Thursday, March 08, 2007

browser plugin idea...

There are a lot of books that people recommend to me that sound awesome but I don't quite want to own or read right away.

Imagine if you could select an ISBN number, or just visit the amazon.com page for a book, and click on a button in your browser. The plugin would automatically add it to your list of holds at the Seattle Public Library. You'd have to store your library number and PIN, and preferred pickup location with the plugin.

But after that, SPL will just send a notification when the book is available. Takes the hassle out of borrowing.

Also cool would be a wishlist importer that takes books (and maybe even cds and dvds) off your amazon wishlists and adds them to your list of library holds...

If such a thing exists, or if you write one as a result of this post, please let me know as I'd like to use it :)

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

blogging away.

Anonymous said...

In fact Jon Udell did this a while ago when he was still at Infoworld. He first implemented it as a a bookmarklet, and then a Greasemonkey script. The script doesn't actually put a hold on the book, but it does look up availability and insert links directly on the Amazon detail page. I had modified the script to look up books in the King County Library System, but I've lost the script now.

Greasemonkey was pretty new at the time, and he raised some questions in his column about whether rewriting Web pages, a la Greasemonkey, was okay.

Screencast
The LibraryLookup project
Infoworld column

-K