I have Netflix, and one of the things I really love about it is the queue. Every time someone tells me about an interesting movie, I just add it to the queue. Eventually it comes up to the top, or sometimes I’ll bump something up that I’m really interested in seeing.

I really wish library holds worked this way, but they don’t. I can’t just place a hold on an interesting book that someone mentioned, because I don’t want it right now, I want it after I’m finished with the current book or two I’m reading.

And I’m not exactly sure the library is the right place for the queue to live, anyway, at least for me. I buy a lot of books (something of a book junkie), plus I often read things I already have or that have been lent to me by a friend. I want to keep track of all of those books in my queue, but I don’t need or want to get them all from the library. This kind of queue integrated with something like LibraryThing would be perfect.

Well, my Netflix queue has about 200 DVDs on it (many are multidisc TV series, so it’s not really quite as bad as it sounds). I’m convinced there’s probably about that much in my mental queue of books as well, but there’s no way I can remember that many. The pain has gotten to the point that I decided to stop whining and do something about it.

I’ve built a prototype system in Ruby on Rails, because it rocks my world for getting web applications up and running in a hurry. (Rails also gives you all kinds of AJAX-y goodness without much work.) It’s heavily modeled after the queue in Netflix, with basically four sections: the queue, the current reading, saved books (not in the queue because they’re not released yet), and a history (which I haven’t implemented yet). It pulls information from Amazon’s awesome web services using a Ruby library. Right now that’s pretty rough, but it’s clear how it would work. (Even better would be an API for LibraryThing or something like that.) I also envision that eventually it would incorporate ideas from Jon Udell’s Library Lookup to check for availability in your favorite libraries (and of course it could give you a current price on Amazon or other booksellers as well). Unfortunately there are no automated ways (as far as I know) to place holds in OPACs, so you’d still have to do that manually, but at least it could point you directly to the hold page for the work.

You can see the live demo. It’s still quite rough around the edges, but I think it gives a fairly good idea of what I’m aiming at. It’s also totally unsecured, so I’ll trust you not to go crazy with it and tie up my machine. (If you click the link and don’t get anything, you can probably assume something bad happened. If it does, I’ll bring it back up later with a password and you can email me to check it out.)