To Begin building the Library of Everything, I am going to digitize my home library. In everything I do with technology these days, I seek the best platform and best tool for the job. A personal side project of mine has been to quit shopping at Amazon, and one step in doing so was finding a suitable replacement for my book ordering addiction.
When someone tells me about a book, I typically order it immediately. This was easy with Amazon, and fortunately, it’s just as easy with Bookshop.org which is an independent online book seller that ships whatever I want to my home. Yes, I pay for shipping, and it’s worth it.
One cool perk of Bookshop.org is that you can select a local bookstore and they get all of the profits from your book order. I choose Elliott Bay Bookshop, one of Seattle’s best bookstores which happens to be right up the street from me in Capitol Hill (between the same Pike & Pine Streets that Pike Place Market calls home).
Bookshop.org also offers an Affiliate Program that I am using as the first step in opening the Library of Everything. I am using their affiliate program tools to create lists of all of the books in my home library by subject. There are 27 top-level subjects that my shelves afford me space for, but many of those are broken out into smaller subjects. My bookshop.org lists are for each of the smaller subjects which affords me the ability to reorganize my categories as I continue to grow and adjust my system. In my mind, I am developing an alternative to the world-renowned Dewey Decimal System (I need to tell you about the Seattle Public Library’s main library).
With a growing list of dozens of categories, I am maintaining a limited set of 27 top-level categories for the library, aligned with the 27 book cubbies in my home library. Those sections are presented here in online library by three top-level subjects: Everything, Everyone, and Everywhere.
