9 ms·

The Perils of ISBN

160 points by evakhoury 8mo ago

toomuchtodo 8mo ago
If the author sees this comment, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43168838 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43168838 might be relevant as it relates to catalogue completeness. OpenLibrary is very good, but Anna's Archive is potentially more complete.
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
bell-cot 8mo ago
The first few para's of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISBN https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISBN are a better summary of the issue. tl;dr; - The ISBN is intended to be a physical Part Number, within the book business. Where "hardcover, or paperback, or trade paperback, or large print, or revised edition, or ..." very much matters.
rahimnathwani 8mo ago
I'm not sure we always want 'works'. Sometimes different 'expressions' of the same work are different enough that they don't have the same value. For example, compare the most recent edition of 'Straight and crooked thinking' with the one published in 1930.
- vidarh 8mo ago
  I don't know that work, but I agree with you in general because of forewords etc. Or even appendices. And translations by different translators. I "grew up with" a specific translation of Lord of the Rings into Norwegian, for example. There are two. They are very different. But the editions also differ in whether they include the appendices, whose illustrations are used, and more.
  - stackghost 8mo ago
    >They are very different. Are we talking material plot or characterisation changes?
    - Cordiali 8mo ago
      I know Norwegian also has two different written standards, found an example that demonstrates it: >English: I will not tell anyone the secret. >Bokmål: Jeg skal ikke fortelle hemmeligheten til noen. >Nynorsk: Eg skal ikkje fortelja løyndomen til nokon. Source: https://www.visitnorway.com/typically-norwegian/norwegian-language/ https://www.visitnorway.com/typically-norwegian/norwegian-la...
      - vidarh 8mo ago
        Yeah, so really there are at least 3 translations of Lord of the Rings, to continue that example, and I was being a typical Bokmål user and ignored Nynorsk. The title differences are also a good illustration of how different it can be: Bokmål: Kampen om Ringen, Ringenes Herre (the first one is literally "the battle for the ring") Nynorsk: Ringdrotten
    - vidarh 8mo ago
      No, but many of the names are different, and stylistically they are very different. Depending on whether a translation tries to be fairly literal, or sound as if it is written for the language it is translated to the way the result feels will be very different. An example is the name Bilbo Baggins. In the "canonical" Norwegian translation, he's become Bilbo Lommelun. "Lomme" means pocket, and "lun" means snug, warm, or comfortable. It's not literal, but it fits the nature of hobbits well while referencing the "bag" in Baggins", and the connotations comes immediately in Norwegian without having try to deconstruct the name. In this case, I think the newer "canonical" translation is generally considered unambiguously the best, but people often have favourite translations. E.g. my favourite Scandinavian translation of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass isn't even Norwegian, but an old Danish translation which sounds much "softer" (it's hard to explain)
- RobotToaster 8mo ago
  The most obvious example of this is the innumerable[0] versions of the Christian bible. [0] Before anyone says it, I'm sure some bible nerd has numbered them, it's hyperbole.
- crazygringo 8mo ago
  I think the point is, you want a single work when searching. Then click on the item and drill down into editions sorted by year, or whatever. But when you're doing search, it's terrible UX to be flooding it with tens of editions mixed in with other things with similar titles.
davtyan1202 8mo ago
[flagged]
millicentricism 8mo ago
This also fails to take into account that ISBNs also contain the publisher ID in them. So identical copies of a book could have different ISBNs depending on which markets they are sold in.
- boznz 8mo ago
  I'm not sure this is the case, I got my ISBN range through my government national library service, I could be wrong but when you let them know what the book is you are publishing they ask for the Publisher name, though I am guessing as the service is free and it only applies to New Zealand books and publications.
- ilamont 8mo ago
  They don't contain the publisher name, but ISBNs are usually purchased in blocks of 10 or 100 or 1000 or whatever by a single entity, which is often a single publisher or corporation. However, within the block publishers can assign ISBNs to different imprints.
  - NoMoreNicksLeft 8mo ago
    For ISBNs from the big 5, the number really does indicate the publisher. I think the 5th digit (second after 978) can indicate at least some of the big publishers. Smaller ranges are available for purchase from the brokers. In Canada, the national library will even issue you one for free, if you self-publish. The ISBN always indicates the country it's from, the United States getting the biggest block, other European nations and Japan getting their own, with Africa, the Middle East, and so forth all getting a block in common.
    - blue1 8mo ago
      ISBN prefixes does not always indicate a country. They may be are indeed countries, but others are language areas (e.g. 0/1=English) or "regions" (groups of countries) or even other subjects. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ISBN_registration_groups https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ISBN_registration_grou...
CodesInChaos 8mo ago
I read that it's much worse than that, and there are ISBNs that were reused for completely different books.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 8mo ago
  I've stumbled across 3 or 4 magazines that printed the wrong ISSN in more than one issue. One from the 80s did so in every single issue of it's 20some issue run. It must be true that some books have done so as well, but I don't even check that those are correct.
- joemi 8mo ago
  In my experience this is very very rare. Rare enough that it's practically negligible.
  - CodesInChaos 8mo ago
    Even if it's rare, it means a database like goodreads can't assume that an IBAN is linked to only a single book.
    - joemi 8mo ago
      It's rarer than cases of movie titles being reused, so in the context of the article, it's more than adequate, since letterboxd's title-based movie lookup is stated to be a better system. For example, here's a non-exhaustive but still pretty long list of movies with reused titles: https://www.imdb.com/list/ls083468410/ https://www.imdb.com/list/ls083468410/
- rmunn 8mo ago
  I've been cataloguing my books using the ISBN to look them up, and I think I ran into that situation a few times, maybe about 0.2% of all the books I catalogued. (That is, the ISBN search on openlibrary.org returned multiple clearly-different books for the ISBN I searched for). I didn't pay much attention to it so I can't tell you which ISBNs were duplicates, but I've definitely seen it happen. But there is at least one case where it was on purpose. There's a set of reading primers from the UK called the Biff, Chip and Kipper books. We acquired a whole set of them at a garage sale, and when I went to enter them into my catalogue, I discovered that the publisher had assigned just one ISBN to the whole series. Which quite annoyed me when I discovered it. (I ended up just not cataloguing those books, because I didn't want to type the titles, author, copyright date, etc. in by hand for 50+ tiny books).
amiga386 8mo ago
This reminds me of MusicBrainz, whose database stores "release groups", e.g. the album Nevermind by Nirvana is one, which can have hundreds of "releases", as different media (tape, CD, LP, promo, ...), different countries, later re-issues, etc. [0] Sometimes these have different catalogue numbers or barcodes to distinguish them, sometimes they don't but they're still different. I've seen releases where the only difference is the label in the centre of the LP, or the back of the CD case has a two-column tracklisting vs a one-column tracklisting. Music publisher uses the same code and says it's identical and yet it's clearly not. Then there's the "recordings" on an album, which even if they're never re-recorded can still end up chopped up, bleeped or remastered. They're not the same sound. MusicBrainz likes to track when they are exactly the same recording (e.g. the LP recording of a song appearing on a compilation album verbatim) and when they're not (e.g. radio edits of the LP recording). And if we're going beyond recordings by one artist of "their" song, i.e. cover versions, or just plain standards, those are "works", with composers, lyricists, and can be recorded thousands of times by different artists... I greatly appreciate the pedantry and flexibility for noting down when creative works are the same versus where they differ, in relational database form. [0] https://musicbrainz.org/release-group/1b022e01-4da6-387b-8658-8678046e4cef https://musicbrainz.org/release-group/1b022e01-4da6-387b-865...
- SamWhited 8mo ago
  They actually have a (very new, still alpha, probably not a ton of data yet) database for books: https://bookbrainz.org/about https://bookbrainz.org/about I haven't looked into what their schema is like, but if it's anything like Musicbrainz it will be pretty comprehensive and easy to pull the data you want out of!
  - NoMoreNicksLeft 8mo ago
    That's the post I made on r/plex a decade ago that pissed off a dumbass moderator and got me banned from there! I guess he hated books. I've recently been doing data entry on Open Library... sometimes even worldcat doesn't have an OCLC for an edition, and Open Lib is my fallback. Maybe I should be doing it on Bookbrainz instead.
jiggawatts 8mo ago
My state had a reading competition that listed books by ISBN, which was a real challenge for students to track down. Each library had different editions and even different cover art, so if you “found” the book you might not recognise it on the shelf, etc… I worked on the library systems and one of my innovations was to use the ISBN mapping database of WorldCat to find books with identical content but different ISBNs to help kids find the books on the list. Over ten years that one SQL join in the code made the kids read an extra million books they wouldn’t have otherwise. My biggest “bang for buck” in my career!
- DiggyJohnson 8mo ago
  That is amazing. For odd reasons I had to get real familiar with ISBN as well. What did that sql command look like if you don’t mind me asking?
  - jiggawatts 8mo ago
    Literally just a join against a lookup table of alternate ISBNs. So the ISBNs in the reading list were first “expanded” with all possible titles, then they were matched to the books actually in the library. The ISBN alternatives table was just groups with an integer ID shared by each group. My import process synthesised this from worldcat data, which was more messy.
jdranczewski 8mo ago
If anyone in the comments is in a similar predicament to the author and would like a book logging app, I will say that I disagree on their judgement of StoryGraph - I've found it a pretty decent interface, the search function is very good, and the (anti)features mentioned in the footnote are incredibly easy to not use, as the creators seem to understand that many of their users have a very strong preference to avoid AI bloat.
- KPGv2 8mo ago
  https://hardcover.app https://hardcover.app is another choice. It's the one I've been using since right after the second Trump inauguration when I decided to "de-oligarch" as much as possible.
saithir 8mo ago
Sometimes we definitely want 'items' though, so for example I am in a physical bookstore and see a book I might be interested in, so I buy it, to find out later back home that I already have the very same book - and edition - already. It's a scenario that anyone with some amount of books definitely encountered multiple times, I know I did it myself a few times. :) Ability of an ISBN search of my collection would have helped me in this case - scanning a barcode is easy enough task to accomplish. And even if I had a different edition, the resulting title from searching for a different edition would be enough to help me figure out that I should not buy a book I already own.
- eudamoniac 8mo ago
  Genuinely how is this possible? I have nearly a thousand ebooks and I'm certain whether I have or don't have one, because I obtained it deliberately. Are you buying books by the foot or something?
  - f0cus10 8mo ago
    Faced this problem multiple times before. Tbf, I did buy and subsequently transport enough books in luggages to restore a country's economy
  - joemi 8mo ago
    I'm not the person you were asking but it's happened to me too, with physical books, not e-books. I don't know if I can explain how it happens. I'd say that me not knowing the exact content of my bookshelf is similar to me not knowing the exact content of my fridge and pantry. There have been a few times when grocery shopping where I can't remember if I have a less-frequently-used ingredient (like cream of mushroom soup) but I'd like to make something using that ingredient soon, so I buy the ingredient, and then when I get home I find that I did have a can in the back of the pantry that I bought a year ago and the expiration date hasn't arrived yet. Oh well. If you can really remember every single one of your nearly a thousand ebooks that you've bought, that's both impressive and baffling to me.
    - 8mo ago
gerdesj 8mo ago
When you delve into real domain specific knowledge, surprises often surface and it turns out that what you might think is a simple thing is actually rather complicated. I'm mildly surprised at exactly how successful ISBNs are. I worked in a book wholesaler's warehouse 35 odd years ago and the ISBN was used as the product code by the "system". I'd get a series of picking lists for pallets on good old green "staved" fan fold. I'd whizz around the warehouse with my trolley and pick from paper packets of books. The product lines had the rack and bay, last four from the SBN, quantity, title and full SBN. The packets of books had the rack/bay/last four from SBN printed on a label in large and small other details. I got very good at optimising my course around the warehouse and could pick at a right old rate, whilst listening to my mini cassette player. Its pretty boring work so you might as well game it! Sometimes an individual book might fall off my trolley and be dumped in the big cardboard "skip" for rejects. For some reason casualties around me generally involved subjects like maths, material sciences, geology, surveying, hydrology. Oh and fractals! I graduated in civil engineering. Anyway. Surely all of us here know that really getting to grips with defining what it is that you are cataloguing/indexing/numbering/whatever and why can be quite tricky. Both Dewey and SBNs catalogue "books" but for very different reasons. Both systems are extremely successful. You might think that in our world of LLMs n that, that books, Dewey and SBNs will go the way of the dodo. Perhaps, but I doubt it. Right, bugger all this old school nonsense. I've got a C64 (it rocks a SD card interface and a HDMI out (via SCART - must sort that out)) blinking away on my telly in the sittingroom and some mutant camels need a bloody good kicking.
NoMoreNicksLeft 8mo ago
>Uh-oh. Why do we have so many distinct versions of The Last Unicorn? Well, each distinct format of a work has its own ISBN (so a hardcover, paperback, and eBook all have different ISBNs), This isn't even the half of it. On some digital books, I'll find a dozen ISBNs in the front matter. Of course there's the hardback, the clothbound (not always the same as the hardback), the alk. paper variant, paperback, trade paperback, epub, pdf, "Adobe digital", and "master digital e-book" (no idea what that even is myself). And that's all just issued together. If they reprint, it won't get a new ISBN, but if the rights convey to another publisher, that one will get a whole 'nother set again. Some popular titles likely have low hundreds of ISBNs, and keep in mind that these have only been a thing since the late 1960s (9 digit ISBNs, technically just SBNs back then). Then with the now dead paperback trade, you could go through a dozen different covers for the most popular books (King, etc) but they'd all use the same ISBN. Then, and this one bites me the most... if archive.org scans in a hardback with its ISBN, what do I use for the scanned pdf? I've decided that for lack of a better alternative I have to use it, but if the publisher made their own pdf (even just scanning the hardback), then it is supposed to issue a new ISBN to it. Cataloging my own library, I've had to use a hodgepodge of unique ids. ASINs, ISBNs, Worldcat's OCLC numbers, Open Library's, and a few others besides. And it still comes up short. The number of oddball publishers and pamphlets and so forth that have never been cataloged anywhere is enormous.
- Finnucane 8mo ago
  >if archive.org scans in a hardback with its ISBN, what do I use for the scanned pdf? The scanned pdf just doesn't have an ISBN. ISBNs are assigned by publishers to products for inventory management. That's it. If archive.org scans a book, it's not a product that needs inventory control.
  - NoMoreNicksLeft 8mo ago
    I need unique identifiers. And I disagree. For me, the scan of a book keeps the same ISBN as the printed book that was scanned (when it has an ISBN at all). No other sensible alternative really exists. I also believe Open Library catalogs them the same (since they are archive.org too, and doing much of the scanning).
KPGv2 8mo ago
> why isn't there a letterboxd for books There is. https://hardcover.app https://hardcover.app I used Letterboxd a lot before kids. I used Goodreads until the Trump inauguration when I de-Amazon'd myself as much as possible (Amazon owns Goodreads). I switched to Hardcover, which is a much better interface. There are ways to improve, but overall I prefer it over Goodreads.
- ncfausti 8mo ago
  What would you like to see improved?
  - lccerina 8mo ago
    not OP, but sometimes I add the ebook version to my library even if I never use them. To find it again and fix it, sometimes I need to scroll through the years of read books to spot the tiny icon that distinguishes the version of the book. It would be nice to have a simple filter by book type (physical/ebook/audio) in the library page.
  - KPGv2 8mo ago
    actually the #1 criticism i had has been fixed since the last time i made reading progress: one-click progress updates from Home. I launched the app on my phone and bam, it's right there! I'm not sure there is anything I'd improve. I recall when I started creating a list of Akutagawa Prize winners in translation, it was a bit painful because I had to input a lot of ISBNs for rarer books. Also I struggled for a couple books with picking the right version so the page count was correct. But I haven't done either of those in a while since I haven't read more rare stuff in a year. Possibly they've gotten better, too.
idoubtit 8mo ago
Wikidata is a FRBR-compatible public database of books. I don't know if it's good enough for the kind of books the author wants, but in recent years the quality of wikidata greatly increased for the books that deal with (about 1000 items). BTW, they misunderstood their own example of "Hotel Iris" by Yoko Ogawa when they wrote "the same work is duplicated four times." In fact, those four entries in the list point to distinct works. One of these is a French publication by the publisher Actes Sud. Translations are not the same work as the original. They are derived works. But it's true this list is a mess. Another entriy has 3 editions, one in English and two in Spanish, so it's obviously an error that mixes two distinct works.
- crazygringo 8mo ago
  > Translations are not the same work as the original. They are derived works. Which adds yet another layer. Because you still want them to be considered as part of a larger single entity. If you're performing a search, you want to find the single main entity, and then have different translations listed the same way you have different editions listed.
  - ray_v 8mo ago
    Is this not what semantic search enables?
    - crazygringo 8mo ago
      No? I don't know how that relates or what you're trying to suggest.
      - ray_v 8mo ago
        My comment was trying to suggest that some of these types of searches would allow you to link resources or works together because of how tightly coupled they'd be when you produced vectors from the metadata.
- ZeroGravitas 8mo ago
nomdep 8mo ago
A good time to remember that the Open Library came to be thanks to the initial work of Brewster Kahle (founder of the Internet Archive) and Aaron Swartz (RIP) http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/openlibrary http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/openlibrary
mmooss 8mo ago
> there’s a distinction between the work (the book The Last Unicorn), the expression (a given edition of the book), a manifestation (a given physical format for an expression, such as paperback or hardcover), and an item (an individual object in a collection) The author misunderstands 'work', as far as I know: A work is "intellectual or artistic content of a distinct creation. It refers to a very abstract idea of a creation e.g. Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet and not a specific expression."[0] In contrast, an "expression" is an "intellectual or artistic realization of a work. The realization may take the form of text, sound, image, object, movement, etc., or any combination of such forms."[0] The Last Unicorn story is the work, "the book The Last Unicorn" is an expression as would be the film version or the computer game, etc. [0] https://www.ifla.org/references/best-practice-for-national-bibliographic-agencies-in-a-digital-age/resource-description-and-standards/bibliographic-control/functional-requirements-the-frbr-family-of-models/functional-requirements-for-bibliographic-records-frbr/ https://www.ifla.org/references/best-practice-for-national-b... (as of a few years ago)
lodrion 8mo ago
Congratulations! You have discovered https://booksearch.blogspot.com/2010/08/books-of-world-stand-up-and-be-counted.html https://booksearch.blogspot.com/2010/08/books-of-world-stand...
joemi 8mo ago
A simple search for books is an interesting problem because some it makes sense to find based on title alone, while it doesn't make sense for other books. Take To Kill A Mockingbird as an example... No matter what (English) edition of the book you read, you're likely reading the exact same content, even the exact same words, as any other English edition. There might be a different preface near the front or different blurbs on the back cover or a different number of words per page, but the actual story is word-for-word the same. A simple title lookup makes sense here in most cases. Compare that to something like The Iliad, where the English versions are all translations and can vary greatly from translator to translator. While all telling ultimately the same story, a bad translation doesn't begin to compare to an elegantly beautiful translation, so you almost certainly don't want to treat all editions of The Iliad the same. Translations aren't the only times that you wouldn't want to treat all editions of a title the same. Some books have undergone abridgments, revisions, or corrections, so the content won't be word-for-word the same between editions, but might or might not be close enough that it's worth considering them the same. Some books have heavily annotated editions, so while not changing the underlying content that all the editions are based on, the reading experience is quite different. I could go on with differences, but I hope it's clear that there _are_ differences between books and movies when it comes to variations/releases. For books, I think the lookup issue is closer to how it is for board games. Board games, like books, have many editions and translations and often get updated/revised between editions. Sometimes the updates change the gameplay significantly, and other times they don't. Boardgamegeek.com is one of the best (if not _the_ best) catalogs of board games that there is, and it has regular discussions/arguments about whether a new edition of a game is different enough that it deserves its own page or if it should just be relegated to be an easy-to-ignore note in the Versions section of the previous version's page. I think a letterboxd-like lookup for books would have similar regularly-occurring debates, and, like with board games, ultimately have to be fairly hand-curated.
ggm 8mo ago
A salutory lesson in field overloading and structured keys. There must be a aphorism for "things you cannot do with a key, if you don't know in advance thats how the key works" list.
- galkk 8mo ago
  Unfortunately, for isbns even if you know how the key works in theory and should be used by standard, reality will break you very soon. It’s quite loose. At least it was 10 years ago when I worked in the area of book catalogs matching, per different online stores.
ajohnson1200 8mo ago
I built a personal / hobby site for books a couple years ago that was inspired by pinboard.io, and leaned heavily on ISBNDB (their API), during which I learned a lot about isnbn's and books, at least through the lens of what the ISBN DB API offers: - searching by title, ie: "The last unicorn" will return books across many years, and many editions, and with lots of different titles, examples: The Last Unicorn (thorndike Press Large Print Science Fiction Series) THE LAST UNICORN The Last Unicorn (40th Anniversary Edition) The Last Unicorn the Lost Journey The Last Unicorn: The Lost Version The Last Unicorn das Einhorn im Spiegel der Popkultur and then books that have a similar title but are by completely different authors: The Last Unicorn: A Search for One of Earth's Rarest Creatures - there's no way to programatically link an ISBN or ISBN13 to all of the other variants of that book across years or editions ( "First Edition", "1st U. S. printing", "6th Printing", etc..) or bindings ("Hardcover", "Mass Market Paperback", "Library Binding", "Kindle Edition", "Audio Cassette", etc..) or languages ("en", "English", "zh", etc..) - I wrote some code that would consume the 1000 items in the ISBNDB API search results, and attempt to reduce the list of search results based on the the language, the title, and author(s) using Jaccard similarity, and then sorted by year, and grouped by binding, which mostly worked to be able to see all editions for a book, but it's super messy. Going to have to see if I can use OpenLibrary instead, looks like a great option.
kxcrossing 8mo ago
I like the bait-and-switch here. “Let’s make my own app” which almost made me tab out, followed by an interesting dive into the perils of uniqueness in ISBN. I would still say overspecifying is better than under!
qingcharles 8mo ago
Anna's Archive has done a lot of work with ISBNs, e.g. https://annas-archive.li/blog/all-isbns-winners.html https://annas-archive.li/blog/all-isbns-winners.html AA makes use of a WorldCat scrape they performed: https://annas-archive.li/blog/worldcat-scrape.html https://annas-archive.li/blog/worldcat-scrape.html I'm currently working on an ISSN database, which is periodicals, and is grossly underrepresented compared to books.
galkk 8mo ago
I worked a little bit in the area. (it was 10 years ago in the area of book catalogs matching, per different stores/countries/bestseller lists) ISBN is a an attribute/key, but not primary key, in database terms :) ISBNs are messy and in real world you’ll see crazy amount of broken/edge cases that shouldn’t happen by the letter of the standard, but happen all the time in reality. * For example, isbn can be reused by publisher for completely different book. * 2nd edition, while very different, may have same isbn. * Reissue of the same book could have different isbn. * Textbook of same author for 6th and 7th grade could have same isbn. * As soon as you’ll get in translations all bets are off. * I already mentioned textbooks. How anbout about college books where each year there was slightly revised edition of same book. If you ask yourself - wtf? You’re not alone. —- In my youth I heard horror stories about people who suddenly found multiple duplicate guids (uuidv1) in their databases because cheap Chinese knockoff network cards were using same MAC addresses. Think that with isbn that could Happen to you any time.
- Ekaros 8mo ago
  I did some data collection on my cookbooks. Figured out Lidl had used same ISBN for same book. In entirely different languages.
  - galkk 8mo ago
    You feel my pain :) Honestly, right now I probably wouldn’t even try to code complex algorithm of book matching but fed all of books metadata, including book covers etc to llm and it would do better than what we had. Our algorithm had tons of special cases coded and in results ui there was a button “needs manual review”, that was launching review workflow (not a joke, business people has special support team in India, because we were matching not only books) for cases when confidence score was low.
    - ogurechny 8mo ago
      But covers also lie. They are mass-uploaded to various services by the similar automated matching systems with cheap human agents used for decision making. Everyone just grabs and re-uploads the existing images from the image search results if they are “similar enough”. Because if it works for instant noodles, it works for books, too. Many publishers don't even bother to provide anything but a single image that is cut from the source file for the printed cover, which might be quite different from the way the book really looks. For my language, I know I can only rely on just a couple of shops that make a photo of an actual book under regular lights for catalogues and announcements as a matter of principle. Others just add the same image file everyone else used. For the older books that had multiple revisions, it's still strictly manual interaction with second-hand book sites and old listings to figure out the exact version. On the other hand, most services here do care about providing table of contents, even if its crowd-sourced phone snapshots of the page. International market is insane in that regard. Not only sellers on Amazon and the like ignore them (sure, they were never going to do so much manual work for all the uploaded items anyway), the publishers don't even mention what's inside on their official pages. “Selected stories. New translation by X”. Are those the same stories that were published 5 or 10 years ago under a different name or cover? Has X translated a new set of stories and (partially) refreshed the collection? Both of these things happen. It is ironic that I need to download the full scan from the pirate library to find out what is available in print. Unless, of course, some anonymous worker in some library hasn't diligently typed the whole list of works into the description, hooray for those.
wise_blood 8mo ago
TMDB is the best metadata provider for my home media server, they just have everything. Two great features are: season names and episode groups. The other day there was a thread about Babylon 5, where seasons have names and the watching order is different from the airing order. Perfect application of both
zvr 8mo ago
Just a comment pointing people to https://www.librarything.com/ https://www.librarything.com/ which I find so much better than goodreads. Regarding the taxonomy of WEMI (work, expression, manifestation, and item), all of them are useful since we are talking about books at different levels. From "I have read Don Quixote", which is about the work (translations are the same), to "My Don Quixote has coffee stains", which is about the item.
cestith 8mo ago
I buy a lot of books for an individual. I have a dedicated library room in my home, and that’s not the only place there are bookcases. I shop by ISBN often because I want specifically a particular edition in a particular cover. So it’s not just title and author. It’s not even title, author, publisher, edition, and cover honestly. Sometimes there’s an Indian subcontinent English printing of a book that’s laid out differently and on different paper from the US/Canada market version. One small drawback is sometimes I’ll order a book by ISBN, and the bookseller will locate it by ISBN, and it will be a completely different item on a different topic by a different author. Sometimes if a book is a small printing or is a very old title the publisher will recycle the ISBN.
culi 8mo ago
I like WikiData for tasks like these that require consolidating multiple different identifiers for the same work. E.g. https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q106545884 https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q106545884 Gives us the ISBN, Goodreads work id, LibraryThing id, the OpenLibrary id, and the Google Knowledge Graph id all in one query.

160 points by evakhoury 8mo ago

If the author sees this comment, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43168838 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43168838 might be relevant as it relates to catalogue completeness. OpenLibrary is very good, but Anna's Archive is potentially more complete.

deleted 8mo ago

[deleted]

bell-cot 8mo ago

The first few para's of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISBN https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISBN are a better summary of the issue. tl;dr; - The ISBN is intended to be a physical Part Number, within the book business. Where "hardcover, or paperback, or trade paperback, or large print, or revised edition, or ..." very much matters.

rahimnathwani 8mo ago

I'm not sure we always want 'works'. Sometimes different 'expressions' of the same work are different enough that they don't have the same value. For example, compare the most recent edition of 'Straight and crooked thinking' with the one published in 1930.

vidarh 8mo ago
I don't know that work, but I agree with you in general because of forewords etc. Or even appendices. And translations by different translators. I "grew up with" a specific translation of Lord of the Rings into Norwegian, for example. There are two. They are very different. But the editions also differ in whether they include the appendices, whose illustrations are used, and more.
- stackghost 8mo ago
  >They are very different. Are we talking material plot or characterisation changes?
  - Cordiali 8mo ago
    I know Norwegian also has two different written standards, found an example that demonstrates it: >English: I will not tell anyone the secret. >Bokmål: Jeg skal ikke fortelle hemmeligheten til noen. >Nynorsk: Eg skal ikkje fortelja løyndomen til nokon. Source: https://www.visitnorway.com/typically-norwegian/norwegian-language/ https://www.visitnorway.com/typically-norwegian/norwegian-la...
    - vidarh 8mo ago
      Yeah, so really there are at least 3 translations of Lord of the Rings, to continue that example, and I was being a typical Bokmål user and ignored Nynorsk. The title differences are also a good illustration of how different it can be: Bokmål: Kampen om Ringen, Ringenes Herre (the first one is literally "the battle for the ring") Nynorsk: Ringdrotten
  - vidarh 8mo ago
    No, but many of the names are different, and stylistically they are very different. Depending on whether a translation tries to be fairly literal, or sound as if it is written for the language it is translated to the way the result feels will be very different. An example is the name Bilbo Baggins. In the "canonical" Norwegian translation, he's become Bilbo Lommelun. "Lomme" means pocket, and "lun" means snug, warm, or comfortable. It's not literal, but it fits the nature of hobbits well while referencing the "bag" in Baggins", and the connotations comes immediately in Norwegian without having try to deconstruct the name. In this case, I think the newer "canonical" translation is generally considered unambiguously the best, but people often have favourite translations. E.g. my favourite Scandinavian translation of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass isn't even Norwegian, but an old Danish translation which sounds much "softer" (it's hard to explain)
RobotToaster 8mo ago
The most obvious example of this is the innumerable[0] versions of the Christian bible. [0] Before anyone says it, I'm sure some bible nerd has numbered them, it's hyperbole.
crazygringo 8mo ago
I think the point is, you want a single work when searching. Then click on the item and drill down into editions sorted by year, or whatever. But when you're doing search, it's terrible UX to be flooding it with tens of editions mixed in with other things with similar titles.

davtyan1202 8mo ago

[flagged]

millicentricism 8mo ago

This also fails to take into account that ISBNs also contain the publisher ID in them. So identical copies of a book could have different ISBNs depending on which markets they are sold in.

boznz 8mo ago
I'm not sure this is the case, I got my ISBN range through my government national library service, I could be wrong but when you let them know what the book is you are publishing they ask for the Publisher name, though I am guessing as the service is free and it only applies to New Zealand books and publications.
ilamont 8mo ago
They don't contain the publisher name, but ISBNs are usually purchased in blocks of 10 or 100 or 1000 or whatever by a single entity, which is often a single publisher or corporation. However, within the block publishers can assign ISBNs to different imprints.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 8mo ago
  For ISBNs from the big 5, the number really does indicate the publisher. I think the 5th digit (second after 978) can indicate at least some of the big publishers. Smaller ranges are available for purchase from the brokers. In Canada, the national library will even issue you one for free, if you self-publish. The ISBN always indicates the country it's from, the United States getting the biggest block, other European nations and Japan getting their own, with Africa, the Middle East, and so forth all getting a block in common.
  - blue1 8mo ago
    ISBN prefixes does not always indicate a country. They may be are indeed countries, but others are language areas (e.g. 0/1=English) or "regions" (groups of countries) or even other subjects. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ISBN_registration_groups https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ISBN_registration_grou...

CodesInChaos 8mo ago

I read that it's much worse than that, and there are ISBNs that were reused for completely different books.

NoMoreNicksLeft 8mo ago
I've stumbled across 3 or 4 magazines that printed the wrong ISSN in more than one issue. One from the 80s did so in every single issue of it's 20some issue run. It must be true that some books have done so as well, but I don't even check that those are correct.
joemi 8mo ago
In my experience this is very very rare. Rare enough that it's practically negligible.
- CodesInChaos 8mo ago
  Even if it's rare, it means a database like goodreads can't assume that an IBAN is linked to only a single book.
  - joemi 8mo ago
    It's rarer than cases of movie titles being reused, so in the context of the article, it's more than adequate, since letterboxd's title-based movie lookup is stated to be a better system. For example, here's a non-exhaustive but still pretty long list of movies with reused titles: https://www.imdb.com/list/ls083468410/ https://www.imdb.com/list/ls083468410/
rmunn 8mo ago
I've been cataloguing my books using the ISBN to look them up, and I think I ran into that situation a few times, maybe about 0.2% of all the books I catalogued. (That is, the ISBN search on openlibrary.org returned multiple clearly-different books for the ISBN I searched for). I didn't pay much attention to it so I can't tell you which ISBNs were duplicates, but I've definitely seen it happen. But there is at least one case where it was on purpose. There's a set of reading primers from the UK called the Biff, Chip and Kipper books. We acquired a whole set of them at a garage sale, and when I went to enter them into my catalogue, I discovered that the publisher had assigned just one ISBN to the whole series. Which quite annoyed me when I discovered it. (I ended up just not cataloguing those books, because I didn't want to type the titles, author, copyright date, etc. in by hand for 50+ tiny books).

amiga386 8mo ago

This reminds me of MusicBrainz, whose database stores "release groups", e.g. the album Nevermind by Nirvana is one, which can have hundreds of "releases", as different media (tape, CD, LP, promo, ...), different countries, later re-issues, etc. [0] Sometimes these have different catalogue numbers or barcodes to distinguish them, sometimes they don't but they're still different. I've seen releases where the only difference is the label in the centre of the LP, or the back of the CD case has a two-column tracklisting vs a one-column tracklisting. Music publisher uses the same code and says it's identical and yet it's clearly not. Then there's the "recordings" on an album, which even if they're never re-recorded can still end up chopped up, bleeped or remastered. They're not the same sound. MusicBrainz likes to track when they are exactly the same recording (e.g. the LP recording of a song appearing on a compilation album verbatim) and when they're not (e.g. radio edits of the LP recording). And if we're going beyond recordings by one artist of "their" song, i.e. cover versions, or just plain standards, those are "works", with composers, lyricists, and can be recorded thousands of times by different artists... I greatly appreciate the pedantry and flexibility for noting down when creative works are the same versus where they differ, in relational database form. [0] https://musicbrainz.org/release-group/1b022e01-4da6-387b-8658-8678046e4cef https://musicbrainz.org/release-group/1b022e01-4da6-387b-865...

SamWhited 8mo ago
They actually have a (very new, still alpha, probably not a ton of data yet) database for books: https://bookbrainz.org/about https://bookbrainz.org/about I haven't looked into what their schema is like, but if it's anything like Musicbrainz it will be pretty comprehensive and easy to pull the data you want out of!
- NoMoreNicksLeft 8mo ago
  That's the post I made on r/plex a decade ago that pissed off a dumbass moderator and got me banned from there! I guess he hated books. I've recently been doing data entry on Open Library... sometimes even worldcat doesn't have an OCLC for an edition, and Open Lib is my fallback. Maybe I should be doing it on Bookbrainz instead.

jiggawatts 8mo ago

My state had a reading competition that listed books by ISBN, which was a real challenge for students to track down. Each library had different editions and even different cover art, so if you “found” the book you might not recognise it on the shelf, etc… I worked on the library systems and one of my innovations was to use the ISBN mapping database of WorldCat to find books with identical content but different ISBNs to help kids find the books on the list. Over ten years that one SQL join in the code made the kids read an extra million books they wouldn’t have otherwise. My biggest “bang for buck” in my career!

DiggyJohnson 8mo ago
That is amazing. For odd reasons I had to get real familiar with ISBN as well. What did that sql command look like if you don’t mind me asking?
- jiggawatts 8mo ago
  Literally just a join against a lookup table of alternate ISBNs. So the ISBNs in the reading list were first “expanded” with all possible titles, then they were matched to the books actually in the library. The ISBN alternatives table was just groups with an integer ID shared by each group. My import process synthesised this from worldcat data, which was more messy.

jdranczewski 8mo ago

If anyone in the comments is in a similar predicament to the author and would like a book logging app, I will say that I disagree on their judgement of StoryGraph - I've found it a pretty decent interface, the search function is very good, and the (anti)features mentioned in the footnote are incredibly easy to not use, as the creators seem to understand that many of their users have a very strong preference to avoid AI bloat.

KPGv2 8mo ago
https://hardcover.app https://hardcover.app is another choice. It's the one I've been using since right after the second Trump inauguration when I decided to "de-oligarch" as much as possible.

saithir 8mo ago

Sometimes we definitely want 'items' though, so for example I am in a physical bookstore and see a book I might be interested in, so I buy it, to find out later back home that I already have the very same book - and edition - already. It's a scenario that anyone with some amount of books definitely encountered multiple times, I know I did it myself a few times. :) Ability of an ISBN search of my collection would have helped me in this case - scanning a barcode is easy enough task to accomplish. And even if I had a different edition, the resulting title from searching for a different edition would be enough to help me figure out that I should not buy a book I already own.

eudamoniac 8mo ago
Genuinely how is this possible? I have nearly a thousand ebooks and I'm certain whether I have or don't have one, because I obtained it deliberately. Are you buying books by the foot or something?
- f0cus10 8mo ago
  Faced this problem multiple times before. Tbf, I did buy and subsequently transport enough books in luggages to restore a country's economy
- joemi 8mo ago
  I'm not the person you were asking but it's happened to me too, with physical books, not e-books. I don't know if I can explain how it happens. I'd say that me not knowing the exact content of my bookshelf is similar to me not knowing the exact content of my fridge and pantry. There have been a few times when grocery shopping where I can't remember if I have a less-frequently-used ingredient (like cream of mushroom soup) but I'd like to make something using that ingredient soon, so I buy the ingredient, and then when I get home I find that I did have a can in the back of the pantry that I bought a year ago and the expiration date hasn't arrived yet. Oh well. If you can really remember every single one of your nearly a thousand ebooks that you've bought, that's both impressive and baffling to me.
  - 8mo ago

gerdesj 8mo ago

When you delve into real domain specific knowledge, surprises often surface and it turns out that what you might think is a simple thing is actually rather complicated. I'm mildly surprised at exactly how successful ISBNs are. I worked in a book wholesaler's warehouse 35 odd years ago and the ISBN was used as the product code by the "system". I'd get a series of picking lists for pallets on good old green "staved" fan fold. I'd whizz around the warehouse with my trolley and pick from paper packets of books. The product lines had the rack and bay, last four from the SBN, quantity, title and full SBN. The packets of books had the rack/bay/last four from SBN printed on a label in large and small other details. I got very good at optimising my course around the warehouse and could pick at a right old rate, whilst listening to my mini cassette player. Its pretty boring work so you might as well game it! Sometimes an individual book might fall off my trolley and be dumped in the big cardboard "skip" for rejects. For some reason casualties around me generally involved subjects like maths, material sciences, geology, surveying, hydrology. Oh and fractals! I graduated in civil engineering. Anyway. Surely all of us here know that really getting to grips with defining what it is that you are cataloguing/indexing/numbering/whatever and why can be quite tricky. Both Dewey and SBNs catalogue "books" but for very different reasons. Both systems are extremely successful. You might think that in our world of LLMs n that, that books, Dewey and SBNs will go the way of the dodo. Perhaps, but I doubt it. Right, bugger all this old school nonsense. I've got a C64 (it rocks a SD card interface and a HDMI out (via SCART - must sort that out)) blinking away on my telly in the sittingroom and some mutant camels need a bloody good kicking.

NoMoreNicksLeft 8mo ago

>Uh-oh. Why do we have so many distinct versions of The Last Unicorn? Well, each distinct format of a work has its own ISBN (so a hardcover, paperback, and eBook all have different ISBNs), This isn't even the half of it. On some digital books, I'll find a dozen ISBNs in the front matter. Of course there's the hardback, the clothbound (not always the same as the hardback), the alk. paper variant, paperback, trade paperback, epub, pdf, "Adobe digital", and "master digital e-book" (no idea what that even is myself). And that's all just issued together. If they reprint, it won't get a new ISBN, but if the rights convey to another publisher, that one will get a whole 'nother set again. Some popular titles likely have low hundreds of ISBNs, and keep in mind that these have only been a thing since the late 1960s (9 digit ISBNs, technically just SBNs back then). Then with the now dead paperback trade, you could go through a dozen different covers for the most popular books (King, etc) but they'd all use the same ISBN. Then, and this one bites me the most... if archive.org scans in a hardback with its ISBN, what do I use for the scanned pdf? I've decided that for lack of a better alternative I have to use it, but if the publisher made their own pdf (even just scanning the hardback), then it is supposed to issue a new ISBN to it. Cataloging my own library, I've had to use a hodgepodge of unique ids. ASINs, ISBNs, Worldcat's OCLC numbers, Open Library's, and a few others besides. And it still comes up short. The number of oddball publishers and pamphlets and so forth that have never been cataloged anywhere is enormous.

Finnucane 8mo ago
>if archive.org scans in a hardback with its ISBN, what do I use for the scanned pdf? The scanned pdf just doesn't have an ISBN. ISBNs are assigned by publishers to products for inventory management. That's it. If archive.org scans a book, it's not a product that needs inventory control.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 8mo ago
  I need unique identifiers. And I disagree. For me, the scan of a book keeps the same ISBN as the printed book that was scanned (when it has an ISBN at all). No other sensible alternative really exists. I also believe Open Library catalogs them the same (since they are archive.org too, and doing much of the scanning).

KPGv2 8mo ago

> why isn't there a letterboxd for books There is. https://hardcover.app https://hardcover.app I used Letterboxd a lot before kids. I used Goodreads until the Trump inauguration when I de-Amazon'd myself as much as possible (Amazon owns Goodreads). I switched to Hardcover, which is a much better interface. There are ways to improve, but overall I prefer it over Goodreads.

ncfausti 8mo ago
What would you like to see improved?
- lccerina 8mo ago
  not OP, but sometimes I add the ebook version to my library even if I never use them. To find it again and fix it, sometimes I need to scroll through the years of read books to spot the tiny icon that distinguishes the version of the book. It would be nice to have a simple filter by book type (physical/ebook/audio) in the library page.
- KPGv2 8mo ago
  actually the #1 criticism i had has been fixed since the last time i made reading progress: one-click progress updates from Home. I launched the app on my phone and bam, it's right there! I'm not sure there is anything I'd improve. I recall when I started creating a list of Akutagawa Prize winners in translation, it was a bit painful because I had to input a lot of ISBNs for rarer books. Also I struggled for a couple books with picking the right version so the page count was correct. But I haven't done either of those in a while since I haven't read more rare stuff in a year. Possibly they've gotten better, too.

idoubtit 8mo ago

Wikidata is a FRBR-compatible public database of books. I don't know if it's good enough for the kind of books the author wants, but in recent years the quality of wikidata greatly increased for the books that deal with (about 1000 items). BTW, they misunderstood their own example of "Hotel Iris" by Yoko Ogawa when they wrote "the same work is duplicated four times." In fact, those four entries in the list point to distinct works. One of these is a French publication by the publisher Actes Sud. Translations are not the same work as the original. They are derived works. But it's true this list is a mess. Another entriy has 3 editions, one in English and two in Spanish, so it's obviously an error that mixes two distinct works.

crazygringo 8mo ago
> Translations are not the same work as the original. They are derived works. Which adds yet another layer. Because you still want them to be considered as part of a larger single entity. If you're performing a search, you want to find the single main entity, and then have different translations listed the same way you have different editions listed.
- ray_v 8mo ago
  Is this not what semantic search enables?
  - crazygringo 8mo ago
    No? I don't know how that relates or what you're trying to suggest.
    - ray_v 8mo ago
      My comment was trying to suggest that some of these types of searches would allow you to link resources or works together because of how tightly coupled they'd be when you produced vectors from the metadata.
ZeroGravitas 8mo ago

nomdep 8mo ago

A good time to remember that the Open Library came to be thanks to the initial work of Brewster Kahle (founder of the Internet Archive) and Aaron Swartz (RIP) http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/openlibrary http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/openlibrary

mmooss 8mo ago

> there’s a distinction between the work (the book The Last Unicorn), the expression (a given edition of the book), a manifestation (a given physical format for an expression, such as paperback or hardcover), and an item (an individual object in a collection) The author misunderstands 'work', as far as I know: A work is "intellectual or artistic content of a distinct creation. It refers to a very abstract idea of a creation e.g. Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet and not a specific expression."[0] In contrast, an "expression" is an "intellectual or artistic realization of a work. The realization may take the form of text, sound, image, object, movement, etc., or any combination of such forms."[0] The Last Unicorn story is the work, "the book The Last Unicorn" is an expression as would be the film version or the computer game, etc. [0] https://www.ifla.org/references/best-practice-for-national-bibliographic-agencies-in-a-digital-age/resource-description-and-standards/bibliographic-control/functional-requirements-the-frbr-family-of-models/functional-requirements-for-bibliographic-records-frbr/ https://www.ifla.org/references/best-practice-for-national-b... (as of a few years ago)

lodrion 8mo ago

Congratulations! You have discovered https://booksearch.blogspot.com/2010/08/books-of-world-stand-up-and-be-counted.html https://booksearch.blogspot.com/2010/08/books-of-world-stand...

joemi 8mo ago

A simple search for books is an interesting problem because some it makes sense to find based on title alone, while it doesn't make sense for other books. Take To Kill A Mockingbird as an example... No matter what (English) edition of the book you read, you're likely reading the exact same content, even the exact same words, as any other English edition. There might be a different preface near the front or different blurbs on the back cover or a different number of words per page, but the actual story is word-for-word the same. A simple title lookup makes sense here in most cases. Compare that to something like The Iliad, where the English versions are all translations and can vary greatly from translator to translator. While all telling ultimately the same story, a bad translation doesn't begin to compare to an elegantly beautiful translation, so you almost certainly don't want to treat all editions of The Iliad the same. Translations aren't the only times that you wouldn't want to treat all editions of a title the same. Some books have undergone abridgments, revisions, or corrections, so the content won't be word-for-word the same between editions, but might or might not be close enough that it's worth considering them the same. Some books have heavily annotated editions, so while not changing the underlying content that all the editions are based on, the reading experience is quite different. I could go on with differences, but I hope it's clear that there _are_ differences between books and movies when it comes to variations/releases. For books, I think the lookup issue is closer to how it is for board games. Board games, like books, have many editions and translations and often get updated/revised between editions. Sometimes the updates change the gameplay significantly, and other times they don't. Boardgamegeek.com is one of the best (if not _the_ best) catalogs of board games that there is, and it has regular discussions/arguments about whether a new edition of a game is different enough that it deserves its own page or if it should just be relegated to be an easy-to-ignore note in the Versions section of the previous version's page. I think a letterboxd-like lookup for books would have similar regularly-occurring debates, and, like with board games, ultimately have to be fairly hand-curated.

ggm 8mo ago

A salutory lesson in field overloading and structured keys. There must be a aphorism for "things you cannot do with a key, if you don't know in advance thats how the key works" list.

galkk 8mo ago
Unfortunately, for isbns even if you know how the key works in theory and should be used by standard, reality will break you very soon. It’s quite loose. At least it was 10 years ago when I worked in the area of book catalogs matching, per different online stores.

ajohnson1200 8mo ago

I built a personal / hobby site for books a couple years ago that was inspired by pinboard.io, and leaned heavily on ISBNDB (their API), during which I learned a lot about isnbn's and books, at least through the lens of what the ISBN DB API offers: - searching by title, ie: "The last unicorn" will return books across many years, and many editions, and with lots of different titles, examples: The Last Unicorn (thorndike Press Large Print Science Fiction Series) THE LAST UNICORN The Last Unicorn (40th Anniversary Edition) The Last Unicorn the Lost Journey The Last Unicorn: The Lost Version The Last Unicorn das Einhorn im Spiegel der Popkultur and then books that have a similar title but are by completely different authors: The Last Unicorn: A Search for One of Earth's Rarest Creatures - there's no way to programatically link an ISBN or ISBN13 to all of the other variants of that book across years or editions ( "First Edition", "1st U. S. printing", "6th Printing", etc..) or bindings ("Hardcover", "Mass Market Paperback", "Library Binding", "Kindle Edition", "Audio Cassette", etc..) or languages ("en", "English", "zh", etc..) - I wrote some code that would consume the 1000 items in the ISBNDB API search results, and attempt to reduce the list of search results based on the the language, the title, and author(s) using Jaccard similarity, and then sorted by year, and grouped by binding, which mostly worked to be able to see all editions for a book, but it's super messy. Going to have to see if I can use OpenLibrary instead, looks like a great option.

kxcrossing 8mo ago

I like the bait-and-switch here. “Let’s make my own app” which almost made me tab out, followed by an interesting dive into the perils of uniqueness in ISBN. I would still say overspecifying is better than under!

qingcharles 8mo ago

Anna's Archive has done a lot of work with ISBNs, e.g. https://annas-archive.li/blog/all-isbns-winners.html https://annas-archive.li/blog/all-isbns-winners.html AA makes use of a WorldCat scrape they performed: https://annas-archive.li/blog/worldcat-scrape.html https://annas-archive.li/blog/worldcat-scrape.html I'm currently working on an ISSN database, which is periodicals, and is grossly underrepresented compared to books.

galkk 8mo ago

I worked a little bit in the area. (it was 10 years ago in the area of book catalogs matching, per different stores/countries/bestseller lists) ISBN is a an attribute/key, but not primary key, in database terms :) ISBNs are messy and in real world you’ll see crazy amount of broken/edge cases that shouldn’t happen by the letter of the standard, but happen all the time in reality. * For example, isbn can be reused by publisher for completely different book. * 2nd edition, while very different, may have same isbn. * Reissue of the same book could have different isbn. * Textbook of same author for 6th and 7th grade could have same isbn. * As soon as you’ll get in translations all bets are off. * I already mentioned textbooks. How anbout about college books where each year there was slightly revised edition of same book. If you ask yourself - wtf? You’re not alone. —- In my youth I heard horror stories about people who suddenly found multiple duplicate guids (uuidv1) in their databases because cheap Chinese knockoff network cards were using same MAC addresses. Think that with isbn that could Happen to you any time.

Ekaros 8mo ago
I did some data collection on my cookbooks. Figured out Lidl had used same ISBN for same book. In entirely different languages.
- galkk 8mo ago
  You feel my pain :) Honestly, right now I probably wouldn’t even try to code complex algorithm of book matching but fed all of books metadata, including book covers etc to llm and it would do better than what we had. Our algorithm had tons of special cases coded and in results ui there was a button “needs manual review”, that was launching review workflow (not a joke, business people has special support team in India, because we were matching not only books) for cases when confidence score was low.
  - ogurechny 8mo ago
    But covers also lie. They are mass-uploaded to various services by the similar automated matching systems with cheap human agents used for decision making. Everyone just grabs and re-uploads the existing images from the image search results if they are “similar enough”. Because if it works for instant noodles, it works for books, too. Many publishers don't even bother to provide anything but a single image that is cut from the source file for the printed cover, which might be quite different from the way the book really looks. For my language, I know I can only rely on just a couple of shops that make a photo of an actual book under regular lights for catalogues and announcements as a matter of principle. Others just add the same image file everyone else used. For the older books that had multiple revisions, it's still strictly manual interaction with second-hand book sites and old listings to figure out the exact version. On the other hand, most services here do care about providing table of contents, even if its crowd-sourced phone snapshots of the page. International market is insane in that regard. Not only sellers on Amazon and the like ignore them (sure, they were never going to do so much manual work for all the uploaded items anyway), the publishers don't even mention what's inside on their official pages. “Selected stories. New translation by X”. Are those the same stories that were published 5 or 10 years ago under a different name or cover? Has X translated a new set of stories and (partially) refreshed the collection? Both of these things happen. It is ironic that I need to download the full scan from the pirate library to find out what is available in print. Unless, of course, some anonymous worker in some library hasn't diligently typed the whole list of works into the description, hooray for those.

wise_blood 8mo ago

TMDB is the best metadata provider for my home media server, they just have everything. Two great features are: season names and episode groups. The other day there was a thread about Babylon 5, where seasons have names and the watching order is different from the airing order. Perfect application of both

zvr 8mo ago

Just a comment pointing people to https://www.librarything.com/ https://www.librarything.com/ which I find so much better than goodreads. Regarding the taxonomy of WEMI (work, expression, manifestation, and item), all of them are useful since we are talking about books at different levels. From "I have read Don Quixote", which is about the work (translations are the same), to "My Don Quixote has coffee stains", which is about the item.

cestith 8mo ago

I buy a lot of books for an individual. I have a dedicated library room in my home, and that’s not the only place there are bookcases. I shop by ISBN often because I want specifically a particular edition in a particular cover. So it’s not just title and author. It’s not even title, author, publisher, edition, and cover honestly. Sometimes there’s an Indian subcontinent English printing of a book that’s laid out differently and on different paper from the US/Canada market version. One small drawback is sometimes I’ll order a book by ISBN, and the bookseller will locate it by ISBN, and it will be a completely different item on a different topic by a different author. Sometimes if a book is a small printing or is a very old title the publisher will recycle the ISBN.

culi 8mo ago

I like WikiData for tasks like these that require consolidating multiple different identifiers for the same work. E.g. https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q106545884 https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q106545884 Gives us the ISBN, Goodreads work id, LibraryThing id, the OpenLibrary id, and the Google Knowledge Graph id all in one query.