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.
You mean a Site like this:
http://www.eigenspace.net/reality/
Which has been around for quite some time....
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.
http://www.footle.com does some of what you are talking about. And it has a lot of reviews already ....
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).
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
Written, yes. Printed, no. Gutenburg invented the printing press about 550 years ago. Before that it was all handwriting. Unless you count evidence from China using clay printing processes 450 years before.
Conversion Rate Optimisation French / English consultant
or this.
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.
Check out "The Assayer" for online book information.
... let me know. Then I might take a look at the wheel you've reinvented.
The one thing I liked about IMDB was that in its early days you could download all of the data it contained.
You still can, by going to ftp://ftp.imdb.com/pub/interfaces
Last update was March 1, 2003.
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."
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
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/
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.
catalog.loc.gov
The Open Directory License, used by dmoz isn't a copyleft but was authored roughly for "DB data". At Bitzi we use the similar OpenBits License. One could also choose a Creative Commons license. Or maybe the GNU Free Documentation License. Also see the FSF's licenses page. I wouldn't get enthusiastic about any community contributed data project until license issues are clarified.
Aww, come on. He didn't intend for the mailing list to be postable from anyone except for himself, and he shutdown the list pretty quickly. Yeah, I got a bunch of messages too, but it wasn't spam, it was people asking questions about how to do stuff, etc.
Then after less than one day he shut down the list and setup forums. Give him a break.