those would be totally different isbns. to connect the related editions you'd probably need to get something like the FBR records for each work and idk if anna's archive has related books like that?
I know that isn't an AMA, but may I ask, how is running a publishing house working out for you? From the outside, having a small publishing house, sounds like an uphill battle on all fronts. What is the main driver to become a publisher - hobby turned into profession?
It's mostly still a hobby. I publish very few books and could do without being a "publisher". But being one allows me to exist in the official French databases where traditional bookshops can find my books and order with one click. Without that, they would have to search on Google, find a phone number or an email address, and they probably wouldn't even bother.
It's not a recipe for getting rich! But it works for me, (and costs almost nothing).
Huh, that text (and barcodes) are very offset from where they should be. Would you mind sharing what OS and browser you are using and if this text weirdness was temporary or all the time?
Wow, that is really cool. What an amazing passion project and what an incredible resource!
Zooming in you can see the titles, the barcode and hovering get a book cover and details. Incredible, everything you could want!
Some improvement ideas: checkbox to hide the floating white panel at top left, and the thing at top right. Because I really like to "immerse" in these visualizations, those floaters lift you out of that experience to some extent, limiting fun and functionality for me a bit.
Note: The presentation reflects the contents of Anna's archive exclusively, rather than the entire ISBN catalog. There is a discernible bias towards a limited range of languages, due to Anna's collection bias to those languages. The sections marked in black represent the missing entries in the archive.
That's not entirely accurate since AA has separate databases for books they have as files, and one for books they only know the metadata of. The metadata database comes from various sources and as far as I know is pretty complete.
Black should mostly be sections that have no assigned books
I found some books which are available from dozens of online bookshops but which are not in this visualisation. Perhaps they're not yet in any library that feeds into worldcat.org, though some of them were about five years old.
Did you search by title or ISBN? If you search by title, the search goes through Google Books, which is very incomplete (since I didn't build a search database myself). If you put in an ISBN13 directly, you'll find a lot more books are included (I'd say you can only find 10-30% of books via the Google Books API)
It's a bit misleading I guess the way I added that feature.
Does anyone know if there's an API where I could plug in ISBN and get all the libraries in the world that have that book?
I know Worldcat has something like this when you search for a book, but the API, I assume is only for library institutions and I'm not a library nor an institution.
This would be absolutely incredible to incorporate into VR. You could create such an intuitive organizational method adding a 3rd dimension for displaying.g
This would be absolutely incredible to incorporate into VR. You could create such an intuitive organizational method adding a 3rd dimension for displaying.
Books visible should be fairly complete as far as I know. But the search is pretty limited (and dependent on your location) because that uses the Google Books API. If you put in an ISBN13 directly, that should work more reliably.
It’s not uncommon for an ISBN to have been assigned multiple times to different books [0]. Thus “all books in ISBN space” may be an overstatement.
There’s also the problem of books with invalid ISBNs, i.e. where the check digit doesn’t match the rest of the ISBN, but where correcting the check digit would match a different book. These books would be outside of the ISBN space assumed by the blog post.
And possibly not even assigned at all. I looked at the lowest known ISBNs for Czech publishers and a different color stood out: no, https://books.google.cz/books?vid=ISBN9788000000015&redir_es... is not a correct ISBN, I'd say :-) (But I don't know if the book includes such obviously-fake ISBN, or the error is just in Google Books data.)
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 146 ms ] threadhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISBN#ISBN-10_to_ISBN-13_conver...
Although I don't know if this was the winning entry or not
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42652577 - Visualizing All ISBNs (2025-01-10, 139 comments)
https://i.imgur.com/mhw6Mub.png
It's not a recipe for getting rich! But it works for me, (and costs almost nothing).
Zooming in you can see the titles, the barcode and hovering get a book cover and details. Incredible, everything you could want!
Some improvement ideas: checkbox to hide the floating white panel at top left, and the thing at top right. Because I really like to "immerse" in these visualizations, those floaters lift you out of that experience to some extent, limiting fun and functionality for me a bit.
Note: The presentation reflects the contents of Anna's archive exclusively, rather than the entire ISBN catalog. There is a discernible bias towards a limited range of languages, due to Anna's collection bias to those languages. The sections marked in black represent the missing entries in the archive.
Black should mostly be sections that have no assigned books
It's a bit misleading I guess the way I added that feature.
Out of all the VR vapourware, a real life infinite library or infinite museum is the one thing that could conceivably get me dropping cash.
It would be far more interesting as a project which tried to make all legitimately available downloadable texts accessible, say as an interface to:
https://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/
I know Worldcat has something like this when you search for a book, but the API, I assume is only for library institutions and I'm not a library nor an institution.
There are more cool submissions here https://software.annas-archive.li/AnnaArchivist/annas-archiv...
Mine is at https://isbnviz.pages.dev
There’s also the problem of books with invalid ISBNs, i.e. where the check digit doesn’t match the rest of the ISBN, but where correcting the check digit would match a different book. These books would be outside of the ISBN space assumed by the blog post.
[0] https://scis.edublogs.org/2017/09/28/the-dreaded-case-of-dup...