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!"

Comments

There is already a good one.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

BookCrossing

[ciurana]

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!

E

Re:What About Amazon?

[joshsisk]

If Amazon decides not to carry the book, *poof* it ceases to exist if we rely on it as a means of archiving records of books.

Well, no. There are lots of books on there that they don't carry. In fact, there are lots of books on there that they have NEVER carried.

The do this because they will send a request to a rare book dealer for you and then take a commission from the sale if the dealer can find it for you.

That said, I think a non-commercial DB is better...

Re:What About Amazon?

[b!arg]

You do realize that IMDB.com is run by Amazon, don't you?

Re:What About Amazon?

[HBergeron]

IMDB was originally started by some english blokes as a free universal database project much like the original cddb and the like. You can see its' origins in some of the odd bits of information - they'll often have finnish or irish box office figures for an obscure movie but not U.S.. In my opinion those boys did one hell of a job setting it up. A few years back they sold out to Amazon for a (rumoured) $100M, not a bad chunk of change. Amazon has linked dvd sales to the site be seems to otherwise have left it to it's own devices. The greater clunkiness of the site these days owes more to the business folks who are running the site for amazon who seem to be trying to turn it into another Daily Variety.