John Miedema

I write book reviews here. I always include a link to the book.
I used to link to Amazon, but I stopped that practice some time ago. After all, why should they get priority over other book sellers. I started linking to my LibraryThing entries, but despite how great it is, it is still a proprietary source, often making money from Amazon. If I am going to pick a proprietary source, it seems to me the most reasonable choice is the publisher. My current policy is to link to the publisher’s …

Is there One Big Library? Or are there many distinctive local libraries? I think both exist. I am in the early stages of designing a WordPress plugin that will allow people to easy insert book data (cover image, title, author, publisher, etc.) into their blog posts. For the first cut of the software, I will select one of the four big digital sources of book data: Amazon, LibraryThing, OpenLibrary, and WorldCat (which I will call libraries). In order to make the selection, I made the comparison illustrated in the table …

Every good software design begins with a list of requirements. Here is my list.

Develop a utility that will allow for easy insertion of book data into blog posts. The currently targeted blog platform is WordPress. The initial form of the utility will be a WordPress plugin, using PHP as a scripting language.
User a vendor-neutral, open web source of book data. The source will provide standard book classification fields, i.e., title, author, publisher, etc. Open web technologies required include: open source, open APIs, open data to allow for addition of titles …

The OpenBook plugin will grab book data from OpenLibrary using its APIs.
If you are new to APIs, it stands for Application Programming Interface. Software use APIs to open up their functions to other programs. OpenLibrary exposes its data through a URL with a query string. The query string is everything that follows the “?” in the URL in the address bar. It is a series of name-value pairs that a website can pick up and read. More on this below.
For the plugin, I want to get data for one particular …

In the previous post, I retrieved book data in my browser using the API of Open Library. In this post, I capture that data in PHP. I’m not going to try to teach PHP, just give you a feel for how it works.
I will perform three steps. First, I define a variable, “$url”, that matches the API URL created in the last post. Second, I pass the URL to a PHP function, “file_get_contents”; this function scoops the book data from OpenLibrary and places it in another variable, $bookdata. In the …

Last time, I pulled the book data from OpenLibrary into PHP so that I could start programming it. The data is fairly extensive but I just want a few fields, as per the requirements: author, book title, and publisher. Ideally, I would like to get a book cover image too — more on that later.
I have pulled all the data into a single variable, $bookdata. It may look a little confusing, but the good folks at OpenLibrary have put it in a standard format, JSON (JavaScript Object Notation). This means …

Update: June 4, 2008. There is a relative URL in the book data for the cover image. It does not occur in all results. If this is for alternate covers, say good-bye to screen scraping.

The one thing missing from my book data was cover images. I inquired with OpenLibrary and it turns out that they are working on an API for this, but it is not ready yet. I did not want to skip covers.
I took a long hard look at Google’s Book Search Book Viewability API. It returns URLs …

I didn’t know it at the time, but this idea of making a book data plugin started about a year ago when I was offered some free books by Random House in exchange for a link to their website when I posted a review of the book. I thought that sounded fair, and I disclosed this fact in my About page. It got me thinking about my previous practice of linking to Amazon.
I do not pretend to understand the big world of publishing, but it makes sense to me …

I’m not usually a hockey fan but my wife is. I’m a fan during the Stanley Cup if there’s a Canadian team left playing. There wasn’t this year, but there were plenty of Canadian players. Oh that Sydney Crosby. And Cleary is the first Newfoundlander to win the Stanley Cup. I coded up the plugin during the Stanley Cup final last night. It is in good shape. A few more tweaks, some robust testing on my end, and I will release it for beta testing.
Note: the design has changed. The …

Ladies and Gentlemen … I am pleased to announce that the beta release version of OpenBook is ready for download.
Download from the WordPress server
All the instructions are in the readme file with the download. I will also be documenting things here. I look forward to any and all reactions.