New Books Watch Program will monitor a custom list of authors and email a notice whenever a new book is published by any author on the list. The script uses LibraryThing.com as a backend database, but you don't need an account, it is accessed anonymously.

For source and documentation see the New Books BitBucket page. A unix shell with cron access is needed (should work under cygwin). Copy-paste or save nb.sh in its own directory. This should take 5 or 10 minutes to install and get running, no extra software needed.

NOTE: If it stops working, check back for a new version. The script works by "scraping" HTML output from LibraryThing - thus if LT changes its HTML code, you'll need a new copy of the script. In practice LT has been stable for many years.

Example email output:

Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2012 06:10:44 -0400
From: notify@balbach.net
To: stephen@balbach.net
Subject: New Books at LibraryThing

1 new work for Mark Lynas (lynasmark)

* The God Species: How Humans Really Can Save the Planet...

http://www.librarything.com/author/lynasmark