Micro.blog users who actively use our book-related features will have noticed over the last couple of weeks that books search has been unreliable. Long story short, we were using a combination of Google Books and Open Library, and rate-limiting with Google in particular started crippling what we expected from the feature.
I’ve now finished reworking our books search. It can still fall back on Google Books and Open Library in some cases, but now primarily uses ISBNdb. There’s a new version of Micro.blog for Mac and Epilogue for iOS. Epilogue for Android will follow after it goes through Google review.
Thinking longer term, blogging about books is such an important part of Micro.blog that I’m going to build our own database, expanding beyond the basic caching and bookshelves tracking we currently do. This is trickier than it seems if you aren’t Amazon and Goodreads.
Thanks to all the readers out there who were patient while we improved this. We’re juggling a lot of things right now, with our new RSS reader set to launch soon too.
