👉 PROJECT LINK: list of library books I’ve checked out, finished, and backlogged
👇 MORE INFO
(initial draft that I didn’t end up posting to etherpad, could be a useful summary for eventual post or directory page)
I’ve been working on a project for the last week to track my library due dates, and I reached an important milestone this morning where I’m able to show some of that data on my website.
It started out with a simple goal: to have a single place to view all my various due dates. That information is currently spread out across different parts of the library app and website. Specifically, I want to see due dates for:
I achieved that in a simple way with a Notion database. And then from there, my ambitions grew.
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My first new goal was to automate all that data so I don’t ever have to enter book data manually. It should just pull it in from scraping emails or the library website.
Now, my goals have grown beyond automation to include making the data easily visible in physical form, without needing to go to a computer or phone. In other words, I’d like to make this digital data go physical—with a smart bookshelf.
That means:
I imagine:
Now my ambitions have grown even more. It’s not just about library books anymore. I want to track books that I own too—using a webcam to visually scan a book and have that data automatically entered into the database as a book that I own.
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Set up a scraper to also add data from that Google Sheet about:
Take all that data from the Google Sheet and pull it into the Notion database as needed.
The full end-to-end flow will be:
That’s the remaining work on automating the data and displaying it at home.
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The steps for displaying the data physically involve acquiring new hardware that I don’t have yet:
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My idea to make this project physical is inspired by something I’ve loved since I was a kid: Doc Brown’s automated dog feeder from the opening scenes of Back to the Future. It’s this Rube Goldberg–style machine that’s set off by a clock, then goes through a whole series of steps to grab the dog food, open it, and pour it into the bowl for Einstein to eat.
I’ve always been fascinated by that sequence—but you’re also immediately hit by the comedy of it. It’s this overly complex mechanism that ends up being brittle and ineffective, because it’s purely time-based and not smart at all. It makes a mess.
It reminds me even more of the Wallace and Gromit automations. Wallace gets dressed by being dumped out of bed and into some pants, while his breakfast is made through a long chain reaction. It’s even funnier in that analogy, though, because Gromit actually is the intelligence built into the system. He stitches together the automations, watches to make sure things don’t go wrong, and often has to intervene—like when he gets hit in the face with strawberry jelly.
So my idea for the physical bookshelf is to build something in that spirit, but smarter. A bookshelf designed around my library use and reading habits. Not just based on time-based automations, but real-world actions—like scanning books I own, or reacting to events that happen in the library system. The goal is for it to feel magical, but actually work.
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The inspiration for scanning in all of my books comes from a project that my friend James did. He organized his music library by using a webcam hooked up to a vision recognition system. He could wave a vinyl record in front of it, and it would recognize the album.
I want to do something similar. I want to be able to just wave a book I own in front of a webcam—or place it on the shelf—and have the system recognize it. It should be able to tell:
That way, I don’t have to type anything. I don’t want to enter book data manually. I just want to scan things in—either when I check them out from the library, or at home in front of the webcam.
At most, I’d be okay with clicking a button to change a book’s status. Like from “currently reading” to “finished,” or from “checked out” to “returned.” Especially because the library’s data about returns isn’t very reliable.