Syncing LibraryThing with other Services (like Notion)

I recently reached out to the LibraryThing development team about the possibility of integrating LibraryThing with Notion (https://notion.so/), a popular 'second brain' platform for storing thoughts, highlights, and plans. How useful would it be to be able to sync your LibraryThing library with Notion to create a more comprehensive and organized system for your book collection?

Notion already integrates with a lot of web tools, so there is precedent here. (https://www.notion.so/integrations/all)

With the integration, LibraryThing users would be able to use Notion to attach notes and summaries to their database entries for each book, store their book collection in a cloud-based platform, and track and manage book lending more easily.

I think the LibraryThing development team would consider building a sync feature like this if there's broader appetite for it. Does anyone else think this integration would be helpful and be interested in supporting it?

No, I don't have any interest in this.

>1 hyllis: attach notes and summaries to their database entries for each book
Um, this is what the comments and private comments fields are for.

store their book collection in a cloud-based platform and track and manage book lending more easily.
This is basically what Librarything does.
Why would they need to sync with another service to do ... what they already do?

Fair enough. I'm not sure I was clear enough in my first post.

Here's the real value I see: a platform like Notion is useful because with integrations like this, you could potentially bring together your highlights and notes from your books, Kindle, and web clippings. So, it does a great job of centralizing everything if you're aiming to, again, build a "second brain" for all your annotations rather than just your notes on books.

Here's some more reading on building a Second Brain. I think it's really intriguing, and makes all your notes much easier to surface and connect with one another.

https://www.buildingasecondbrain.com/

Why would I need a second place to store information I already have in LT? Except that there it won't be connected to the community data. I may be missing the point but... isn't that just a subset of what you get on LT if you stay on LT. Why would you want to go elsewhere or why would LT want to help people go elsewhere?

>3 gilroy: >5 AnnieMod: I'm not familiar with Notion, but I use Obsidian, and believe they are similar enough to say the point is not in replicating data from LT, but importing the part that is relevant there as well, but your further notes, mindmaps, etc there are far beyond the scope of LT. It's not something for comments, it's a knowledge management system not restricted to books.

While I'd love to be able to import my data for select books into Obsidian, thus avoiding to manually enter what I have elsewhere, I must say my hopes lie in community plug-ins, not really LT. Aren't Notion devs in a better position to develop this or am I missing something?

>6 SandraArdnas: Andra, precisely! Thank you for putting it so clearly. I think Notion would need to somehow have access to the updating library database of a given user, and I believe LT dev would need to be involved to authorize that.

>7 hyllis: Ah, I forgot you mentioned syncing, not just importing. I'd be happy with just import, which basically requires a way to suitably parse one of LT export formats into the other software structure. I had some attempts with csv, but it requires so much work to populate Obsidian as desired that I gave up until some better tool comes up.

>6 SandraArdnas: >7 hyllis: No, I'm still failing to see the benefit.
I mean if someone at Notion wanted to develop a plug in using the Librarything API (when it becomes reactivated) that's fine.

But I don't see the need. Maybe because I don't do mind maps and that's about the only thing listed that can't be done here on Librarything. Personal threads can be used to maintain lists of links to articles as well as being able to catalog them. Plus those threads can maintain comments regarding books. Gather your knowledge if you so chose. The catalog itself holds the books details....

>9 SandraArdnas: But then you'd need to re-import each time you add a book to your library, no? Basically, I'd want there to be real-time visibility across both platforms.

>10 gilroy: You seem to be a long-time user and have insight into the LT API. Is that something that existed and then went away?

>1 hyllis: Would you mind adding some disclosure about any ties you might have to Notion? You’ve been a member on LT for a brief time, have a very private profile, and this seems to be your first talk post.

>10 gilroy: Mindmap is one of many, many things how you can present your information/data. In Obsidian, I have quotes from books which I can pull by author, author and specific book, tag or any other criteria I find useful. This isn't something you can do on LT as just one example. It's an entirely different type of software, with entirely different aim. Plug-ins are common to make workflow easier and less time-consuming. Just as LT uses sources to facilitate cataloguing, knowledge management systems benefit from having their own 'sources', which is other software you use to gather your info/data.

>11 hyllis: Yes, but I don't want my entire catalogue imported anyway, just the books I want to expand on beyond data I have on LT. API existed and is on hold until further notice IIRC. Try searching the forum for thread that details it.

>12 hyllis: currently closed due to the revamp to LT2.0
I believe they said it will be reactivated once that project is done. So in about 3 years

>13 2wonderY: I don't have any ties to Notion, apart from the fact that I use it as a "knowledge management" tool much as SandraArdnas seems to be using Obsidian.

I recently discovered LibraryThing, and am thrilled that it exists. I'm loving it for managing/engaging with my library of books. But I want to somehow integrate it into my larger system of note taking.

>14 SandraArdnas: Precisely!

>15 gilroy: Thank you.

Why not just put your notes right in Notion if that's what you like to use? Why would I want to integrate LT data with web clippings (if I even understand what those are)? Why not just ask Notion devs to scrape the LT data? Count me among the people confused by the concept. It sounds like you want to integrate both cars and boats, which are both good, but really different? why?

>18 reconditereader: If one of the things in your PKM is books/reading, then importing the book data you already have on LT means you don't have to manually enter it and can go on to doing the actual notes that much quicker. I'm on my part confused why would scraping generic LT data about a book be preferable to getting the exact data you have? Do so few people here use other software in need of integrating with something else they use? It's like asking why would LT use sources when you can copy/paste info from library sites or whatever. Requests for easy communication between different apps and syncing the same app across different devices is probably among the most common. You need some of your data in more than one place. While manually entering it is always an option, it isn't very efficient. Hence, you look for ways to automate it.

E.g. My latest book entry into Obsidian is the one I'm currently reading. I entered the basic book data manually, but any quotes I mark in my e-reader can be shared to Obsidian with one tap because both the reader and Obsidian support it. If it's physical books, again you'll find OCR plug-in rather than typing it. I might find a review I want to keep record of and add that web clipping into Obsidian also with one click. If I'm doing research, I'd want a way to keep a bibliography of all relevant articles, preferably not by entering it manually. So you have another app like Zotero, which is suited to that task, and a plug in that can import select data quickly. In the end, you have a web of information of all kinds and your personal notes about the book inside your PKM. Getting my LT data as easily into it as I can from a number of other sources would make my workflow smoother and quicker. It is the backbone of a book entry, but only a backbone.

For those who want to understand what Building a Second Brain means: it is a productivity method started by Tiago Forte. @SandraArdnas in message 19 explains what it is about: being able to save highlights or other selected data to your Evernote/Onenote/Obsidian/Notion/......

For what it is worth, Ali Adbaal uses Readwise to collect highlights and quotes from a book. Perhaps that service would be of use in the use case of the OP?

Have no idea what a PKM is but you have fun with yours.

>21 reconditereader: We do live in the information age, google is your friend, at least in finding what you don't know. Asking a question why not this and that, but then responding as if you have no idea why it should be of interest to you is the pinnacle of absurdity. Why ask and bother with the topic at all is a much better question.

>1 hyllis: I am also *VERY* interested in seeing a LibraryThing integration with Notion (and even other knowledge/idea management platforms such as Milanote) come to fruition soon, @hyllis! Are you comfy sharing (or DM'ing me) a bit about the LT development team's response/reaction to your initial inquiry?

For other folks with interest in seeing this type of functionality on LT, what could it look like to generate critical mass around @hyllis' idea? Please definitely feel free to DM me if you'd like to continue the convo that way! 😊

>1 hyllis: oh yeah i am definitely interesting in this. especially an Obsidian integration.

>19 SandraArdnas:

Hi Sandra,

in case you're interested, there is a 'book search' plugin for Obsidian! It will import some generic metadata from Google Books (I think you can select another source but I'm not sure) Here is a good YouTube guide.

I don't use Obsidian as a database for books anymore, I've simply found it too clunky and lacking in the features that LT offers (I'm also not that tech savvy). But I do use the book search plugin to create a book note that I can use to record my thoughts, highlights, and reviews.

>25 nvblue: Yeah, I know, but I want my data from LT. Even if I find the same edition through book search, I still have to transfer tags and such manually. Perhaps the new Web Clipper can be configured to import my LT data automatically. There's a template to import Goodreads data already available, so I'm hoping one can be whipped up for LT too, but I lack the required knowledge and was unsuccessful so far. Will probably seek help in Obsidian forums at some point.

Either way, I only enter books I'm reading, so one at a time, because those are the ones I'm making notes about. For those who wish to import the entire or large sections of LT library, there's the CSV importer, but for a single book it's easier to just manually copy the relevant data into my note.

Thanks anyway :)

This post is now old, but I wanted to say how in favor I am. I just completed integrating my Zotero library of journal articles and other PDFs into Notion. I love the idea of having a single place that brings together my book library with my academic journal articles and other research components. It wouldn't replace LibraryThing, but would create a one-stop place for me to associate different materials with a single topic, which is so helpful for research.

But it sounds like those that are interested in the idea are not agreed as to which of the various options they prefer. Getting this to work well with even one of them would probably use significant resources, and upset those who prefer a different platform.

And given how many parts of LT itself do not sync in real time, needing days or weeks before the information here is also available there, I can't see this working well enough for those who want all their newest info available in one place.

>28 MarthaJeanne: I think sync in real time is total science fiction even with a single other platform. Realistic hopes revolve around smooth export/import workflow. LT already has a good selection of export formats and further improvements would revolve around fine-tuning those and possibly adding metadata to work pages so that another app can be configured to recognize and insert author, title, tags and other fields where appropriate. Since work pages are next on the list for LT 2.0 project, it will be an opportunity to ask how feasible web page metadata is.

I came here with this exact hope...that there would be an easy integration between LT and Notion. I am a homeschool mom with lots of books coming and going. I do the bulk of my lesson planning on Notion. I would love to be able to create my groupings in LT by subject and plug in just the right chunks into my lesson plans. Also I still need to catalog the books we own and that would be so much easier using LT then importing the data to our resources library in Notion.

@SandraArdnas I would love a Obsidian plugin for LibraryThing that leverages their API. I know you can bulk import books into Obsidian using a csv plugin.

But it would be great to have a basic plugin that allows to compare the two versions of books (Obsidian & LT) and then update the entries. Doesn't have to full sync - even though that would be great.

Maybe we could cobble something together using Claude or something?

>31 timeforrevolution: For my purposes, (I make a book note when I start reading it), I managed to make a template for their webclipper, which automatically makes a note and populates select data in it. Let me know if that helps you and I can share it.

To be specific, it creates a note in a specific folder with a specific title and fills in title, author, publication date, ISBN, pages, cover image, format (pb, hc, epub, etc). Any info that comes in the ‘your book info’ box on LT can be extracted. Info in Common Knowledge I haven’t found a reliable way to extract automatically, but if you use AI interpreter, it could probably do it.

I might want to take a look at it. Haven't thought of using the web clipper to pull in the information.

If I recall correctly, the API provides the output in a JSON format. I've tapped into an API before using Google Sheets and then transformed the data in a way that made sense to me. So I believe I can get a workflow working that woulld:

- It gets downloads of my books from LT via API.
- Then the csv importer plugin from Obsidian parses it and skips the update where there are no changes. Manual sync.

At some point I might really want to try vibe-coding an Obsidian plugin. If I can't make it work, I'll just have to do it manually until someone does.

Or, maybe even use n8n that uses the exported CSV file from LT and then updates the relevant parts. A more automated manual sync solution.

>33 timeforrevolution: Definitely take a look at the webclipper. It's awesome and there are templates on Github for a number of sites, Goodreads, IMDB, Letterboxd, and such, making tracking your reading and media a breeze. No LT one though, so I ended up making the effort to wrap my head around the syntax the clipper uses to make one myself. The default template that comes with the clipper is great for capturing articles or highlighted parts of it into your notes. AFAIK,it's available as addon for all major browsers