This Obsidian vault was created by exporting my Goodreads library of books to CSV. I then used csvkit and command line tools to convert the CSV format Goodreads data to Markdown. Each Markdown document created in this way contains extensive metadata that can be used to query the vault with Dataview.
- Download the vault
- Open the vault in Obsidian via "Open another vault -> Open folder as vault"
- Trust us. :)
- When Obsidian opens the settings, verify that "Dataview" and other community plugins are enabled
- Done! The Obsidian Books Vault is now available to you in its purest and most useful form!
The Obsidian Books Vault is part of the Obsidian Media Vault.
The Obsidian Media Vault repository is organized as an Obsidian vault containing Media descriptions in markdown format. It can be viewed using any markdown viewer (e.g. almost any browser) but if Obsidian is used then many additional features will be available including queries using the Dataview plugin for Obsidian.
The Obsidian-Media-Vault repository reflects the partial contents of my personal library of books, cds, and records. As such, it may be relevant only to a few. However, the process by which this repository was created and curated as well as the tools used in its creation and curation may be useful to a wider audience. I am making it public and freely licensed so that others may examine, adapt, clone, and use in whatever manner they choose. See the description of Process for an overview of the process and tools employed in the creation of this repository.
Get started browsing the Obsidian Media Vault.
The Obsidian Books Vault has been curated with metadata allowing queries to be performed using the Obsidian Dataview plugin. Sample queries along with the code used to perform them can be viewed in the Books Queries document.
Additional visual representations of the Books Vault, also based upon Dataview queries, are provided by the Excalibrain Obsidian plugin.
The Obsidian Books Vault markdown contains metadata with tags allowing a variety of Obsidian Dataview queries. For example, the markdown of the book "Timequake" by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. has the following YAML prelude:
---
bookid: 9594
title: Timequake
author: Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
authors:
isbn: 0099267543
isbn13: 9780099267546
rating: 4
avgrating: 3.72
publisher: Vintage Classics
binding: Paperback
pages: 219
published: 1997
shelves: science-fiction, novels, vonnegut
shelf: read
review:
---The above book metadata can be used to perform Dataview queries to search, filter, and retrieve books as if they are in a database. For example, to produce a table of all books in this vault by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. published prior to 1970 add the following to a markdown file in the vault:
```dataview
TABLE
link(file.link, title) as Title,
author AS "Author",
published AS "Year"
FROM "Books"
WHERE author = "Kurt Vonnegut Jr." and published < 1970
SORT published ASC
```
Sample queries along with the code used to perform them can be viewed in the Books Queries document.
The 'Books' subfolder of this Obsidian vault was created by exporting my Goodreads library of books to CSV. I then used csvkit and command line tools to convert the CSV format Goodreads data to Markdown. Each Markdown document created in this way contains extensive metadata that can be used to query the vault with Dataview.
See the Process section below for details on this vault setup procedure.
The Books sub-vault is organized by author subfolders. For example, all books by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. are in the Books/Kurt_Vonnegut_Jr/ folder.
See the Process document for a detailed description of the tools and process used to generate this vault.
Obsidian community plugins we have found useful and can recommend include the following:
- Contextual Typography: Enables enhanced preview typography
- Dataview: Treats an Obsidian Vault as a database from which you can query
- Excalibrain: An interactive structured mind-map of an Obsidian vault
- Excalidraw: Edit and view Excalidraw in Obsidian
- Hider: Hides various elements of the UI
- Hover-editor: Turns the hover popover into a full featured editor
- Pandoc: Adds command palette options to export your notes to a variety of formats
- Quickadd: Quickly add content to a vault
- Shellcommands: Define and run shell commands
- Style Settings: Enables theme customization
- Templater: Defines a powerful templating language