Slashdot Mirror
An IMDb for Books
darkgray writes "After years of reading books and never really knowing which books were, perhaps, the best out there, and in the meantime getting more and more impressed by sites like the Internet Movie Database, I decided to start a project of my own. I named it the Internet Book List, and now it needs people to vote on books they've read, and even more it needs dedicated people to submit books and author information. Help out Humanity: Add a Book!"
There's always Amazon.com. They have reader reviews as well as a rating system for each book. I personally use it due to the large amount of traffic they have so I can see a wide range of opinions on a product.
They may not have everything, but they're pretty close.
So ummm... how do we go about inputting books ourself? I mean, there are some decent books in the system that need rating and reviews, but none that I've read recently enough to write a decent review.
I think it would be difficult to post most "memorable quotes" from a book, sadly. At least, not without posting a dozen paragaphs of context :)
(Well, I guess there are a few exceptions ... but in general, it might be difficult)
Have you already considered the legal ramifications for what you're doing?
It's a sterling idea, it's just that some publishers might get aggrieved when they see information on their publications being held by a third party.
Smokey, this is not 'Nam, this is bowling. There are rules.
But what is wrong with Amazon's system of ranking books and writing comments about them - they have a lot of info that is searchable?
Hell, they own IMDB too.
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
Anyway, it could collect or link comments about the book at amazon or other book related communities, to build fast a reasonable big initial collection, and start adding to it.
You mean a Site like this:
http://www.eigenspace.net/reality/
Which has been around for quite some time....
Amazon and other retailer sites are good, but a free, non-comercial one is better. Amazon won't bother having entries for books they don't sell, which excludes many old and obscure ones.
What is really needed for something like this is an advanced version of the Personalized Suggestions that amazon and others use now. I bet the community could come up with a pretty complicated and very neat algorithm such that when I rated the books that I do and do not like it really would give me recomendations for books I would also like.
I haven't had much luck with the amazon one, but if something like that worked, now that would be a Good Thing.
Fiction, Nonfiction, both?
What about textbooks? Do we want those too?
How about programming books? Manuals? At what stage of public availability do we want to consider? If it's on a shelf at Barnes & Noble that's one thing, but are we talking Congressional Review here?
Suggest some boundaries!
Schnapple
Maybe an extension to this could include magazines, journals, and other literature. Including full-text for things that are public domain would be another nice feature.
It's called "amazon.com".
Seriously, though, my old college library used Amazon when trying to find out information about a book. It has reviews, it's surprisingly complete (considering how many out-of-print books they list), what more could you want?
And, if you're looking mostly at SF, SFSite fulfills many of the functions you list.
1. Amazon "buy this book" buttons. They could get some decent Amazon affiliate revenue I'd think... easily done & free to set up 2. "This user also enjoyed" cross-referencing! I've found some great stuff with that feature of Amazon. Oh. Now I think about it, this site is basically Amazon, except without the database or a way to actually buy books. Hmmm.. not really that great now, is it?
coldcity
code, life, art
I usually search/review books on Amazon then buy them locally or via another discount online merchant. Amazon charges tax+shipping so it actually costs more to buy from them in most cases.
Doesn't the library of congress or some other source already have the background information of all books available online?
Personally I would assume that if you signed up there would be a section to submit...
but thats just me...
moo.
It looks like the site has a good start. One problem, though. The list of 'most popular' books reads like a reading list from the comic-bookstore-guy fan association. All that genre fiction: the Neil Gaiman, Douglas Adams, Tolkein. Ayn Rand! One worries how soon Elron the Hubbard will appear. That's all subcult stuff. Hopefully as the site grows a more mainstream focus will take hold.
http://www.alexlit.com It's a little SF heavy, but it has a great rating systems and has been operating for a number of years. Check it out before you start a whole new project.
But the worst part is: How do you dare to submit this to Slashdot without having Neal Stephenson in the Authors list ?
I would much rather research a book or series without being unindated with adds and guesses as to what I want, and sweaters randomly dropping down out of a Target tab.
I look forward to submitting.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
amazon doesn't get ./ed after 10 minutes either...
What? No erotica genre?
bah!
-- www.globaltics.net
Political discussion for a new world
Your site looks like it is off to a good start. Considering that there are thousands upon thousands of titles, how do you add a title that is not in the database? Do you have an automated process, or are you stuck adding titles and authors by hand? If you are doing this via hand and you get, say, 100 submissions per month for a new title, you will be a busy bee (and very well might burn out before you really get going). If there is an automated process, how do you access it?
Be excellent to each other. And... PARTY ON, DUDES!
http://www.footle.com does some of what you are talking about. And it has a lot of reviews already ....
I signed up, went in, looked, and found no place to add a book.
moo.
One of my favorite wastes of time is following threads on Allmusic. I love the way they have a description of a band, and also have information on contemporaries, styles, members etc. that are dynamically hotlinked to other items in the db. If you could do the same kind of thing with the author information, it would be really great.
This is a great idea. I hope it really takes off as I'm curious to see others takes on books that I find interesting.
Provide a way to download/purchase an archive of your listed books?
Ratings is the least interesting feature of imdb and a big failure. Focus on content. Also I didn't see any promise to keep the submitted comment "open" and "free". I don't want to contribute to another cddb fiasco.
Get ready for a world of hurt ... first the Slashdotting, and then, if this becomes popular, a wave of traffic to your site that won't stop... just look at IMBDB or RottenTomatoes: sites that started small and today have huge server farms...
Karma: pi (Mostly due to circular reasoning in posts).
Posting to Slashdot means you'll probably get lots of new listings, but they'll also be pretty skewed to some niche audiences. I just took a quick look at the list of most popular authors, and it's pretty apparent. Still, you do need to build up quickly to attract other people to enter submissions, I suppose. Just as long as you don't alienate people who don't like the stuff that slashdotters do...
"But I trust in the people's capacity for reflection, rage and rebellion." -Oscar Olivera
1. It doesn't look like anything that online bookstores (e.g. Amazon) wouldn't have already. If I want to find out if a book is good or bad then I can usually already do it. /. front page? /. effect. Enough said.
2. IMDB and other similar "serious" sites have paid full time staff that deals with submissions, fixing inaccuracies, and feeding out other problems. This site, however, looks somewhat amateurish. I have seen a few similar attempts (SF-specific though) that are quickly reduced to anarchy by duplicate submissions, inaccurate data etc.
3. As I mentioned in the previous point, there are many such attempts already, often having more features. How is this particular one any more special so that it should be advertised on
4. It doesn't survice the
All this being said, I wish you luck. If you manage to keep the site growing, consistent and high quality (you need full time dedication for it!), it never hurts to have more information available.
When men used to be men
As nice as the IMDb is, there is one major difference between what you are doing and the IMDb:
The sheer volume of material.
There are far more books now than movies, and you had better start considering how you are going to apply categories and searching to it. The sheer volume also means that most of the good information is only going to reside in 'popular' books, while the rest, if it is ever added, is going to be dilute and useless.
I wish you luck in your endeaver, I'm certian others will aid you in its progress. I can't see it becoming very popular unless you somehow leverage existing (possibly for-pay) data sources, such as Amazon, and that path requires you to take your site to a proprietary level (as CDDB and IMDb did), which will upset those who freely added material in the 'early' days.
-Adam
Others have mentioned Amazon and some other genre specific sites. Perhaps having a site that does consolidation like Rotten Tomatoes does for movie reviews. If you could get Amazon and the other web owners to agree, you could integrate their reviews and rankings and make your site a meta site. One advantage for Amazon could be that you could provide a "buy it now" link (not saying that this is a "worthy" thing, just that it might take something like this to get them to agree).
I think what would set this apart is the fact that the data is freely available to anyone that wants it. Sure, IMDB is a great database, but the data is not free for people, and neither is Amazon's data of course.
I am a strong supporter of FREE data the way that freedb.org gives away their database. I think that is the featrue that will make this database worthwhile. Otherwise I agree that Amazon seems to be doing a pretty good job.
All i found was an email address to submit to. Is there a book sudmit form I missed?
click me
1. Doesn't epinions.com suffice as a general ratings/review site with a major section on books?
2. I haven't found anything on the policy for collection, ownership, and usage restrictions of data that is gathered from this. I will be damned if I post information to be shared only to see it be used for commercially licensed purposes only like CDDB down the road. I need to know that the information submitted by "volunteers" will be freely accessible and usable by everyone else, or if not, have that policy stated clearly.
Before everyone goes to help any kind of "community" project like this, I think the legal stipulations need to be upfront and clear.
The other problem is, maintaining this kind of information is a large undertaking (at a scale where it can be useful, at any rate). It's a nice idea, but what will keep it running so that it will remain useful for a long time, so that we are not just wasting our time here?
The other thing I find difficult about amazon is the amount of pointless reviews I have to wade through to find something that actually evaluates a book beyond the simple, "oh mi gawd, it sucks. i had to read this for english class and it rilly rilly sucked."
I've always appreciated the structure of imdb. The ability to search it intelligently (which may be possible with amazon, but I've yet to have it do a real library catalogue style search), some of the fun trivia sections including biographies and so on.
I do look forward to using this new site and seeing how it develops.
I tried to add my book, but there was no submit form - even after I created an account. Got a PHP error message so maybe its just /.ed.
I'd also like to see something on the order for computer and video game software. Again, everything tied to the ISBN with some necessary database details to file in.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
the best out there
WTH does "best" mean?
---
Information wants...you to shut your pie hole.
as in Freedom, or Free as in Beer, like IMDB?
So what rights do I have with this data? I was kinda burned when FireFly sold all my record reviews (along with those by hundreds of other users). CDDB being sold to (and locked up by) Escient is a better example of this phenomenon. (For those who arrived late, freedb is an open source fork of CDDB, which is now called GraceNote).
No more submissions from me until someone tells me what happens to my work. I don't mind someone like Jon Katz quoting my /. posts, but I'm not willing to have my work turned into proprietary data.
Good project tho; I'm surprised it took this long to happen.
So, are we going to have interesting biographies on such compelling figures as Bilbo Baggins or Harry Potter??
[/blatant sarcasm]
From the site: "Here, arrayed in all their splendor, lie over five thousand books of the Science Fiction and Fantasy persuasion." It seems this side is dedicated to mostly, if not completely, Fiction books. A database that catalogs and reviews books regardless of the book's nature would be an excellent addition. Futhermore, even though others may have attempted to do so before, this one may suceeed because if its similarity to the already established IMDB.
SOMETHING EXISTS ALREADY IT IS CALLED ISBN!!
practically any book created has one.
if he wanted to add a system to comment on books, that would be different.
The imdb was set up because no database of movies exist.
For what is worth, there is a similar effort out there called Book Crossing. Essentially, you put books in circulation by leaving them in cafés or other public places, for people to find and comment on. I put a couple of books (my most recent one today!) out. Anyway, this creates a virtual roaming library that now has global reach.
Check out their web site; Book Crossing has some neat ideas that could be applied to this project.
Cheers!
Ehttp://eugeneciurana.com | http://ciurana.eu
Posting your own web site on Slashdot is a good way to get noticed, but isn't it a bit masochistic?
That said, you need to work a bit on the layout and interface, but I really like the idea. I love using IMDB, and Amazon, being commercial, can have certain agendas regarding specific books, and can arbitrarily remove reviews and skew the votes.
You need a specific and clear policy regarding submissions, and a good work ethic if you want people to help. Don't sell out!
If he explores all forms and substances Straight homeward to their symbol-essences; He shall not die.
I have wondered for years why this idea had not yet come to fruition. If you want opinions on movies, there are an infinite number of reviewers, filmophiles and media oulets focused only on the goal of giving you information about films. A database of books for the public (not trying to sell them) is an idea whose time has come. I have always wanted to have the opportunity to see what people think about fiction (especially contemporary). Perhaps now I shall write some reviews of my own...
Help out Humanity: Add a Book!
For you, my friend, books, I have two! Here and here.
getSexySig();
Actually, I have found several out-of-print books and software that is no longer available (old Lucasarts games, etc...) in their database, not available for sale.
That said, I still think a non-retailer database is a fantastic idea. It would be nice if the database itself was freely available, so that we don't have a repeat of the CDDB fiasco. ("It's free! Wait, no it's not!")
There is an interesting article in last? months Dr Dobb's about just this sort of thing. The premise of the article is that you can track groups via email, books, or just about anything that has large scale participation. This is much like how amazon's "if you like this then you would like these too." Its akin to "7 degrees of kevin bacon" but uses some more sophisticated alogirthms then just tracing a path from A -> B -> to see what people like. I hope that a feature like this would be implimented into the system. The most interesting part of the doctor dobbs article however was that in books there is almost absolutely no crossover in liberal and conservative reading, and when there is it is the same few books over and over.
Just some thoughts on IMDB and an online book respository.
I think this Book List is a fabulous idea and I support it 100%. My only concern is something of this magnitude will require a business plan of some sort. Already the server appears to be having problems handing the slashdotting effect. If this project hopes to achieve its true potential its going to need a lot of bandwith and storage capacity, in addition to a lot of open-sourced people power and coordination. At the very least I would expect it would require some people to manage it full-time, who will need monetary compensation for doing so.
Do you have a business plan that will anticipate and manage this growth. I hope so.
Best of luck and success to you.
Planet P Blog
www.enthea.org
typing like this is really more trouble than it's worth.
good show!
Just raise the taxes on crack.
This is a good idea. I have often thought that IMDB is the best site on the internet since it was ran from Cardiff Uni (Despite the US-centric reporting and rampant commercialism on the frontpage).
The main think the IMDB has over a similar book site is the interconnectedness of movies. With actors often appearing in more than one movie, the IMDB is just as much a database for actors, crew, writers, producers and composers as it is for movies.
With books all you can really index are the titles and the authors - and crossovers are rare.
You could still list the characters appearing in a book but due to the majority being one of appearances it's usefulness is definately restricted.
No playing six degrees with books. and no thinking "I really like that character. What else have they been in?"
All in all it's a nice idea but I can't see it reaching the same level of usefullness of IMDB.
Wow, so we can have another site, like imdb and cddb, where thousands of volunteers can create a huge and valuable database, which is then claimed as sole property by a single company which then proceeds to make money for itself by charging for use? No thanks. May I suggest the Library of Congress card catalog instead?
Well, this is really great and all, but what do we do after you drop dead from seeing your bandwidth bill after this slashdotting? Back to Amazon I guess...
Good idea, but it's missing ISBN numbers on some of the books, publisher information (Which I KNOW can be several publishers for the same work)
I have to suggest that somebody go on a major ISBN harvesting mission for this site....
LongTail SSH Brute Force analysis tool is here!
We could even make stuff up, like, "Reportedly Douglas Adams was enjoying a tuna sandwich with pickles when the idea for 'So Long and thanks for all the Fish' struck him."
Major time waster and brain filler : Turn on the tv. Find movie. Look movie up. Read Trivia, Goofs, Memorable Quotes, Alternate Versions, and Movie Connections in that order. On Movie Connections, click another movie that looks interesting. Repeat. My wife wonders why I'm always saying I'm going to go pick up my office but it takes days.
www.HearMySoulSpeak.com
or this.
when the best book isn't the bible :-)
Cudos though. I really think it can be successful as long as the insensative clods in here start telling real people about it.
Bye!
'Cuz if you named it IBDb.com, it'd sound like that annoying robot from Buck Rogers.
The latest Slashdot meme.
In the case of public domain books, having a link to the appropriate files on Project Gutenberg would be nice
Everything's been downhill since the TRS-80
I wrote an essay about what such a book database would look like.
Books, Ontologies and Shared Dictionaries
Interestingly, many of the book reviews from the major sites (nytimes, ny review of books) charge for access to archived articles. When writing my longish longish essay on Gao Xingjian's novel Soul Mountain , I had to go through hoops to figure out how to reach cached copies of these articles. Although dozens (if not hundreds) of people had reviewed this same book, only a handful were publicly accessible.
Unfortunately, this sort of project would be successful if the major book publications agree to open their content. i would argue that access to old movie reviews (like Roger Ebert, etc) on imdb hasn't hurt the respective publications. Perhaps if the project gains enough momentum, the major publications will see value in providing their content for free.
I hope this project succeeds (and more importantly finds funding), but I have to wonder what is so wrong with depending on newsgroups (easily accessible from google groups) to find reviews. It's free, easy and threaded, so conceivably people could reply to a thread on a specific book.
Robert Nagle
Robert Nagle, Idiotprogrammer, Houston
I'm not learning anything new from database of fanboys, objectivists, and self-appointed digerati. This is the same shit we already hear too much about on slashdot.
What would be nice is an internet database with information culled from others that don't come from an IT background or don't even have an internet connection. I might actually learn something new from these people.
Under the help section:
5. How do I help out with the project?
We'd love to get more people to help out with adding books and authors, so mail us at submission@iblist.com asking to become an administrator. We will contact you as soon as we can.
Everyone who's chiming in with "What about Amazon" is missing the point of having an independant database whose purpose is to collect and distribute information.
Amazon is only interested in marketing books so people will buy them. They aren't going to carry information about things they can't sell.
The Library of Congress will carry information about the book, but no commentary or reviews... and even they won't store data on books that may be centuries old, or only available outside the United States.
As far as legal concerns... remember that little principle called "Fair Use" that all the big companies want to take away from us? Printing a self-compiled catalog of book titles, even with small excerpts, should be covered under fair use. Reviews of said titles should be 1st amendment. Of course, IANAL.
This is a great idea!
Thank You. This is great!
Although mentioned several times already, amazon does a pretty nice job of acting out the role of a 'comprehensive net-based book et al. resource',
with the downside of being run by a commercial entity.I for one will embrace free and open alternatives such as this one(have had enough amazon- problems in the past to stay away from them whenever possible)
Also it would be pretty nifty to have other interfaces to the database in addition to the web-based one, like SOAP (as a sidenote, the iblist administration interface for adding books & data is pretty nice)
Another area I feel is in great need of a similar resource is games(especially retro) (computer, board, card, pen & paper, arcade, console, pinball) where relevant comprehensive data is scattered all over the net. "Oh I need information of those kinds of arcade games? system16.com perhaps? klov.com? usenet? aaaargh)
To all of the posts talking about Amazon as an archiver of book information:
Remember that Amazon OWNS IMDb, which is why you see Amazon links and ads all over the site. Yet IMDb is vastly superior to the information contained within Amazon itself. So, perhaps another major bookseller on the net (bn.com, maybe?) could buy / finance this endeavor to duplicate IMDb/Amazon's successful relationship (assuming that the site gets popular and is unable to support itself).
What's the license for using the information in the database? If it's under your control, I don't think I care that much about submitting. If any bookseller can use it on their website, and I can download it and do whatever I want with it-- cf dmoz.org used by Google-- you have me on.
While everyone is complaining that Amazon already has a internet book rating archive. Where is the internet rating archive for Linux distributions and packages? Sure there are reviews for specific distros and packages, but no diffinitive source to see how many people are using specfic ones and what they say about it at a given time. Unless you count old /. polls. I'd also like to see some demographic information to correlate the statistics. I would expect users to change their vote to keep it relative to what they are actually running currently, that way when something new comes out the poll would reflect its true popularity.
0xfeedface
You could make a pretty good start on getting this info by writing spiders to grab books and author info off amazon.com and bn.com
No electrons were harmed creating this post, though some may have been subjected to electrical and/or magnetic fields.
How are you going to pay for this? Maybe the UN will chip in? I assume you'll be including books written in all languages and writing systems.
This will be an important step toward the long-term goal of the Internet: putting all of human memory online.
One difficulty you'll eventually see will be people trying to censor all mention of certain books. It will be very difficult to verify that the data is not altered or deleted except for authorized and proper purposes.
The book database looks like it's pretty heavily geek-weighted right now. Not saying they aren't some of the best titles, but the top fives seem all to be your standard geek picks for books snd suthors.
Help out Humanity: Add a Book!
Can you say "The Book of the Dead"?
Hot Damn! It's the Soggy Bottom Boys!
This has already been done for speculative fiction. Unfortunately, their ISP pulled the plug on cgi scripts a couple of months ago according to this news update.
Check out "The Assayer" for online book information.
I'd love to see a group lens for books. Movielens is awesome.
'SBEMAIL!' is better than a goat!!
Before I go itemizing all my rare/out-of-print/hard to find books, I'd like to know what's going to happen to the data.
Is this going to turn around and go commercial, or (as we're led to believe) be project Gutenburg-ish?
If it's going to be open, can we get the DB on DVD, I'd certainly pay for a million-plus library of books that other people cared enough to index.
Etc.
Keep your packets off my GNU/Girlfriend!
Hey, isn't that what those old :CueCats can now be used for? I know mine is sittin in a bag of old computer parts, and thousands of geeks have them, and there are programs that turn scanned ISBN's into book info (which the company planned on you buying from their affiliates).... this guy should have a section on his Submit Book page where you can scan in an ISBN and then input the data about it... and then others can do a search by the scan of ISBNs.
IANAL, but I play one on
Why don't we just lobby for the Library of Congress to put its catalog online with voting and posting?
I like the idea but I really need a few clarifications before I'll devote time/energy to this and couldn't find anything relevant on the site.
- Is the db really free? Where will it be available for download, how often will the downloadable version be refreshed, can I mirror the database?
- Who is paying for this, how and why? Maybe a "buy this from amazon" link could be provided for each book, with revenues going towards the project itself. Don't know if this would be sufficient, though.
I'm sure there are a number of people who would like to get involved but it's crazy to assume anyone will get devoted to a project when they don't even know what will become of their contribution. The "license" of this db needs to be clarified.
until i learned that i can't write a review or post a book rating with out being a user.
I think you would get alot more initial data if you were to allow anyone to post a review or rating. At least until you get your amount of data up.
... let me know. Then I might take a look at the wheel you've reinvented.
Do you have any idea how verbose the 'bookies' , to coin a phrase to replace literati, can become? How many petabytes do you have available if this catches on?
At present, I appear to be the first to recommend this series of books, but I'm sure not to be the last.
You could've hired me.
Why not get a copy of the library of congress records?
They've got quite a lot of books in there and they're public, so you should be able to get them at the cost of reproduction.
(although, given the sheer size, that might mean some money)
Seems to me to be a good 'skeleton' for a database like this.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
try http://catalog.loc.gov
(Library of Congress) catalogs, then mounting a serious effort to make it web-accessable?
Seems that would be a more logical choice for proceeding on such a project.
?sp
If you just want to get reviews of books you might find interesting, check out other online sites like Amazon. Or (gasp) join a book club. Talk to friends. Read reviews in the newspaper.
..." type suggestions, that's where your book club/reviews/knowledgeable bookstore staff will help.
And if you want to create an uber-list of all the books in existance, I'm afraid the Library of Congress has probably beaten you to it.
What makes the IMDB useful (for me, at least) is not their reviews, but the way I can see who was in a particular movie, and what other movies they may have been in. Or to look up who played the part of that really cool character in such-and-such a film.
There are no comparable "searches" you could do on a IBList-type site. The LoC (among many other places) could give you the list of all the books by a particular author. And if you are looking for "If you loved Dickens, then you'll also like
Oh, and by "knowledgeable", I suggest you ignore your big-box Chapters, B&N or whatever, and visit your local, independent bookseller (if they haven't been driven out of business yet). In my experience, their knowledge and service far outweighs any minor price discount from Big Book City. Often, the independent is cheaper too, especially on new hardcovers.
Tuus crepidae innexilis sunt.
The nice thing about the IMDB is that it carries more than just reviews of the movies. It also has detailed information and trivia about each movie - the stars, the producer, the director, bloopers and goofs, plot holes, trivia, etc.
If the IBList does the same thing, they'll be filling a niche that Amazon's book reviews don't fill.
One could easily use Amazon Web Services to populate a site focused primarily on the review and ratings aspect of each product. They make most of this data publicly available to use (pretty much) as you see fit.
Having previously worked for them as a Web developer, I can tell you that Amazon does not do anything to skew the reviews and ratings of books. Nor have I ever heard of a book "disappearing" from Amazon's site, even if it becomes unavailable to them. Reason being, third-parties (including any of us) could still sell the book used (or new) through their platform. This is actually a very significant part of their business.
BTW, Amazon owns IMDB.com. IMHO, any attempt to create the IMDB of books has little hope of success unless it uses Amazon's massive collection of data, including ratings and reviews. They are just years ahead of any other effort, and, regardless of personal opinions, have millions of happy customers, many of whom already use the site for exactly these reference purposes.
Hi. I'm employed by a library and am working on a masters in library science, but IANAL(ibrarian).
That said, I spend a lot of time around databases of books. And I'd like to respond to a couple criticisms that have been raised in previous threads as well as make some suggestions.
It is true that are reference resources for books -- Books in Print with reviews, for example. And to an extent, BIP has been replaced by Amazon -- Because BIP costs money, whereas Amazon is fast and free. Librarians in general arn't happy about an entity with a stake in selling books controlling the reviews. They'd like to see a good, free resource develop.
But then we're vexed with the question of data format. We're developing free resources which we want to be interoperable, right? There is an internationally-accepted standard (data format) for electronic storage of bibliographic records -- it's called MARC. (http://www.loc.gov/marc/) Any new system storing records of books really should use MARC -- or at least be able to export to MARC, like allmusic/allmovie.com do.
Again, on the standards front -- what about subject tracings? Yeah, in the current database there's a place for genere, but books often cross those lines -- especially when you're dealing with nonfiction books. Library of Congress puts out a massive list of approved subject headings called (approperately) the library of congreess subject headings (LCSH). Wouldn't using those be wise? Plus you could get the records from the LoC already classified, saving a lot of work and arguments as to how to classify "the diamond age."
But downloading all those records manually would suck. Luckily, there's also a standard protocol for moving bibliographic records from one place to another -- z39.50. The advantage of z39.50 here would be that the maintainer of the site could suck zillions of bibiographic records from libraries, the LOC, whoever -- as well as share their records with libraries, schools, etc. They (for the most part) wouldn't have reviews, but they would have accurate summaries and bibiographic (size, publisher, isbn, pages, etc) information. To me, that seems like it would be a good way to start getting records for the userbase to augment. Plus, there's a z39.50 perl module available for your fun and entertainment. (http://perl.z3950.org/)
I think a database like this is ABSOLUTELY needed, and hope the creators will take these standards into account as their resource develops.
-- r . m o s q u i t o --
For cease and desist letters from publishers.
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
seriously, if you want a compresnsive archive, you need to get the opinions of non geeks, because frankly, the opinions of geeks have historically not been in alignment with those of the masses. as such, with high geek polarity, your popular appeal is sunk
I see many people saying how IMDB is good because it is not commercial... You all do realize that Amazon owns IMDB, right? Look at the bottom of the imdb webpage... An Amazon.com company...
vote...
...
1 The Bible
2 The Art of War
3
4 (misc. patriotic titles)
EWW Hard COPY!
Just saw that they say they're an Amazon company, and whois shows *.amazon.com as DNS servers. You're right, I'm wrong. Hate it when that happens :)
It would be more decentralized to encourage people to publish data as RDF. I have a near-trivial book review schema for marking things as reviews, and
Dublin Core can already express title/author/publisher information.
Those reader reviews are often times shills for the author or publishing company. This is especially true of many of the books published by smaller companys by lesser known authors. Plus with Amazon reader reviews you get dozens of AOL style "Me TOO!!" postings with idiots saying things like "This was a good book, my daughter also liked it." Yeah, great review fuckface.
The basic problem is that there was no online database for movies before imdb.
But these people are re-inventing the wheel. There are tons of people who have much more experience with this stuff, who've spent years getting masters degrees in library science. These people have spent a lot more time trying to figure out out to categorize books already.
Plus, there are already numberous search tools available, like the loc and Amazon.
Cirethere is always http://www.bookideas.com. they've already gotten started with their "list", and they have reviews, too.
There have been two objections raised that I think are legitimate:
1. We enter all this info and the site locks up the database and starts selling access, just so they can make dirty money.
2. This effort will take a lot of bandwidth, resources and effort. You need money for that.
I don't want to contribute to an effort that will lock up the info like #1 but without #1, #2 will stop this from being a success.
Could a solution be a distributed database? Something between DNS and a P2P system. You set up a daemon on your machine. Enter your reviews locally, 10 books, 100 books, in one category (SF, Classics) whatever. Someone with the client does a query. It goes through a heirarchical system like DNS or broadcasts like a P2P system and you get back a review and other info. You can rate this review, or choose to read reviews by people who like books similiar to yours to filter out duplicates you don't like.
The protocol, client and daemon are all open source and open standards.
As someone else pointed out, this could be handy for things other than books: magazines, journals, cds, dvd's etc.
Another way to get a similiar effect is to have an standard XML description of a book, have people post the info on their personal websites and have goolge or something similiar webcrawl and catalog that data for later searches.
This way the bandwidth and database are distributed. The cost and effort are distributed and the data can't be locked up.
Why don't you write a webcrawler to go through all the pages at amazon.com and other sites to collect information about the books available? There aren't going to have some of the more obscure books, but you'll quickly have a very extensive list.
an initiative like this may already be sponsored by your local library. See, for example,
http://www.readersclub.org/
Now if the would only RSS feed the contents...
(I wish I could see what the site has, but it's /.'d)
When it comes to books, I tend to want to read the ones that are recommended by other people who share my tastes.
No system like this will ever be complete(useful?) without a way to filter out the opinions of people with whom I'll probably never agree.
A big problem with IMDB is that you have so many widely varying opinions, that it's a pretty useless way to find movies that I might enjoy. It's only really good for seeing who starred in what, really.
Why are you letting these clowns ruin our country?
The main think the IMDB has over a similar book site is the interconnectedness of movies... With books all you can really index are the titles and the authors - and crossovers are rare.
But surely sometimes authors base parts of their works on other books they've read before. Imagine for a moment if someone were to write a book, and included with it a list of every other work that they found useful in doing so- you could call that section, say, a bibliography!
Seriously, you and the moderators should try the non-fiction section, there's a whole world there. But even science fiction and fantasy books are going to have similar plot elements, themes, situations, etc that would be worth cataloging.
I would love to be able to find in a database a history or science book I've just read, and be able to click on any listing in the bibliography and browse on backwards through time. Or find what the most cited book ever was, or play six-steps-to-Stanley-Karnow or some other author (I wouldn't love that, but someone might). Imagine a grand family tree of books with chains of links stretching back for centuries that existed on the web for anyone to browse and search- I think it would be a powerful device for showing the accretion of human knowledge. (There are systems like this for peer-reviewed papers, but they're relatively inaccessible)
Does anyone know if reproducing a bibliography whole would be fair use?
Isn't discussing books online a violation of Amazon's recent patent. Granted, that only applies in contexts where the books are also offered for sale. But if you offer them for sale at anywhere other than Amazon, they can come after you, as long as that silly patent holds up. Meanwhile, I'd suggest that sites which do both discuss and link books consider bn.com - as complete a catalog as Amazon, no bad patents. Let's keep Bezos busy making more enemies.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
While the Internet Book List looks like it might eventually become a worthwhile alternative data source to Amazon.com, I've been using All Consuming for a little while and find it to be an exceedingly useful resource for book information.
While it does use Amazon data (the merits of which are discussed in other replies to this article), All Consuming provides a clean interface and metainformation to the base data, as well as nifty features like weblog scanning (to find mentions of books), the ability to track a book collection, and a "friends" network that keeps one up-to-date with other members' various literary excursions.
As I put it on my weblog: "If you read, join All Consuming."
ask how much they want for their database of ISBN-informationt op
Ebay will shutter Half within a year, and surely the data could be salvaged...
http://news.com.com/2100-1019-991480.html?tag=fd_
I've always been impressed at how typing in an ISBN produced the book,
with details, and often a picture of the cover.
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Sounds like clever spam to me. My site MediaGab could really use more reviews, more users talking about the stories and most of all more people buying products to support my site. Maybe I should submit a story to slashdot for help.
mediagab.com is modeled after slashdot in terms of how the site functions but its audience is those who are looking for Entertainment news and reviews on media (Books, movies, music). Since I am spamming you might as well check it out.
But back on topic here, I hope that iblist.com works out for them. Maybe if they offer a synopsis of each book (via ISBN) available to other sites via XML I might include them in my book listings with a link to their site.
The title is something like "The Third Level" or similar. It's about a guy who works for an insurance company. He's building a computer model of the world such that the company can run simulations of natural disasters to figure out how much to charge for their insurance. To use it, you somehow connect into the simulation such that you're a part of it (ala The Matrix, but predating it) and you observe what's going on in the simulation as the disaster/whatever is happening.
Soon, strange things start to happen to this guy. One day he's driving down the road and he turns to look at his wife, asleep in the passenger seat. When he looks back out the windshield it's all black -- there's nothing outside the car. He turns to wake his wife but then everything's there again. Later, one of the people jacked into the simulation suddenly stands up, rips off the headset/whatever, shouts "I'm half-way there!" and drops over dead. As the story unfolds you come to understand that the main character is really just a simulated person in a massive computer simulation of the real world, which is so accurate that it includes people like him, running simulations of the simulated world.
So, anyone heard of it? I was told about it by a camp counsellor in the 1960s.
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
Know we just need someone to code 6 Degree's of Kevin Bacon to work against....!
Or maybe in the book world its 6 degree's of Tolkien or something...:)
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
Anyway, I can toss in two cents to back up criticisms of their model: Amazon has a serious bias in favor of positive reviews. When you write a glowing review of something, the "helpful" votes pour in, especially if the book in question is on a controversial subject. Don't believe me? Write a positive review of something nastily political.
On the other hand when you really slam something, air it out, pretty often the votes are overwhelmingly against you. Doesn't matter how shoddy the book is, there are people who take offense.
I can honestly say I've written every review I have with the person who might be considering that title in mind: Should they buy this? When I don't recommend something, for example, I try to suggest an alternative. But the "helpful" votes aren't much interested in that; they're about staking out positions. The only real exception (for me) has been reference works -- which type of dog should I think about? or Is this bird guide organized well? -- those sorts of things.
Not sure why, but imdb isn't like that. Maybe it really is the conflict-of-interest thing. Seems like a natural problem with a commercial site, but then imdb does actually link to sources for movies, doesn't it?
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
Most review sites show all the reviews or the highest and lowest rating reviews. This just shows the general population rating.
The Library of Alexandria website has you rate several books. Then it compares your ratings with all of the other users in its database and finds the users who's ratings are closest to yours, your "neighbors". Then it makes recommendations based on other books your neighbors have rated. It even assigns a confidence level based on how many neighbors have rated a book, what the spread of ratings is, and how close each neighbor is to you.
It started out as a straightforward data gathering and recommendation website. The layout of the website has gotten a little more awkward since they added an online bookstore, but you don't have to order books just to get recommendations. You can sign up for a free membership and then just go to the Departments:Recommender links to get at the rating and recommendation area.
The more you rate, the more accurate Hypatia's recommendations for you and your neighbors will be. I am not an employee of alexlit, but I am an enthusiastic user. I've entered over 2000 ratings over the years.
Taco
michael
Katz
Lockwood
Hemos
Rusty
underbruck
Trollaxor
Shoeboy
OmikrOn
Lockwood's kid
McPherson
George Bush
cyborg_monkey
Jason Kidd
Kobe Bryant
Scott Osgood
Steve Yzerman
Richard Simmons
Tom Cruise
Brad Pitt
Malda
goatse
bc
l33t j03
turmeric
News for Turds
Klerck
Peter Johnson
Lunch Lady
Fukui San
Einstein
Bill Gates
RMS
Feel free to add any homosexual you know of. I need to add a lot of text because I have too few characters per line. I assume I need to increase the number of characters I have prior to each line break becuase I have tried to post bulleted list with a lot of short names on it. That sucks, because it detracts from my message and delays the service I am providing of brining to Slashdot readers a handy list of known homosexuals on the site. Four score and seven years ago, our fathers blah blah blah. One two three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven twelve thirteen fourteen fifteen sixteen seventeen eighteen nineteen twenty. Important Stuff: Please try to keep posts on topic. Try to reply to other people's comments instead of starting new threads. Read other people's messages before posting your own to avoid simply duplicating what has already been said. Use a clear subject that describes what your message is about. Offtopic, Inflammatory, Inappropriate, Illegal, or Offensive comments might be moderated. (You can read everything, even moderated posts, by adjusting your threshold on the User Preferences Page) Problems regarding accounts or comment posting should be sent to CowboyNeal.Important Stuff: Please try to keep posts on topic. Try to reply to other people's comments instead of starting new threads. Read other people's messages before posting your own to avoid simply duplicating what has already been said. Use a clear subject that describes what your message is about. Offtopic, Inflammatory, Inappropriate, Illegal, or Offensive comments might be moderated. (You can read everything, even moderated posts, by adjusting your threshold on the User Preferences Page) Problems regarding accounts or comment posting should be sent to CowboyNeal.
Readerware uses Amazon.com, Library of Congress, and several other sources to dish up info about the books, as well as a picture of the cover. It's surprised me on some of the books it can find - even a narrow circulation book published by the company I work for...
http://www.readerware.com/
MobyGames has been around for four years and has been documenting the entire history of videogames. Help out the cause. Contribute your favorit game information MobyGames
ABE used to be the online bookselling venue of choice, but that's before the new idiot management decided to impose a new commission fee structure on top of what their dealers were already paying, and kicking off those dealers who refused to sign the new agreement.
Information on ABE's new policies can be found here.
roght now, the best service to look for books online is bookfinder.com, which searches not only ABE (and Amazon & B&N if you want it to), but also more than a dozen other independent book-listing sites, including TomFolio.com, the site I currently list my science fiction books on (in addition to my own site.
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
Science Fiction already has two sites (though not with rankings) with tens of thousands of book and story titles already listed. They are:
The Locus Index; and
The Internet Speculative Fiction Database.
The Locus database covers SF/F/H/etc. from 1984 on fairly comprehensively, while the ISFDB covers a wider timeframe, but isn't (yet) nearly as comprehensive. ISFDB was also suffering under some badwidth caps earlier in the year, but expects their problems to be solved (via hosting through the Texas A&M library system) very shortly. Both are well worth bookmarking and using.
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
then you'd be on to something
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
The box has around 6 in load.
OK, I like this idea. What you need to do, is design a form that facilitates the abilities of people to make entries. You might want to limit it to fiction initially, or maybe not. Instead of listing a "cast" for each book, treat the characters as if they were actors, and let the readers see where characters show up in more than one book. So maybe Huck Finn is a character in someone else's book. That'd be a neat thing to know. This obviously has a lot more utility (and gets a lot more complicated) with non-fiction.
But how about this: design a form that publishers can fill out with the key pieces of information (author, title, characters). They will be prompted to see if any of the characters they've entered are already in the database. At the same time, many thousands of volunteers will start going through the back-catalog of their favorite books and doing the same thing. Even agents or the authors themselves might think it's useful to undergo this exercise. I'd suggest you swear off any ownership of the database and go with some GPL-type license to make sure no one else can "embrace and extend" it.
I think it'd be really neat thing to do; maybe someone else has tried. If you can make it work, it will be unbelievable useful for both general interest and serious scholarship. And once it's up and running and popular, a lot of free books could be linked from your site. If you push it, I bet you can make it work. Spend the few weeks it takes to make this type of info easy to enter, and the rest will take care of itself.
Some of the discussion has been about whether there's anything that Amazon doesn't do that someone else needs to do. Well, Amazon doesn't carry reviews of free books, which is actually The Assayer's main focus. (You can also review non-free books on The Assayer, and such reviews are welcomed, treasured, and cherished, just like reviews of free books :-)
Everyone should also realize that by submitting a review to Amazon, they are not in any way contributing to the free information movement. The reviews become the intellectual property of Amazon, which means you would be violating their copyright if you cross-posted your review somewhere else.
I think Internet Book List and The Assayer are doing things that are mostly complementary, not duplicative. I think the most popular use of The Assayer is actually just that people use it as a database of free books.
From surfing IBL briefly, one thing that wasn't clear to me was the legal status of reviews submitted by members...? The Assayer only accepts copylefted reviews. Cross-posting on both sites is fine with me, and if there are no legal incompatibilities, we could even share data on a wholesale basis. The Assayer's database is free for downloading, except for users' private information, such as e-mail.
Best wishes for IBL's success! From my experience, the hard part has been just enticing people to write reviews.
Find free books.
check out mediumsphere.com. another book list project
I was a little worried about this on my own user-submitted book review site, The Assayer. However, it's turned out not to be a problem. The site is very open. Any registered user (i.e., someone who's supplied a valid e-mail address) can enter new books, edit the information about a book, report that the link to a free book has been broken, etc. It hasn't been a problem at all -- users are generally pretty responsible about this kind of thing. I do look at the log file every day or so and make sure that nobody has been doing anything really goofy. Also, I back up the database pretty frequently, so if someone truly malicious came along and munged it, I would just have to restore off of backup. Hasn't happened, though.
Sure, users make mistakes like entering a title as "The War of the Worlds" rather than "War of The Worlds, The." Not a big deal. I just see it in the log and fix it.
A somewhat bigger problem is conflicts of interest. I've had several cases where the author tried to submit a review of his own book. The cure is caveat lector: don't trust a review by someone who hasn't given any personal information (real name and bio). Also, a person who has submitted a lot of well-written reviews is more trustworthy than someone who's only written one. I've heard stories about abuse on Amazon.com, too (e.g., grad students submitting glowing reviews of their thesis adviser's book).
Find free books.
I knew there was a conspiracy going on:
> Results of search for "1984":
>
> No results.
For-profit or not, IMDb is MUCH more useful as an informational site than Amazon is. Despite IMDb's tie-in with Amazon, it still is presented in a info first, sell second fashion, in my opinion.
IMDb lists tons of titles which you have absolutely no chance of buying from them.
IMDb has the extremely useful 'home pages' for any actor, director, etc. which you can see their entire body of work and even sort the info in a bunch of different ways. Where is a comparable feature for authors on Amazon?
IMDb does not try to sell me clothing, kitchenware, and other such nonsense on a movie review page. Amazon on the other hand..
A movie's 'home page' is not ridiculously long and bloated like a book's home page on Amazon.
You can do some pretty tremendous things with IMDb's advanced search that I have yet to see in Amason. Character name search for example?
IMDb has a much more pleasant interface. Almost everything on the site is a link to gobs more information.
Amazon is a great online store, but in terms of being a raw informational web database, I feel it leaves a lot to be desired. I think an 'IMDb for books' is something good to strive for. It DOES fill a need.
Sometimes I feel that the writing of book reviews should be limited to people who like books. Personally, I like books, but I have a hard time explaining what it is about a book that makes it good. This is why I don't write many reviews.
(EOT)
>I would much rather research a book or series without being unindated with adds and guesses as to what I want
People who posted to Slashdot also bought nice clean underware!
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
Let's review MacBeth -- you know, Shakespeare. I'll just type in the ISBN and review it.... oh wait, Amazon has 104 books with different ISBNs. And that's just what's in print.
:)
Cataloging books is hard -- that's why there are librarians. The real question is always about granularity. For example, do I want a review of the story of MacBeth? Am I interested in the quality of the footnotes? How about different editions of a scholarly version?
There's a lot of metadata you need to define to properly catalog a book. ISBNs are a start, but for all you OO folks (or Platonic idealists as well), the database needs the object BOOK of which we can define both instances and subclasses, etc.
Reviewing books is not as simple as it seems.
Of course once the data model's down, we can just thumbs up/down the book to make that part easy
Actually, the data in the Library of Congress' database was sold to a private company in the Reagan years. It may have changed since 2001, but last time I checked, text files of US book records from the LOC catalog--that should fit on a $20 DVD-R-- still cost US$15,000/yr. in licensing.
Dude...you submitted the site to Slashdot looking for traffic and participation...I think complaining about it is in pretty poor form.
m.
Photography, technology, and my dog Scout - http://mattstratton.com
They also have "Open Sourced" books...
You know you are dealing with nerds...
Not only can't they spell "kudos," but they rate a sci-fi book as #1 (Hitchhikers guide) and include Ayn Rand's rantings among the 20.
Sorry, but so far this list has zero credibility.
Library science was stuck with card catalogues for donkeys years. Only in the last few years have necessary tools been available to radically improve things. Catalogues were always very one-dimensional, and things could be 'lost'. Now we have more flexibility, sso the librarians are having to think again as well.
See my journal, I write things there
How about a music database as well, complete with full credits and biographical information of all personnel involved?
Doesn't Book-A-Minute already provide this?
X(7): A program for managing terminal windows. See also screen(1).
The easies boundry would be anything with an ISBN
But that includes more than just books - a lot of software also has ISBN numbers. I used to run a software company which got ISBN numbers for its products. To assign ISBN numbers, all you had to do was register with the issuing authority, tell them how many numbers you were likely to need, and they'd issue you a range of numbers. When you assigned one to a product, you informed them. Apart from the time, and the postage, it didn't even cost anything. There are products consisting of a program on a floppy disk plus a 10-page manual, that have ISBN numbers. We issued different numbers for the same program on 5.25" media and 3.5" media (this was 15 years ago).
Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Ender's Gam
Followed by a pretty large list of SF and fantasy that makes me say...
Please, all of you readers who have discovered those shelves in the library and bookstores that don't have books with swords or spaceships on the covers, please, rate some of those books.
In all seriousness, I enjoy Hitchiker's Guide as much as the next geek, but as a holder of a degree in English I hope to see a balanced list of books rise to the top.
The Glass is Too Big: My Take on Things
Sounds like a 14 year old wrote the thing. I am going to forward you to goatse.cx haha I am so Kool!
The IMDb .list files are text, but rather hard to parse. Is there really a .csv version somewhere as the AC indicated? If so, it would be nice if someone names the exact path to it.
http://catalog.loc.gov/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?DB=lo cal&PAGE=First
This link will take you directly to the basic search function of the Library of Congress catalog, where you can easily enter the ISBN.
[Note: that's DB=local not lo cal.]
DNA is a Turing machine. You, however, being dynamic and emergent, are not.
Here a collection of qualities / ideas that would make me want to contribute. Some of them mentioned already:
.csv format so that everyone can build applications on top of the collected data. There are Open Content licenses for this. Hopefully, lots of mirror sites will copy the data.
...
- Data should be freely distributable, in
- People should be able to contribute using a form.
- The database design should be open for debate. Somewhere in this comments section there was a (future) librarian, I'm sure there are others who want to contribute _and_ are knowledgeable.
There could be "book connections" similar to movie connections in IMDb,
- Take into consideration different character sets and languages. People should be able to submit reviews of The Two Towers in Finnish or Dutch.
Maybe there should be a mailing list to discuss ideas related to this project.
mediumsphere.com is another book list site (mine :)
I've had a quick look around, and some of the info is just blatantly wrong.
:-/
If they want to be taken seriously, then they need to at least TRY to be accurate.
Example - go to their info on Isaac Asimov, and look at the Foundation entry - see the order in which they place the books? Extremely wrong! They merely place them in chronological order of being published, even though anyone who reads the series will know that is NOt the order for the storyline at all.
If they get things as simple and basic as that wrong, I'm afraid I can;t trust anything else they state
People should not be afraid of their governments - Governments should be afraid of their people.
What crazy person picked that color scheme? Bleah! I refuse to subject my eyes to such abuse.
Some people just don't understand that white is a perfectly acceptable background color.
-FF
SQUEAK, the Death of Rats explained.
Neither of these sites cover as many books as Amazon, but because they are prepared to link to other web sites the Complete Review pages are often much more useful.
Danny.
I have written over 900 book reviews
Readerware does this already, by screen scraping a bunch of book site, and the LOC.
If the only reason for someone to go to the "IMDb for books" is to vote on their favorite, then you're bound to get an overwhelming number of cultists and religionists coming to your site.
Anybody know of any decent music databases analogous to IMDB? I would propose All Music Guide, which I actually think tells me more about music than IMDB tells me about movies.
I wasn't talking about LC or Dewey classification systems -- just cataloging, which is the act of describing works in a uniform matter.
This system isn't about classifying books, either. it's just about describing them.
For example, just looking at the titles by A's in this database, I noticed in some titles, all words are proper cased, while others have minor words written in lower case.
Why is there only one ISBN number listed for Hitch Hiker's Guide (and why Hitch Hiker's, rather than Hitchhiker's or Hitch-hiker's) when there've been many dozens of editions which it might be worth distinguishing between? [Does this system even differentiate between the GN and the novel?]
Those are the kinds of issues that librarians have spent decades working out.
Would you just throw together a database without asking any experts in building databases for advice? Build a bridge without looking at past efforts by architects and construction workers?
Then why pooh-pooh the advice of trained librarians?
Without at least consulting experts in the field, and at least listening to their accumulated wisdom at doing what you're trying to, I suspect you're going to get a lot of junk.
[Oh, and off the top of my head, the books I read on Elizabethan history are around DA330s in LC and in the 940s in Dewey, however I think about them more in terms of the physical layout of the libraries I visit most frequently.]
Ayn Rand - Atlas Shrugged
It's listed as Crime & Mystery.
What a joke.
This reminds me of the CDDB when it first came out. Everyone was loading in their collections and helping build the database. Then suddenly the database was sold and became commercial. Lots of people suddenly saw time and effort they devoted to a community become leveraged for someone else's profit. Sure, there weren't any promises that WOULDN"T happen, but it a lot people were surprised and pissed none-the-less.
Hell, didn't IMDB go a similar route? It was a labor of love, until it was sold, right?
I won't populate a free database of anything until I know it will stay free, or not-for-profit! I'm sure someone on slashdot will tell me why that's a stupid position. They may even be right. But that's how I certainly feel about it today.
In my opinion (but I am biased ofcourse ;)) reviews or short remarks tell a lot about what people liked or disliked about a book.
The Virtual Bookcase: book reviews
A couple of other comments following what people have said....
I'd (personally) like to see an upfront statement that users retain copyright over their comments.
Someone suggested MARC data as a good thing. I'm not entirely sure I agree as MARC data differentiates between editions even where there is no difference in content. However, I do think it could be very useful to have at least partial MARC records for the books, and possibly multiple MARC records for a single book.
Being able to load in publishers records for currrent books would also be a good thing (these are probably available somewhere online). Perhaps the "Cataloging in Publication" data could help.
The ability to link to Library of Congress bibliographic data (for those who prefer non-US centric, the British Museum Library, the Sorbonne, the Alexandria libray and the major libraries in Russia, China and so on) would also be very helpful.
Thinking in advance about other kinds of user services would be good. For example, might there be a way to search for other users who've rated a particular collection of books highly, then to find books common to those people? (IE, "Readers like you...")
Finding a granting agency that might be interested in helping to support this could be very valuable.
Stay away from this site. I'm not kidding
I thought I'd be helpful and send in a few submissions. The site admin emails me, stating he's made me an administrator and for me to enter my submissions. Then it began. I was added to his mailing list (without my request, consent or confirmation). Tons and tons of spam. His opt-out email doesn't exist. More and more spam. Direct request to remove me from the list goes unanswered. A post to the mailing list requesting my removal returns nothing but insults (and a couple of emails poitning me to the non-working opt-out email address).
This has got to be one of the most unprofessional, half-assed websites I've ever dealt with. Stay away from this site. Don't support it. Don't give them hits.
It's better to burn out than to fade away
services like 'books in print'? they've done much of the hard yards for you.
At any given moment, an arrow must be either where it is or where it is
not. But obviously it cannot be where it is not. And if it is where
it is, that is equivalent to saying that it is at rest.
-- Zeno's paradox of the moving (still?) arrow
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