DeadTrees

DeadTrees is a WordPress plugin that allows you to share the books you’ve been reading with your readers.

It’s slightly influenced by other “My Library” type of plugins, such as the whole Now Reading/Reloaded/Redux group of plugins, but is a complete re-write using WordPress’s Custom Post Type features.

I wrote Dead Trees because I want to post on my blog when I read a book, but only sometimes want to write about the book. Dead Trees lets me, (and you!), do that.

New in Version 1.1: Multiple Book Cover Sources

In version 1.1 book covers will be fetched from OpenLibrary.org , LibraryThing , or Amazon, depending on the settings, and what’s available where.

If you have set your Amazon API credentials, you can choose to look for a cover at Amazon either first or last: first for people who are working on building affiliate income from Amazon, and have plenty of API quota , or last for people who prefer to promote independent book sources or can’t or don’t want to use Amazon’s services.

For non-Amazon book covers, OpenLibrary.org is checked first as it provides larger images than other options. If OpenLibrary.org doesn’t have a cover for a book and you have set a LibraryThing API key we will fall back to looking for a cover at LibraryThing.

OpenLibrary.org does not require any API credentials or any special configuration.

How it works

To post a book that you read, you’ll go to the admin of your site and choose “Books” from the main menu. You can then enter the title of the book, the author’s name(s), ISBN, Amazon’s ASIN, (likely the ISBN), and, if you wish, you may write about the book, but you don’t have to if you don’t want to.

Hit publish and the DeadTrees will grab the cover art from Open Library or Amazon and publish your book.

You can also tag the book, just like a post. The pool of tags is shared between posts & books.

Development is on GitHub at https://github.com/jbeales/DeadTrees

Report issues at https://github.com/jbeales/DeadTrees/issues

See the public side in action, with some custom templating: https://johnbeales.com/books/

Thanks

Thanks to OpenLibrary.org and LibraryThing for providing open book cover data. APIs like these that share information make the independent web possible and fun.

Troubleshooting

If you get a 404 error when trying to view your first book post, visit the Permalinks page in the admin, (Settings > Permalinks), and please leave a comment on Github issue #13 or post in the support forums on wordpress.org to let me know that the problem isn’t fixed yet.