Featured bookshelf

Apologies if this has been brought up before, but I got the idea looking at shelves in my living room, and thinking about the new "shelf" graphic that's been in development.

When people stop by for a visit, they're inevitably drawn to a bookshelf--to learn more about you, look for something they are interested in, or just to snoop and be nosy. So--what you put on that main front and center bookshelf actually says something about you.

So, the idea is, on your profile, or home page, there is a virtual shelf. It holds some number of books--maybe even "spine out" or something like that--let's say, 25-50 books.

This would be my LibraryThing "living room bookshelf"--the first books that anyone would see upon visiting my page.
At a glance, a new visitor could get an impression.

I could put up books that are meaningful to me in some way--books that I am currently reading--books I intend to read, or whatever.

The point is, it's a graphical way for me to put a small portion of my library right out in front and center--in a featured way for people who are just stopping by for a cup of coffee in the living room.

You could use the feature to put up difficult books just to impress visitors, the way some people do in real life, lol.

Or you could put things there to shock, or entice, or entertain.

So, that's what I'm calling the "living room bookshelf" feature.

Has this been discussed, and/or offered before? Sounds like fun to me, what do others think?

I could see it as a special collection.

I really like this idea. Books that I could select myself would be far more representative of my tastes or personality than just the last six books I added, displayed under "Most recent activity". I'm not a big fan of the shelf graphic, but it would fit well in this context.

#2--it's not really a collection.

The point is, the graphical presentation, the fact that those chosen books would be "on display" to a casual visitor to the profile.

So--yes, you could do this with collections, but the real feature is the nice way to display them at the top of your page.

Of course, the problem with a "spine out" display is that there is NO DATA SOURCE for the graphics.

This would only be practical if LT allowed users to scan their book spines and add them to a data base that would then be drawn from to create a "spine out" display. This sounds like it would be a big messy programming project from LT's end, and something that only a very small percentage of users would bother to use.

Over the past several years the "spine out" display has been suggested dozens if not hundreds of times, but nobody requesting the feature seems to be willing to even take on the task of scanning their own books' spines, let alone volunteering to make a dent in the millions of books cataloged in the system ... yet a project like this would be necessary if this was to become "a feature", given that there is no equivalent data source to Amazon's covers to fall back on.

 

5 > actually Tim's foray into the multiple profile pics was supposed to be the first step into letting us add multiple images of a book, including the spine.

I think having a specific collection as the interface for adding and removing the books for this feature would be an excellent idea.

not bad but I would expect that either it would be limited to ~10 for views (maybe 10 random if more are selected) or the users should be able to pick how many (if any) show up when viewing others profile pages. I'm mostly thinking about slow connections and people who don't like cover views.

I like the idea, offered as a module on the Profile tab. Ideally it would run from a devoted Collection (added to the current list of pre-set collections, and subject to being activated or not as the others), and either showing the full set of titles or a random subset.

As others have mentioned, the spine-out image would be lovely, but I understand the current limitations. Eventually it could be done that way, and I'd love to have my entire collection displayed that way. Though I need to add my full library before I begin scanning spines, I will eventually take the time for that, whether for this feature or just as an alternative image of my books.

I like it, and I think it makes sense to make a new default collection for it. There could be a hide option for people with slow connections/general aversion to covers.

I turn covers off all over LT, but I like this.

Fun idea, atomicmutant!

It would also be nice to see this coupled with an upgrade to "Currently Reading", as mentioned in this topic last year.

perhaps allow each user to nominate a "featured collection": defaulting quite possibly to "Currently Reading", but I might choose "Recently Read", while others might choose "My favourites", or "Books to tease pedants with", or indeed "None"

Also, each user should be able to say whether they want covers or titles listed on their profiles.

Being a visually-oriented person I already use HTML code to link the covers of the books I'm currently reading to my profile page. I like the way it looks, but I have to do it by hand which is annoying. Automation would be preferable.

I picked up the HTML trick for pulling your own specific cover from another thread a long time ago. I had seen a number of people do it and wished to join the flock.

I know that there were mentions of upgrading the way profiles looked a long, long time ago (about when home pages came out).

This kind of thing would be really nice and I'm with #13 in that I'd like to have a currently reading shelf. I'd also like to have my recent activities displayed on shelves instead of lumped into the single box. A shelf for recent reviews & ratings and a shelf for recent adds.

But I believe the featured shelf is what a lot of folks were wanting to do by putting the widgets we could make on our profiles. :)

Love this. Love it!

>18 Aerrin99: Moi, aussi.

#16--see, I don't think that people should have to learn HTML to do things like this. I get it that some are more web-savvy than others, but it isn't the norm. I'm glad that you've "found a way" to do this, but I'll wait for the button, thanks. :D

20> Perhaps you should read post #16 again. You seem to be under the mistaken impression that the poster is against the proposed feature.

OH, no I didn't think the poster was against it! I just was pointing out that there are lots of nifty things that HTML-savvy people do to their pages that us mere mortals can't.

It's all good! No worries! :)

i like this

>20 Atomicmutant:
Oh, yes :) I am definitely for the automatic way! It's a pain to do it the way I'm currently doing it - especially if you cycle through books quickly. Someone earlier in this thread mentioned embedding one of the LT widgets, so I might try that and see if I like it better, but I'd definitely rather not have to work-around everything and do it the hard way. I'll be a first-adopter if a featured bookshelf ever becomes a feature.

Currently the widgets can't be embedded on the profile - that's a feature request. Whether the Featured Shelf is a widget or something unique to profiles, it sounds neat to me...

Well, if anyone's got the skillz (cough, splutter!), your 'recently added' images are available in the source code of your recently added module on the Home page. They lie between the strings:
<div id="recentbooks_inside">
and
</div><br style="clear: both;"></div>

Can this be extracted from the home page and added to the Profile page using Greasemonkey?