> That is a very cool idea! I've been thinking about something like that to help fund the website, which is a network of book trades, and you get credit for a new used book for every trade. Although I was going to charge $10 a year or $1 a book to go 80% toward authors and 20% toward the website.

Sounds like a nice way to generate some funding, especially as you already have a number of users on your site to start with. I have no idea how much bureaucracy it takes to be able to take 5% of each transaction or so, so I'll probably leave mine completely free - if I ever get the time to implement it, that is.

> When I last looked in 2020, the data quality on open library was really bad, so I didn't use them.

> Now things are 90% automated, but we still have to source a high quality cover for each book as the book APIs have such small images.

Not great, since that would have been a starting point for me. ;) Cool though, that you can invest into a custom database, since you can tailor it to your task and aren't relying on potentially bad data.

> I am hoping to expand our book DB in 2025 to all books for a lot of the new features.

Is there a public roadmap somewhere for the features?

> I also could have been too pedantic back in 2020 when i looked at them :)

Maybe, maybe not. It takes huge effort to go back and improve a system relying on bad data, especially if it's already a certain size. I know from experience, as my company just did that with a large internal catalogue. Not fun.