Comment by jamesponddotco

While working on Shelvica, a personal library management service and reading tracker, I realized I needed a source of data for book information, and none of the solutions available provided all the data I needed. One might provide the series, the other might provide genres, and yet another might provide a cover with good dimensions, but none provided everything.

So I started working on Librario, an ISBN database that fetches information from several other services, such as Hardcover.app, Google Books, and ISBNDB, merges that information, and return something more complete than using them alone. It also saves that information in the database for future lookups.

You can see an example response here[1]. Pricing information for books is missing right now because I need to finish the extractor for those, genres need some work[2], and having a 5 months old baby make development a tad slow, but the service is almost ready for a preview.

The algorithm to decide what to merge is the hardest part, in my opinion, and very basic right now. It's based on a priority and score system for now, where different extractors have different priorities, and different fields have different scores. Eventually, I wanna try doing something with machine learning instead.

I'd also like to add book summaries to the data somehow, but I haven't figured out a way to do this legally yet. For books in the public domain I could feed the entire book to an LLM and ask them to write a spoiler-free summary of the book, but for other books, that'd land me in legal trouble.

Oh, and related books, and things of the sort. But I'd like to do that based on the information stored in the database itself instead of external sources, so it's something for the future.

Last time I posted about Shelvica some people showed interest in Librario instead, so I decided to make it something I can sell instead of just a service I use in Shelvica[3], hence why I'm focusing more on it these past two weeks.

[1]: https://paste.sr.ht/~jamesponddotco/de80132b8f167f4503c31187...

[2]: In the example you'll see genres such as "English" and "Fiction In English", which is mostly noise. Also things like "Humor", "Humorous", and "Humorous Fiction" for the same book.

[3]: Which is nice, cause that way there are two possible sources of income for the project.