I’ve been experimenting with a few different features around books on Micro.blog. The goal is to make it easier to blog about a book you’re reading, or to discover other books from fellow microbloggers. Some of these features are now tied together in a more cohesive way, so I’d like to summarize what we have.
There are 2 new buttons on the Discover → 📚 page:
- Book Covers shows a grid view of covers for books that people on Micro.blog are blogging about. Each cover links to the individual microblog post. Any microblog post that links to Micro.blog’s book detail page (
micro.blog/books/isbn-here) will automatically be included in the grid view. - Book Search lets you look up a book by an ISBN-13 number, or search for a book by its title or author. This uses a combination of Open Library and ISBNdb. I added ISBNdb to have another source of metadata and it really helps fill in some gaps.
Micro.blog also continues to work great with indiebookclub. Micro.blog will format your microblog post and link the book if you’ve included the ISBN, so it will show up in the 📚 page as well as the new covers grid view.
We’re not trying to reinvent all of Goodreads here, but I’m pretty happy with the way these book features are falling into place. If you like to read (or wish you read more often!) I hope this makes Micro.blog more useful for you.
