Update: Now you can filter the book list by language. After a gentle nudge by Nicole in Lübeck.
OK, the plans are in the works, banks are involved, and now the library comes tumbling down: we are moving to Nørrebro, which is another part of Copenhagen. After the summer, we will live in better-planned apartment.
This entails me and Luisa giving away books. Yes, we have more than 100 books in storage, all different kinds. To make things easier for us and you, we indexed the books in an Excel sheet when we stored them in the attic. This data was a goldmine, because it was a breeze pouring it into a database, and topping up with a small web interface for the users to tell us that they want a book. Then they get to come and pick the book up at no charge over at our house. Go reserve your new free books today!
When you reserve a book, please say something about yourself in the personal message field.
*Bad form*: “Um, I was at some sort of programming website, and there was this link and… the rest is history.”
*Better*: “At the Python Geeks website I found your profile, went to the blog and then booked a book. I’ll pick it up next week, since I live in Copenhagen.”
Caveat! The books have no other info than what it says there on the info card. (JFGI, or “Google is your friend”.) And, you need to pick them up, in person, at our doorstep.
(The application is built using the Rails-like PHP web framework Cake, which is rather entertaining to use.)
M’afraid we’re already giving books away ourselves here. But that list is pretty nifty piece of design. And hey, congrats’ on your new place! Nørrebro is the best part of Cph.
Will take them all. Please deliver them at our doorstep no later than Thursday this week.
Thanks for the praise, Thomas. And Cissi, up yours.
Joc Koljonen said I should tag the books with language tags, and I did, which made the thing a lot more interesting. And ugly, too. (I hate to admit it.)
I got this piece of feedback from a German user:
“I only read German and English. So I’m not interested in seeing the rest. With 80% not in languages spoken by me, I don’t feel like browsing.”
She’s right. “Freebooks” lacks that thing. Proposed solution: clickable colored language tags that reload the page with just books in that language. Add a tag without color that shows all books.
Update: Yeah, I could not help myself, even though I’d said to myself that this Sunday project was a closed book.