The OpenBook WordPress Plugin by John Miedema can be used to easily reference books from inside your WordPress blog and automatically pull covers and book data from Open Library.

We’re quite excited to see people using Open Library and building new tools using our public APIs.

Here’s an example of using the plugin:

[openbook booknumber=”0143034650″]

This book was pulled in by using this tag in the WordPress post:
[openbook booknumber="0143034650"]

The “booknumber” in this case is an ISBN book identifier and is causing a search behind the scenes.

You can also use the Open Library opaque IDs to refer to a book when the ISBN isn’t available (e.g. for books published before ISBN existed!)

In that case your link would look like this:
[openbook booknumber="/b/OL14015131M"]

Many of the Open Library books (particularly older ones) do not have a cover associated with them, but you can add one from the Open Library page for that book!

The OpenBook article in the Code4Lib journal describes some of the design decisions and implementation. (Note: the article mentions the old [openbook]0864921535[/openbook] way of using the openbook shortcode. The newer [openbook booknumber="0864921535"] style should now be used instead.)