll just do the top 10 or so and then maybe have a "more" option. Perhaps you can specify which sites go in your top 10. Anyway, clicking on one of those buttons takes you to the same book, but on that other site, simple as that. Now you're never stuck in one site when you want to be in another.

Of course we can do the same for any kind of entity that has multiple representations across sites, such as music, movies, people, word definitions, etc. Let's start with books, though.

A related problem is when you want to send a book recommendation to someone, which site do you link to? Perhaps our service could also host extremely simple book pages with all those site buttons, plus the author, title and book cover, but nothing else. Your friends (who perhaps aren't using the bookmarklet) can then follow the link to whichever site they prefer. Give these pages supershort URLs, and you've got a twitter-friendly, site-agnostic way to share book recommendations.

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posted by Ian Gilman at 10:17 PM

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