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Visualizing All ISBNs
- greenie_beans 2y agois it illegal to download and use their isbn file? like what is wrong with having that information?
- karel-3d 2y agoI don't think this page, which links to libgen and sci-hub, is that concerned about copyright.
- greenie_beans 2y agoannoying non-answer to my question. i already know all about anna's archive. i'm asking if a person can download these isbns and use them to make data visualizations without fear of breaking a law? https://software.annas-archive.li/AnnaArchivist/annas-archive/-/blob/main/isbn_images/aa_isbn13_codes_20241204T185335Z.benc.zst https://software.annas-archive.li/AnnaArchivist/annas-archiv...
- salomonk_mur 2y agoThey explicitly provide that data for you to do as you wish. They are in a grey area, not you. You can download it no problem.
- greenie_beans 2y agois there legal precedent for that? already asked LLMs so please don't copy/paste an LLM response.
- eemil 2y agoDepends on your jurisdiction.
- karel-3d 2y agoSorry, I misunderstood your question.
- qingcharles 2y agoSeeing as nobody has provided a real answer. The question is, maybe. Anna's Archive is getting sued currently for scraping vast amounts of essentially public metadata which was being gate-keeped by a single organisation. Here's the longer and more complicated answer for you: https://libraries.emory.edu/research/copyright/copyright-data https://libraries.emory.edu/research/copyright/copyright-dat...
- greenie_beans 2y agofeist is what comes up when i search around, too. the ISBNs might be poisoned if anna broke terms of service to get the ISBNs
- skrebbel 2y agoI thought it was my color blindness that made me not able to distinguish between the red and green pixels as described (i only see red and black ones), but even with a browser extension that counters color blindness i can't distinguish more colors. Is this just me, or is the graph weird?
- superzamp 2y agoThe graph seems to be alright, there are indeed red and (some) green pixels, looks like an issue with your extension unfortunately.
- psychoslave 2y agoNo idea of were the issue might land, but I can see the difference in colors.
- rendx 2y agoI see green dots and a few lines of green dots. Did you try zooming in?
- asfasdfasdfn 2y agoThe graphs are very easy to read, albeit depend on your ability to distinguish between red and green. Can you change the green channel to blue to better view it?
- saithound 2y agoFwiw (not color-blind) I can see red, green and black pixels. The graph doesn't look weird to the naked eye. Find the interactive visualiser by scrolling down, and switch it to "Files in Anna's Archive [md5]". This will highlight the location of the green pixels in grey.
- Finnucane 2y agoI am also color blind and the graph is not good.
- Muehe 2y agoIf you have red-green blindness like me try this: - Right-click the image and select "Inspect". - Add a new CSS hue-rotate filter to the element: element { max-width: 100%; margin: 0 auto; filter: hue-rotate(-90deg); } Usually I use "filter: saturate(100);", but that didn't really work well for this image. You might have to adjust the rotation degree though, -90 worked best for me.
- whataguy 2y ago> Each pixel represents 2,500 ISBNs. If we have a file for an ISBN, we make that pixel more green. What do you mean by "more green"? I don't see any shaded green. And I presume the black pixels are unregistered ISBNs?
- lmm 2y agoIf you look closely there are definitely some brownish pixels and some dim greens.
- slyall 2y agoI'd suggest you try a color blindness test. The green is very obvious, especially about 40% of the way down the whole image.
- whataguy 2y agoNo, I see the green, but I don't see any shaded green. Though this has probably to do that ISBNs are distributed in blocks and every pixel is either red or green?
- quink 2y agoKind of hard to tell what corresponds to what in these graphs, maybe if someone could point out Bookland (i.e. 978), it would be a bit easier to orient oneself?
- seszett 2y agoMaking it easier to visualise is the whole point of the bounty announced by this post.
- eporomaa 2y agoHm, I got: "... European sanctions The Council of Europe has decided that the websites of RT (formerly Russia Today) and Sputnik News may no longer be transmitted. The website you are trying to visit falls under this European sanction. ..."
- TonyTrapp 2y agoWorks fine here from a European IP.
- jaapz 2y agoIt's blocked at least in the Netherlands. Weirdly it mentions it being part of the sanctions against Russia, while from a cursory search I only found a judge ordering the site to be blocked because of copyright issues (thanks Brein). They probably just show the wrong error page?
- rchard2scout 2y agoIt's blocked by my corporate networking filter for me, in the category "Illegal downloads". So the Russian sanctions message is probably incorrect indeed.
- Cthulhu_ 2y agoMust be ISP specific, I'm also in NL and can access it fine.
- jaapz 2y agoI'm on Ziggo
- rollulus 2y agoI'm also in NL. Ziggo's DNS server blocks it: $ dig annas-archive.org @89.101.251.228 annas-archive.org. 360 IN CNAME unavailable.for.legal.reasons. unavailable.for.legal.reasons. 339 IN A 213.46.185.10 213.46.185.10 serves a generic page mentioning Russia Today and the Pirate Bay. Not sure which one applies here.
- Over2Chars 2y ago[flagged]
- jillesvangurp 2y agoThe problem with such judgment is that they are subjective and subject to biases that change over time. Almost every scrap of information from ancient civilizations is considered priceless at this point because so few is left of it. Anything from obscene graffiti, shopping lists, personal messages, etc. All of it. Many autocratic regimes editorialize and censure all forms of publications. But even in the US, which is nominally still a democracy you now have states like Florida forcing changes to literature works and banning books entirely for religious and ideological reasons. And this is not just a right wing thing. There have been a few publishers that took it upon themselves to editorialize literature from the 19th and 20th century to get rid of some things that are now considered sexist, racist or otherwise offensive. The whole cancel culture is not just about canceling people, but about limiting access to their work as well. I was at a Christmas market in Berlin a few weeks ago near the Opera. There's a nice little monument there for the book burning that happened in the 1930s. Anything that was vaguely intellectual or Jewish in origin was burned right there during the Kristallnacht. Nice place for a Christmas market and a grim reminder that those calling for things to be deleted/cancelled aren't necessarily very nice people. And of course Hitler himself got cancelled. Possession or distribution of his books is still not allowed in Germany. Anyway, imagine somebody in 5000 years finding their way to some archive of hacker news or some reddit thread might look differently at the value of some of the comments than the average moderator.
- Over2Chars 2y agoAll action is "subjective and subject to biases that change over time". This would then imply I could never take any action, because it's just subjective and biased. Maybe that's an exaggeration of your position, but you do seem to be suggesting inaction or the impossibility of judgement. I reject this position 100%. I would suggest that judgement is a critical part of our civilization, and it's judgement that says those bits of obscene graffiti in Pompeii that makes it so. Or else they could say "well, we can't claim ancient cave art is priceless, because we're biased and our biases will change over time. Maybe in a thousand years we'll discover that ancient cave art is worthless, so we'll do nothing". In fact you have judged my opinions and shared your judgement with me. Good job! Your characterization of regimes as autocratic is judgmental, biased and will change over time. But right now that's your judgement and I applaud it, even if I disagree. Gosh, book burning. Not backing up a romance novel or cookbook is definitely analogous to book burning, but I'll play along. It was a symbolic act to show a rejection of ideas, not an attempt to eradicate the books, much in the same way Gandhi encouraged the burning of foreign made clothing and products. He wasn't going to rid the world of British cloth nor were the Germans going to rid the world of non-German ideas. So yeah, when all the badly written cook books, romance novels, and children's books are in a huge bonfire, you can blame me, personally.
- sebstefan 2y ago>$10,000 bounty >There is much to explore here, so we’re announcing a bounty for improving the visualization above. Unlike most of our bounties, this one is time-bound. You have to submit your open source code by 2025-01-31 (23:59 UTC). >The best submission will get $6,000, second place is $3,000, and third place is $1,000. >All bounties will be awarded using Monero (XMR). ? Why are they using crypto, and, weirdly enough, specifically the crypto people use for buying drugs, to award this? Is it some kind of scam?
- friend_Fernando 2y ago[flagged]
- akimbostrawman 2y agowhat a bunch of nonsense
- thomasingalls 2y agoMajor efforts at creating "everything" libraries are usually looked upon as a positive effort that benefits all of humanity, and we generally mourn the loss of any such effort, regardless of whether the effort is against the laws of the state at the time the effort was undertaken, or even if the collection was created in a morally reprehensible way. See: Library of Alexandria, Library of Congress, GenBank, the Svalbard seed vault, Google Books, Internet Archive and all its efforts, ...the Louvre, and most major museums. In general, we collectively recognize - without having to be told - that preservation of knowledge is a noble and worthy effort that transcends the fleeting whims of a population at a point in time. All that to say, people probably don't need to be tricked into liking such efforts. They're popular because of what they are.
- friend_Fernando 2y agoNo one is objecting to knowledge preservation - when you just preserve it instead of abundantly replicating it with a wink. Reasonable people are objecting to copyright law violation, for the simple reason that it disincentivizes further knowledge creation. Even more reasonable people are objecting to weaponizing copyright law violation on behalf of the vilest dictatorship on the planet.
- starlite-5008 2y ago[dead]
- billpg 2y agoAnyone else seeing this? "This server couldn't prove that it's annas-archive.org; its security certificate is from *.hs.llnwd.net. This may be caused by a misconfiguration or an attacker intercepting your connection."
- c0balt 2y agoNo, sounds like you are being mitm for them. Though the domain appears like a legitimate CDN.
- swores 2y agoSame for me
- masfuerte 2y agoYes. A DNS request for annas-archive.org to my ISP (EE in the UK) returns an address for www.ukispcourtorders.co.uk, which also gives a security warning. If I click through the warning on either site I get an HTTP 400 error. According to Wikipedia, www.ukispcourtorders.co.uk used to list the blocked domains and the court orders responsible. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_blocked_in_the_United_Kingdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_blocked_in_th...
- usr1106 2y agoI get a valid-looking cert issued by Google Trust Services. Finnish ISP's DNS.
- WillAdams 2y agoThe thing is, ISBNs aren't hierarchical --- they are bought in blocks (or even individually at an exorbitant markup, says the guy who bought one to reprint a single book), so this doesn't show anything really interesting/useful. A visualization using LoC or even Dewey Decimal would be far more useful, esp. if it also linked to public domain and copyright-free repositories/lists, say an interactive and visual version of John Mark Ockerbloom's: https://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/ https://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/
- MarceColl 2y agoIt shows what they want to show, which is mostly how much of the world books they have. Hierarchical has nothing to do with it.
- Finnucane 2y agoIt only sort of shows that. ISBNs are issued by edition, not title, so many books would have more than one. And books published before 1970 or so might not be represented at all if they have no recent edition.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 2y agoThey can't even have a tiny fraction of the world's books. Each edition of the book gets a new ISBN... if a book is released as a paperback, hardback, kindle edition, pdf, and epub then there are supposed to be five ISBNs. The vast, vast majority have only been released as dead-tree versions. They have none of those. The books they scan may have an ISBN, but the scans do not have them. Like all Project Gutenberg books, their books have no ISBNs at all. From a strict point of view, they've released new editions of these books.
- nickelpro 2y agoWorthless semantics in the context of the mission of the project. What you've described is that the archived content can be mapped to multiple ISBNs. It's clear the only element of concern here is the content itself. The failure to preserve a particular binding or printer's choice of typeface is irrelevant. Failing to recognize this requires an almost malicious level of pedantry
- jdblair 2y agoIt appears that the IP of the server is blocked in the EU. I get this from my ISP (Ziggo, in the Netherlands): Deze website is geblokkeerd Europese sancties De Raad van Europa heeft besloten dat de websites van RT (voorheen Russia Today) en Sputnik News niet meer mogen worden doorgegeven. De website die je probeert te bezoeken, valt onder deze Europese sanctie. VodafoneZiggo is verplicht de sanctie uit te voeren en heeft de website geblokkeerd.
- voytec 2y agoWorks in Poland, but here you go: https://web.archive.org/web/20250106112552/https://annas-archive.org/blog/all-isbns.html https://web.archive.org/web/20250106112552/https://annas-arc...
- hk__2 2y agoNo issue here in France.
- manosyja 2y agoRunning your own recursive resolver has certain advantages…
- jdblair 2y agoAnd I was so close! I just disabled forwarding to my ISP DNS on my home DNS, now there is no block.
- usr1106 2y agoNo issue in Finland.
- jdblair 2y agoUPDATE: I updated my DNS server config (I run my own already) to use root DNS rather than forward to my ISP, problem solved.
- glimshe 2y agoAnna's archive is one of the wonders of the world. If we almost destroyed our species but Anna's archive endured, there would be hope for a relatively expedient reconstruction.
- wayathr0w 2y ago>relatively expedient reconstruction If self-destruction is a necessary premise here, is that really a good thing?
- graypegg 2y agoI see that bounty at the bottom, so tossing away my chances here, but this visualization is just asking to be mapped onto a Hilbert Curve. [0] When you "stripe" the data like this, points that are sorted close together could end up pretty far apart, since a distance in the Y axis skips an entire row of data as you move down, rather than a distance in the X axis which is 1-to-1 with the source data. If you map it onto a hilbert curve, the X and Y axis mean nothing, but visually points that are close together in the sorted list, will be visually close together in the output image. Since the first part of an ISBN is the country, then the second part is the publisher, and the third part is the title, with a check sum at the end, I would remove the checksum and sort them each as a big number. (no hyphens) You should end up with "islands", where you see big areas covered by big publishing countries, with these "islands" having bright spots for the publisher codes. Bonus points for labeling these areas! I set up something a while ago [1] for an interview that does this with weather data. It makes the seasons really obvious since they're all grouped together. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilbert_curve https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilbert_curve [1] https://graypegg.com/hilbert https://graypegg.com/hilbert (https://github.com/graypegg/hilbertcurveplayground https://github.com/graypegg/hilbertcurveplayground code if anyone wants to go for the prize using this! Please at least mention me if you decide to reuse this code, but I can't stop ya lol)
- abetusk 2y agoAnd there's a generalized Hilbert curve, the Gilbert curve, for non powers of two rectangular regions [0] (online demo [1]). [0] https://github.com/jakubcerveny/gilbert https://github.com/jakubcerveny/gilbert [1] https://jakubcerveny.github.io/gilbert/demo/ https://jakubcerveny.github.io/gilbert/demo/
- n2d4 2y agoWhat property makes the Hilbert curve desirable compared to, say, a snake pattern, with which neighbouring ISBNs are also neighbours in the visualisation? The worry I have with Hilbert curves is that they make the result look like there are distinct "squares" of data [0] when really this is just an artifact of how Hilbert curves work. In that sense, the current visualization is more useful, because it's straightforward to identify the location of each country in it. [0] https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jakubcerveny/gilbert/master/img/55x31.png https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jakubcerveny/gilbert/maste...
- qingcharles 2y agoNow do ISSNs, please.
- ge96 2y agoOoh prize money, D3 those are fun, where you can map a million things/zoom into it
- usr1106 2y agoWhat is Anna's archive and why is it blocked by law enforcement in several European countries (EU + UK)?
- netman21 2y agoHee, hee. "Imperial Library of Trantor."
- friend_Fernando 2y agoIsn't it interesting how certain online forces affiliated with the letter Z are against copyright for Western IP in general, but are pro copyright when it comes to hamstringing Western AI?
- CaptainFever 2y agoThe letter Z? What does that mean?
- aspenmayer 2y agoProbably a reference to Z-Library, or as a stand-in for Russia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z-Library https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z-Library https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z_(military_symbol) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z_(military_symbol)