Automating the Shelf

Over the last couple years I have built up the Shelf page on this site more than any other. Reading has become a major part of my life. By hand I have added 120 books to this page. Each book includes title, author, cover, categories, audiobook links, purchase link, and a couple other metadata fields. Sometimes I’ve added a book lazily without the links and come back the next day to add links. Finding the cover, Audible and Canon+ audiobook links, store links, and more took time. Before, adding an automated script for this kind of thing would be tedious. A script that had the grace to find books on Amazon and Canon+ reliably would be difficult or expensive. But AI skills allow these things to be easy. A few weeks back I had Grok build a skill for finding all the meta data for a book and then adding it to the Shelf. Now with one prompt— add Misconceiving IVF by Joshua Holler to the shelf — Grok’ll go get all the details and the cover and build the small JSON block. But there’s more.…