Org Books Notes

Created: Sep 21 2025, 16:28 UTC
Last modified: Sep 21 2025, 16:28 UTC

This is an Emacs package for managing reading lists in Org Mode. Source code on Github.

Doesn’t work very well:

  • Claims to support Amazon, Goodreads and Open Library URLs, Open Library only works when you use the Legacy Books API JSON URL.

  • Inserts the URL provided as a properties field which doesn’t look nice when exported.

  • Doesn’t insert the cover anywhere.

  • You can insert books via ISBN, but this is implemnted in terms of Open Library, with the aforementioned problems.

Code Notes

The main idea behind is to take a URL, fetch normalized details like title and author based on the type of URL (Amazon, Goodreads, Open Library) and then format the details.

Main entry points is org-books-add-url, which takes a URL, finds a “detail fetching” function corresponding to the type of URL, and then calls org-books-add-book, which will format the book with those details. You can call org-books-add-book directly if you want, and manually provide a title and author.

There are a couple of wrappers around org-books-add-url:

  • org-books-cliplink: fetched the URL from the clipboard.
  • org-books-add-isbn: constructs an Open Library URL from a raw ISBN number.

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