4 ms·

ISBN Visualization

228 points by Cider9986 8mo ago

ZenDroid 8mo ago
How much can you zoom it? Yes.
chcardoz 8mo ago
this is really cool!
shevy-java 8mo ago
One problem I see with annas archive is that there is a tendency towards older books. Now I do understand this for many reasons, but ... I recently read a book about steel construction in 1932, just for curiousity. I wanted to find a more recent one - did not even have to be, say, 1990 or 2000 or some such, but I simply could not find any (well, perhaps english speaking, but this is also a problem in that non-english languages are VERY underpresented in general). I hope they can fix this in the long run. We need to preserve digital information on a much broader basis.
- flexagoon 8mo ago
  > I hope they can fix this in the long run. There's nothing AA could "fix" here, this depends entirely on volunteers uploading the books. Your best way to help is to buy the books yourself, use a book scanning service (eg. 1dollarscan), and upload it to ZLib/LibGen. You can also make a book request on ZLib, that way someone else will be able to do that for you if they want to
- layer8 8mo ago
  In my experience, the availability of anything that isn’t popular or computer nerd-adjacent from before the age of ebooks is very hit and miss on AA.
- cdrini 7mo ago
  I found this on open library from 1989, if useful: https://openlibrary.org/works/OL5859479W/Steel_construction?edition=key%3A/books/OL15344614M https://openlibrary.org/works/OL5859479W/Steel_construction?... With a few other options in search: https://openlibrary.org/search?q=%22steel+construction%22&mode=everything&has_fulltext=true https://openlibrary.org/search?q=%22steel+construction%22&mo...
- AreShoesFeet000 7mo ago
  Recent publications have not yet passed the test of time.
Cider9986 8mo ago
There is a bounty for improving the visualization[0]. [0]: https://software.annas-archive.gl/AnnaArchivist/annas-archive/-/work_items?show=eyJpaWQiOiIzMjUiLCJmdWxsX3BhdGgiOiJBbm5hQXJjaGl2aXN0L2FubmFzLWFyY2hpdmUiLCJpZCI6NzIzNzR9 https://software.annas-archive.gl/AnnaArchivist/annas-archiv...
atulvi 8mo ago
Is there a similar one for IP?
- kobbs 7mo ago
  https://vad.solutions/ipmap/ https://vad.solutions/ipmap/
  - gzread 7mo ago
    Crazy how much more IPv6 space RIPE NCC allocated than ARIN. Really shows off their countries' different stances on innovation.
    - p-e-w 7mo ago
      I think it’s even crazier that a visible slice of the address space that is supposed to last for the rest of humanity’s future has already been allocated.
      - gzread 7mo ago
        It's 1/8 of that space and it's being allocated in big blocks that are expected not to run out unless humanity expands to the whole solar system. If it does run out, there are 7 tries left. More if you only use half as much space next time.
implode7569 8mo ago
Feels like a market map for books. Very cool.
comrade1234 8mo ago
I got burned buying a trilogy with a good rating on goodreads. I only read the first 1.5 books and didn't bother after that. It sucked and when I looked again later it had a more relevant rating. I think the initial score was gamed by bots. So now I download from Anna's archive and if it's as good as I expected based on ratings then I pay for it, which I've done most recently for Children of Time. Thankfully I live somewhere where I can download legally.
- james-bcn 7mo ago
  Children of Time is wonderful! I wish Adrian Tchaikovsky would stop churning them out so quickly and write some more of the quality of Children of Time.
- AreShoesFeet000 7mo ago
  Imagine being sanctioned for trying to read books.
- bean469 7mo ago
  Children of Time is a incredible book. It's the first Sci-Fi book that I read and I enjoyed it thoroughly
torben-friis 8mo ago
It's very strange to me how small Spanish is there. Second language in the world by native speakers, piracy being effectively legal in Spain (non commercially), and so on.
- ghighi7878 7mo ago
  Spanish is second largest by people but not by revenue
- sfRattan 7mo ago
  Piracy of anything other than live streams of La Liga games... For those, Spain shuts down whole IP ranges and cripples the Internet at large while the game is live.
- gonzalohm 7mo ago
  It's because some books are not categorized as Spanish. They are just under a publisher name. For example, search for "Don Quijote"
- nomdep 7mo ago
  Very weird. Only in Spain there are 3k publishers. Argentina has 1k publishers. And then we have huge amount of books published in spanish by Penguin Random House, Scholastic, Springer, etc.
FrustratedMonky 7mo ago
This is really nice. When zoomed all the way, it is a book shelf. Totally un-expected, nice touch.
rosstex 7mo ago
This makes it feel like there aren't many books in the world
- C-x_C-f 7mo ago
  That's funny, I came out of it with the opposite impression. In the section for my native tongue, I zoomed in a few times, here and there, and I only once did I stumble upon an author I knew. To me, writing a book feels like such a monumental endeavor that I find it hard to fathom the amount of collective effort that it took to write all this, especially considering how most of these works are almost forgotten by now (something something power law).
- squigz 7mo ago
  There are 101,000,000 books visualized. Another way of looking at it is how incredible it is that we can catalogue (and archive) so much of humanity's writing.
fakefish 7mo ago
The bookshelf is nice, but I'd love to be able to read the titles more easily - maybe rotate by 90 degrees?
rwoerz 7mo ago
Blocked in Germany by CUII https://cuii.info/ueber-uns/ https://cuii.info/ueber-uns/
- burgerone 7mo ago
  Change your DNS server
- on_the_train 7mo ago
  [flagged]
  - cedilla 7mo ago
    Strange. If you compress complex topics into one four-word sentence, they are not as coherent any more.
    - ProllyInfamous 7mo ago
      Fortunately ingermanlanguage youcancramwordstogether toyourlittleheartsdesire.
      - deanishe 7mo ago
        Ne, kannst du eigentlich nicht.
        ProllyInfamous 7mo ago
        Du bist ja der liebevollmegahackerdorkygamingklugscheißerdatenrausch‑Guy! ::I am not a native speaker — intended to be playful::
        deanishe 7mo ago
        I'm not a native-speaker either, but becoming so assimilated that jokes are no longer a laughing matter …
phiresky 7mo ago
Here's my article on how I built it - and also an instance hosted on GitHub pages if the AA domain is blocked for you: https://phiresky.github.io/blog/2025/visualizing-all-books-in-isbn-space/ https://phiresky.github.io/blog/2025/visualizing-all-books-i... Happy to answer questions as always :)
- realitylabs 7mo ago
  Love this!
max8539 7mo ago
A lot of errors like "resolvePublishers(978-0): SyntaxError: The string did not match the expected pattern." are blocking view on mobile…
krick 7mo ago
I remember the story of it being made, and I seem to even remember there was some very generous bounty attached, but I never got the point of it. I mean, honestly, ISBN is a pretty problematic thing on its own, especially today, when self-publishing is common, and especially for a web-library that is collecting scans of everything somewhat notable that ever was out there. But even accepting it as a main entity, because that's what we've got right now, what does this visualization achieve? What does it show? You cannot really find a book using it, I mean, any more specifically than "some random book probably in a given language". I was kinda surprised when this visualization was declared a winner of that particular bounty/contest.
- functional_dev 7mo ago
  exactly, that map looks like a mess of random blocks... big blocks are registration groups (countries) and squares inside are registrants (publishers). like a hierarchy. this visualisation helped me to put pieces together - https://vectree.io/c/isbn https://vectree.io/c/isbn
- phiresky 7mo ago
  There's a bit of an issue with the linked deployment (in my opinion). In the most zoomed out view you should see the first layer of blocks - very big blocks titled "English language", "French language", "German language". See https://phiresky.github.io/isbn-visualization/ https://phiresky.github.io/isbn-visualization/ maybe. That makes it a bit easier to read. The point of the visualization is showing different attributes of books in the space of ISBNs. ISBNs correlate with country, publisher, and release date, that's why using it as a space is useful. You can clearly see the history of when blocks were created, which blocks are rarer than others (present in fewer libraries), and (on the AA hosting) which blocks are more present in AA vs not. In any case though, yes ISBNs as spatial data are clearly not perfect. Do you have any suggestions that would order the 100 million data points better?

ISBN Visualization

228 points by Cider9986 8mo ago

ZenDroid 8mo ago

How much can you zoom it? Yes.

chcardoz 8mo ago

this is really cool!

shevy-java 8mo ago

One problem I see with annas archive is that there is a tendency towards older books. Now I do understand this for many reasons, but ... I recently read a book about steel construction in 1932, just for curiousity. I wanted to find a more recent one - did not even have to be, say, 1990 or 2000 or some such, but I simply could not find any (well, perhaps english speaking, but this is also a problem in that non-english languages are VERY underpresented in general). I hope they can fix this in the long run. We need to preserve digital information on a much broader basis.

flexagoon 8mo ago
> I hope they can fix this in the long run. There's nothing AA could "fix" here, this depends entirely on volunteers uploading the books. Your best way to help is to buy the books yourself, use a book scanning service (eg. 1dollarscan), and upload it to ZLib/LibGen. You can also make a book request on ZLib, that way someone else will be able to do that for you if they want to
layer8 8mo ago
In my experience, the availability of anything that isn’t popular or computer nerd-adjacent from before the age of ebooks is very hit and miss on AA.
cdrini 7mo ago
I found this on open library from 1989, if useful: https://openlibrary.org/works/OL5859479W/Steel_construction?edition=key%3A/books/OL15344614M https://openlibrary.org/works/OL5859479W/Steel_construction?... With a few other options in search: https://openlibrary.org/search?q=%22steel+construction%22&mode=everything&has_fulltext=true https://openlibrary.org/search?q=%22steel+construction%22&mo...
AreShoesFeet000 7mo ago
Recent publications have not yet passed the test of time.

Cider9986 8mo ago

There is a bounty for improving the visualization[0]. [0]: https://software.annas-archive.gl/AnnaArchivist/annas-archive/-/work_items?show=eyJpaWQiOiIzMjUiLCJmdWxsX3BhdGgiOiJBbm5hQXJjaGl2aXN0L2FubmFzLWFyY2hpdmUiLCJpZCI6NzIzNzR9 https://software.annas-archive.gl/AnnaArchivist/annas-archiv...

atulvi 8mo ago

Is there a similar one for IP?

kobbs 7mo ago
https://vad.solutions/ipmap/ https://vad.solutions/ipmap/
- gzread 7mo ago
  Crazy how much more IPv6 space RIPE NCC allocated than ARIN. Really shows off their countries' different stances on innovation.
  - p-e-w 7mo ago
    I think it’s even crazier that a visible slice of the address space that is supposed to last for the rest of humanity’s future has already been allocated.
    - gzread 7mo ago
      It's 1/8 of that space and it's being allocated in big blocks that are expected not to run out unless humanity expands to the whole solar system. If it does run out, there are 7 tries left. More if you only use half as much space next time.

implode7569 8mo ago

Feels like a market map for books. Very cool.

comrade1234 8mo ago

I got burned buying a trilogy with a good rating on goodreads. I only read the first 1.5 books and didn't bother after that. It sucked and when I looked again later it had a more relevant rating. I think the initial score was gamed by bots. So now I download from Anna's archive and if it's as good as I expected based on ratings then I pay for it, which I've done most recently for Children of Time. Thankfully I live somewhere where I can download legally.

james-bcn 7mo ago
Children of Time is wonderful! I wish Adrian Tchaikovsky would stop churning them out so quickly and write some more of the quality of Children of Time.
AreShoesFeet000 7mo ago
Imagine being sanctioned for trying to read books.
bean469 7mo ago
Children of Time is a incredible book. It's the first Sci-Fi book that I read and I enjoyed it thoroughly

torben-friis 8mo ago

It's very strange to me how small Spanish is there. Second language in the world by native speakers, piracy being effectively legal in Spain (non commercially), and so on.

ghighi7878 7mo ago
Spanish is second largest by people but not by revenue
sfRattan 7mo ago
Piracy of anything other than live streams of La Liga games... For those, Spain shuts down whole IP ranges and cripples the Internet at large while the game is live.
gonzalohm 7mo ago
It's because some books are not categorized as Spanish. They are just under a publisher name. For example, search for "Don Quijote"
nomdep 7mo ago
Very weird. Only in Spain there are 3k publishers. Argentina has 1k publishers. And then we have huge amount of books published in spanish by Penguin Random House, Scholastic, Springer, etc.

FrustratedMonky 7mo ago

This is really nice. When zoomed all the way, it is a book shelf. Totally un-expected, nice touch.

rosstex 7mo ago

This makes it feel like there aren't many books in the world

C-x_C-f 7mo ago
That's funny, I came out of it with the opposite impression. In the section for my native tongue, I zoomed in a few times, here and there, and I only once did I stumble upon an author I knew. To me, writing a book feels like such a monumental endeavor that I find it hard to fathom the amount of collective effort that it took to write all this, especially considering how most of these works are almost forgotten by now (something something power law).
squigz 7mo ago
There are 101,000,000 books visualized. Another way of looking at it is how incredible it is that we can catalogue (and archive) so much of humanity's writing.

fakefish 7mo ago

The bookshelf is nice, but I'd love to be able to read the titles more easily - maybe rotate by 90 degrees?

rwoerz 7mo ago

Blocked in Germany by CUII https://cuii.info/ueber-uns/ https://cuii.info/ueber-uns/

burgerone 7mo ago
Change your DNS server
on_the_train 7mo ago
[flagged]
- cedilla 7mo ago
  Strange. If you compress complex topics into one four-word sentence, they are not as coherent any more.
  - ProllyInfamous 7mo ago
    Fortunately ingermanlanguage youcancramwordstogether toyourlittleheartsdesire.
    - deanishe 7mo ago
      Ne, kannst du eigentlich nicht.
      - ProllyInfamous 7mo ago
        Du bist ja der liebevollmegahackerdorkygamingklugscheißerdatenrausch‑Guy! ::I am not a native speaker — intended to be playful::
        deanishe 7mo ago
        I'm not a native-speaker either, but becoming so assimilated that jokes are no longer a laughing matter …

phiresky 7mo ago

Here's my article on how I built it - and also an instance hosted on GitHub pages if the AA domain is blocked for you: https://phiresky.github.io/blog/2025/visualizing-all-books-in-isbn-space/ https://phiresky.github.io/blog/2025/visualizing-all-books-i... Happy to answer questions as always :)

realitylabs 7mo ago
Love this!

max8539 7mo ago

A lot of errors like "resolvePublishers(978-0): SyntaxError: The string did not match the expected pattern." are blocking view on mobile…

krick 7mo ago

I remember the story of it being made, and I seem to even remember there was some very generous bounty attached, but I never got the point of it. I mean, honestly, ISBN is a pretty problematic thing on its own, especially today, when self-publishing is common, and especially for a web-library that is collecting scans of everything somewhat notable that ever was out there. But even accepting it as a main entity, because that's what we've got right now, what does this visualization achieve? What does it show? You cannot really find a book using it, I mean, any more specifically than "some random book probably in a given language". I was kinda surprised when this visualization was declared a winner of that particular bounty/contest.

functional_dev 7mo ago
exactly, that map looks like a mess of random blocks... big blocks are registration groups (countries) and squares inside are registrants (publishers). like a hierarchy. this visualisation helped me to put pieces together - https://vectree.io/c/isbn https://vectree.io/c/isbn
phiresky 7mo ago
There's a bit of an issue with the linked deployment (in my opinion). In the most zoomed out view you should see the first layer of blocks - very big blocks titled "English language", "French language", "German language". See https://phiresky.github.io/isbn-visualization/ https://phiresky.github.io/isbn-visualization/ maybe. That makes it a bit easier to read. The point of the visualization is showing different attributes of books in the space of ISBNs. ISBNs correlate with country, publisher, and release date, that's why using it as a space is useful. You can clearly see the history of when blocks were created, which blocks are rarer than others (present in fewer libraries), and (on the AA hosting) which blocks are more present in AA vs not. In any case though, yes ISBNs as spatial data are clearly not perfect. Do you have any suggestions that would order the 100 million data points better?