Ted Lueng did a much better job describing the concept of a book queue than I did in this post. But we're talking about the same thing. From Ted:
We're not subscribers to Netflix, but I like their notion of an "interest queue". In addition to the queue, there's what I'll call you interest working set, which is 3 DVDs. When you return an item from working set, you get the next item from the queue. I'd love to have a queue like this for books, and I'd also like to be able to specify whether queue requests get satisfied via my local library or via Amazon (or your favorite book retailer)
I think most of the pieces are there for something like this to happen. But, I think it would be tough to make it as automatic as Ted envisions. Making the Amazon purchase should be fairly easy; doing the local library bit would be harder. Probably the best we could do given the lack of exposed library catalog APIs would be to do something similar to Jon Udell's Library Lookup.
Still, it shouldn't be too hard to pull this off.
Posted by Karl
November 9, 2004 07:38 AM