Bookish is no longer

In 2018, I wanted to create a book identification code translator to help me manage my self-hosted reading log. I built it at bookish.tech and it would translate between ISBN, OCLC, LCCN, Goodreads, and OLID identifiers.

It broke recently because OCLC's Worldcat redesigned their website, and bookish relied on scraping their website for well-formed microdata in order to pull information from it.

The new Worldcat website is a Next.js-powered piece of junk. It's a good example of a website that completely flunks basic HTML semantics. Things that should be <details> elements are instead inaccessible React components. It doesn't work at all without JavaScript. Bad job, folks!

I don't like to link to Goodreads because of its epic moderation problems and quiet Amazon ownership. Linking to OpenLibrary is nice but they rarely have the books that I read, and it's easy to look up ISBN codes on that website.

So, from now on, sadly: my books will probably just be referenced by ISBN codes. bookish.tech is offline and I abandoned an effort to turn it into a CLI. OCLC sucks.