It seems that posts where I include the books icon (e.g. Larkfarm Returns) don’t show up at Micro.blog - Discover books. I’m sure this just means I’m doing it wrong but I’m at a loss. Not using bookshelves or anything other than the “New Post” web UI.
I’m guessing here, but I think your post might have shown up on the Discover page if the link had gone to https://micro.blog/books/9780812511062.
Could be, in which case the help needs an update - ℹ️ Emoji in Discover
Might be a bug, I think it’s supposed to include posts with the emoji and posts that link to the book detail page.
FWIW at this point I won’t drive traffic towards the Bezos empire, so including a page with links to Amazon & Goodreads is a non-starter for me. That’s not to say I demand another way to include posts on discover/books. Just an observation. In a world of unlimited developer time I’d ask for customization of which links show up on the individual book detail pages, but this is not that world.
I understand that. When we first created the books page, we were thinking it could be customized or styled, and I still think we should explore that. Maybe there should be a special parameter like ?amazon=no.
Happy to hear suggestions here. The most important thing is to have a simple page for each book that is mostly un-branded. It should be useful to all blog visitors and not require knowing what Micro.blog is.
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It’s an interesting problem. I’ll make it more interesting, because I read (among other things)
- Books that are long out of print where I’d rather point to a scholarly site than one of the terrible modern instant-print copies (Larkfarm Returns)
- Books from small presses where I’d rather link directly to the publisher (Larkfarm Returns)
- Imported editions where, as far as I can tell, Amazon is the only US source (not posted yet, but Elric: The Moonbeam Roads | Gollancz will be one of these when I finish it)
I’m pretty sure that satisfying all of these edge cases would not be worth the development effort here, where there is plenty else to do.
As far as the canonical books page on micro.blog, perhaps the 80% satisfactory case would just be to not privilege Amazon over other online stores (even though it has everything, so is an easy link in most cases). Move search links to the top and Amazon to the bottom? Include B&N? Put Bookshop over Amazon? Gets politically fraught very quickly, though I would suggest promoting local bookstores is culturally akin to POSSE 
Or maybe the links on the canonical page could be “Borrow”, “Buy”, “Search” that go to child pages with links to libraries, stores, other.
And as long as I’m picking nits…the interaction between the search at Micro.blog and the book detail pages sometimes leads to unexpected results. Take the one that started this thread…searching for “Destiny’s Road” (Micro.blog) brings back multiple candidates, of which the first two are the Niven book we’re talking about.
But the first one is the audio book, which means the Bookshop.org link doesn’t work. The second one is - I’m not sure what - but Amazon links it to the audio book, and Bookshop doesn’t find it. The actual paperback (https://bookshop.org/p/books/destiny-s-road-larry-niven/15283178?ean=9781250767400&next=t) doesn’t seem to be in the micro.blog search results at all.
Again edge cases, but in the best of all possible worlds the book search would somehow put “most inexpensive and widely available edition” at the top, or at least indicate whether search results were hardcover, trade paper, paperback, audio, etc.
This is an issue with how all book search works because ISBNs are set to editions, there’s no good way to recognize editions as related, and everything is terrible.
I say this as someone who has tried to maintain links to bookshop on my personal site via a handmade plug in and find that it fails a huge portion of the time because editions go out of print or stock and I can’t manually keep checking that an ISBN still exists on Bookshop.
Yeah, I didn’t mean to imply that this is a micro.blog bug. I did web development for a couple of decades and I’m well aware of the “everything is terrible” problem.
It’s probably at least possible to tell by looking at target pages whether a link is pointing to an audio book, but it’d require more development than I’d personally invest in the problem. Or we could just let AI “fix” it I guess