3 ms·

Bibliographies of books I find useful, for nonfiction. Specific author recommendations. The related-books adverts at the end of many books. Literary magazine

Bibliographies of books I find useful, for nonfiction. Specific author recommendations. The related-books adverts at the end of many books. Literary magazines within genres of interest. Book reviews: NY Times, London Review of Books, LA Review of Books, New York Review of Books, Kirkus Reviews, etc. Catalogues. Worldcat's been considerably enshittified in recent years, but remains useful. Open Library is increasingly appropriate. ZLibrary's recommendations tend to be surprisingly useful, though it's harder to access these days.

cpach 3y ago
Semi-related: Yeah what happened to Worldcat? It seems almost abandoned, or?
- dredmorbius 3y ago
  It's not abandoned, it's enshittified. There was a major rewrite a year ago August. Among other things: - The site no longer works without a JS-enabled browser. I used to be able to query the site from a terminal session via w3m or by parsing output. No longer. - There's a lot of data surveillance going on, and at least for a while information about queries were being shared to both Google and Facebook. See: <https://nitter.net/libraryprivacy/status/1570183006689673222 https://nitter.net/libraryprivacy/status/1570183006689673222> <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33475890 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33475890>. - Some really cool data-sharing capabilities based on JSON and other data formats of bibliographic RDF triples have been entirely removed (they were broken for many months prior to the rollout). If you're interested in querying or acquiring bibliographic data for specific records ... that's become considerably more difficult. (I believe Calibre, Zotero, and similar tools may still be able to fetch this data, I've not looked into those.) The upshot is lower usability and accessibilty, increased surveillance, and more difficulty in sharing data with other tools / projects.

cpach 3y ago

Semi-related: Yeah what happened to Worldcat? It seems almost abandoned, or?

dredmorbius 3y ago
It's not abandoned, it's enshittified. There was a major rewrite a year ago August. Among other things: - The site no longer works without a JS-enabled browser. I used to be able to query the site from a terminal session via w3m or by parsing output. No longer. - There's a lot of data surveillance going on, and at least for a while information about queries were being shared to both Google and Facebook. See: <https://nitter.net/libraryprivacy/status/1570183006689673222 https://nitter.net/libraryprivacy/status/1570183006689673222> <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33475890 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33475890>. - Some really cool data-sharing capabilities based on JSON and other data formats of bibliographic RDF triples have been entirely removed (they were broken for many months prior to the rollout). If you're interested in querying or acquiring bibliographic data for specific records ... that's become considerably more difficult. (I believe Calibre, Zotero, and similar tools may still be able to fetch this data, I've not looked into those.) The upshot is lower usability and accessibilty, increased surveillance, and more difficulty in sharing data with other tools / projects.