Just found your note and the post. Strangely that thread had been on my radar due to @Bmosbacker comments around tasks.
I will give your idea some thought. I see value in focus areas, my challenge I’m interested in many things and much of it could be relevant to my professional work.
@jsamlarose I think the shortcut problem came because I first downloaded on my Mac. Assuming that ToolboxPro was already available on the MacOS.
Progress or a lack thereof.
TLDR - I’ve got a half baked version running and fear the effort it would take to do it well. Even as recovering software developer, I find Shortcuts a pain to use.
I took a whack at it this last week on my sabbatical week. It made me realize just how painful shortcuts development is in general. The lack of version control and undo/redo really gets in the way.
I got this shortcut:
Shortcuts - which relies on ToolboxPro, to the basic level with a few hours work. (Thanks @jsamlarose for the core of this shortcut). Once I had the shortcut there, I thought it would be cool if it took input from the sharesheet. I.E. I select the title of a book on a page and invoke the shortcut from the sharesheet. Except my attempts to use that as input broke the original shortcut. Since there is no easy version control I had to rebuild by borrowing parts from the original. Uggggghhhh.
The whole experience is made worse, when the shortcuts app continually tries to decide what it thinks I want. It replaced variables with what it thought I needed, expect it never was. I’m sure you’ve experienced this as well.
Other details
I’ve also made a trivial page:
TABLE Author FROM "Sources/BookNotes" WHERE status = "📥"
and Discarded:
TABLE Author FROM "Sources/BookNotes" WHERE status = "🗑️"
Since my BookTitle column is still called File and not “Title” - I think we can see that I don’t know much about Dataview.
Finally the Discarded section represents the idea that sometimes I get a book recommendation and it doesn’t work. (Dark Matter - Blake Crouch), I want to remember that I rejected these books so they don’t come up again.
The best way really I have found is just to use a bibliography program. I actually do it now through DEVONthink 3 though.
I was just double entering stuff in Bookends before. I don’t need extensive formatting now, which was the main reason for me to have a special program.
I just have a Keyboard Maestro snippet that names a new text file so I know it is bibliographical and when created and then just Author Title date and a ‘comments’ or finder note with it, or really now I just put the note in the text file. I can just search or list in DEVONthink 3. It works really well. You could just have a database for bibliography too. Just do Author title etc in the text file names.
Or simply keep a few ‘lists’ in Amazon which is partly what I do really I think. Without realizing it almost you might say.
My strategy when I have to have a book is to get a sample sent to my iPad. 95% of the time I never look at it, thus saving a good bit of money (and shelf space).
For a variety of reasons I don’t want to use Amazon.
@JohnAtl downloading a sample chapter is clever. In my case it increases the likelihood I would actually buy the book.
Your public library may have a list function, and an easy export to email.
There’s also WorldCat, a free resprce for libraries to facilitate interlibrary loans. You can search without an account, accounts are free and allow you to maintain private lists.
A webclipping of the list might be a way to move the data.
Libraries tend to have stringent user privacy and data standards.
Fair enough: and frankly maybe that is something I should consider myself. Practice what I preach regrading the monopoly!
(A bit late response…here goes).
Absolutely recommend this. I use LibraryThing and have scanned 150+ books in.
It’s got many ways to sort and look at your data (books). (Also, you can export data out as well - JSON and some other formats I think). You can tag and maintain any lists as you want.
If you still would like to work the Obsidian way you have set up, the data is all there for your copy paste. Sometimes, the ISBN varies due to the edition/country, etc, but that’s a small problem compared to manually do this 
.
You may love this little App：BookBuddy
The Pro version isn’t expensive and I bought it years ago.
They also have MusicBuddy and MovieBuddy.