1. Shortcut: WorldCat Search
  2. Shortcut: WorldCat Markdown Link

Until recently, I used Amazon almost exclusively for sharing links to books. But you may have noticed that in the last month or so I’ve been linking to WorldCat instead. WorldCat still shows you where to find a book on Amazon but it also offers other options, including which nearby libraries have what you’re looking for. I got this idea from @craigmcclellan who shares music in a similar way.

And thanks to Craig and his @theclassnerd co-host Robby Burns, I also learned how to create Shortcuts on iOS. So now, when I want to share a book on my blog, here’s what I do.

  1. Look up a book on WorldCat through their website or through the WorldCat Search Shortcut, which will find your book on WorldCat after you scan its barcode.
  2. With the book’s WorldCat page open, I run WorldCat Markdown Link. This copies a pre-formatted markdown link for the page to my clipboard.
  3. Then, I paste the link.

If this looks useful to you, download the Shortcuts and try it for yourself. You can modify them to suit your needs.

At the moment, these Shortcuts work perfectly in Safari. In the future, I’d like to get the same results on other browsers. If you can figure out how to do that, I’d love to hear from you.