How to Suggest a Book

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As this website serves the newsgroup, uk.religion.christian, there is no mechanism for submitting material to the site other than via participation in the group. So, to semi-automate suggestions for the Recommended Reading list, I have written a simple text-based template that you can use when posting a book suggestion. To use this, just format your post using this template for the book information:

        title: 
       author:
 suggested-by:
  amazon-asin:
     comments:

All fields should be single, unbroken lines except the last, which can be multi-line and will be terminated by a blank line. None of the fields are required except the first (title); the parser will start parsing at the first instance of 'title:' it sees and stop at the first blank line it encounters afterwards.

Spaces before the keywords are ignored; I've aligned them along the colons for visual convenience but this isn't necessary for the parser. The parser is also capable of ignoring standard quote characters at the beginning of the line containg the keywords, so you can also make suggestions by replying to a post containing the template and editing it.

'suggested-by' should be your name (if you want credit for suggesting it).

'amazon-asin' will allow the display script to pull in things like sleeve images and prices from Amazon's RSS feed. For books, the ASIN is usually the same as the ISBN.

'comments' is for you to say a little about why you are recommending the book.

For example...

        title: Lost Icons: Reflections on Cultural Bereavement
       author: Rowan Williams
 suggested-by: Mark Goodge
  amazon-asin: 0567087220
     comments: I bought this book after hearing the author speak at
Greenbelt a couple of years ago. I'm not an Anglican, but I found it an
interesting insight into the mind of one of the most important Christian
figures in public life.

You can see a real-life example in Message-ID: <36r99nF56e34qU7@individual.net> (available here at Google Groups UK).