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!"
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.
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
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
Personally I would assume that if you signed up there would be a section to submit...
but thats just me...
moo.
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?
> They may not have everything, but they're pretty close.
Erm, and you know this how?
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.
Also, if we rely on Amazon purely as a reference, I don't like the idea of the huge advantage they get on their competitors. Even if another site sells the book for cheaper, the convenience (pardon me, the conflict of interest) of mixing reference lists with sales catalogs seems a little too market-muddling for me.
"Old man yells at systemd"
what about it? We know that people go around on there and post ridiculous numbers of "reviews" for books. They rate them high and they sing their praises. Most of the time it's non-sense.
Let's take a look at some of the items listed on the current list of high-ranking info on IBDb...
Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the (1979)
J.R.R. Tolkien
Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy
I *hated* Hitch Hiker's Guide and I really don't care for Tolkien.
The Internet is full of opinions and sucky ones at that... No matter what, I cannot trust the views of others on the Internet to tell me which movies/books are good (especially MAJOR sites like Amazon and now this one).
Opinions are like assholes, everyone has one, and EVERYONE's stinks like shit.
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!
The problem with amazon is that their main purpose is to sell the product. This is a conflict of interest since they are always pushing some product to you, and in the process influencing people's opinions.
After using it for movies and also using IMDB.com I have always preferred IMDB.com because it has a much broader user base and offers better information. I feel like a good book site could do the same if it is able to gain enough information to get started.
How could they possibly have a legal right to complain? How is someone infringing on copyrights by simply acknowledging the existence of a published work? If it's published, it's implied that it was offered for Public Consumption, and referencing the author and title of a particular book should be considered a non-copyrightable fact.
Besides, there are already publically-accessable book lists in many places, on and off line. Amazon has already been cited, but how about your local library? Or the Library of Congress? Do libraries need to get permission to put books in their card catalog?
I'm curious if he recognized how much bandwidth can be eaten up by a project like this. Or if he's looked to see is Amazon has a patent on this. It seems right up their alley...
Every time I visit the Amazon website (to read reviews, I would never purchase a book from them) I worry about all that information people are submitting to one of the great sinking ships of the Internet. If and when Amazon.com goes belly up, or becomes even more just another buy.com site spamming our eyeballs with whatever consumer crap is bringing in sales, what is going to happen to all the reviews and content people are voluntarily contributing? I'd surely rather it were going to a non-profit site ('profit' is not bad, it's just that part of the profit-loss system necessitates that companies and their websites die on occasion).
Anyhow...
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
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.
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.
"Call me Ishmael" - Herman Melville, Moby Dick
"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife." - Jane Austin, Pride & Prejudice.
"There was only one catch and that was Catch-22" - Joseph Heller, Catch-22.
"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times" - Charles Dickens, A Tale of two Cities.
""When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean--neither more nor less." - Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.
5 perfectly good memorable lines, without lots of context.
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.
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.
Actually, Amazon has hundreds of thousands of out of print titles in their database, complete with reviews and data. So your argument doesn't really hold.
Also, I would be much more worried about some guy's week-end project going offline than the web's biggest retailer. So I would still need more convincing to believe that this is in any way a better archiving solution than Amazon or other online bookstores.
When men used to be men
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
Erm, and you know this how?
Personal experience. It's rare I don't find a book I'm looking for.
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.
An excellent point.
Also, if we rely on Amazon purely as a reference, I don't like the idea of the huge advantage they get on their competitors. Even if another site sells the book for cheaper, the convenience (pardon me, the conflict of interest) of mixing reference lists with sales catalogs seems a little too market-muddling for me.
Conflict of interest how? You see this daily in many places. Video game reviews have links to purchase the game they're selling, same with books, computer hardare and almost everything else. And of course, if your purchase the product using that link the reviewer generally gets a percentage of the sale. The same goes for the grocery store. Why not get some toilet paper while you're there instead of driviing to Target and saving $.50?
Like it or not, convience is king.
Also keep in mind nobody is forced to purchase the book there, and that's exactly what I do. Use Amazon for the review and then shop around if I decide to purchase it.
Keep in mind what this person wants to do is not create a reference list but a centralized web site for reviews. If you want a reference list I would suggest The Library of Congress.
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!
they really should have it user-submitted via a form and have it all automated. Or else this puppy's going to die purty darn fast.
click me
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!
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.
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.
You might find more variety among the Slashdot audience than you'd think. Not all of us constantly wallow in technical manuals from O'Reilly or _Star Wars_ / _Star Trek_ fiction.
Hell, my most recent readings include a history of the Qin dynasty as written by a historian of the Han; a short novel about a family of Tsarist aristocrats set in Kiev shortly after the Bolshevik revolution in Moscow; the second half of the "Hyperion" series; and a "novel of ideas" (nihilism, socialism, atheism, et al) of intrigue and conspiracy set in various places in Russia in the late 1800s. Not caring too much as to the age of a text frees one to pick and choose.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
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 --
Actually good fiction teaches concepts that are very educational, many of which can't be gleaned from fact-only books. Loyalty, honor, imagination, sacrifice, tolerance, cooperation, totally hetero male affection and bonding, etc. etc. are all taught extensively in JRR's books. These aren't fictional concepts. Good fiction also provides a window into different experiences, say falling in love with someone society prohibits you from being with. Shakespeare don't ya know? Also good speculative fiction can provide a viewpoint and examination of our current day world. What might things be like if...? What might a world based on this or that economic system be like? What might an alien think of the fact that we all wear clothes and get embarrassed when no other life from does this? What does that say about us?
I'm sorry to say it really does sound like good fiction is over your head.
You sure they own it? Perhaps imdb is simply taking advantage of Amazon's partner program. Which means imdb gets some money, amazon gets some money, and people get some videos and lose some money (well, not really loose, lol).
Of course people who do click on the link and purchase might better be served by a few minutes to comparison shop.
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.
CireWhy 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.
(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?
Or go to Bookfinder.com, a meta-search whose list of booksellers includes ABE.
"Slashdot is about legos and staplers." -Cmdr. Taco
One problem with including things like magazines and journals would be that they periodically change format, and they continuously change in the quality of content. A book, on the other hand, is pretty static once it has been published so reviews of it made today will pretty much be accurate for the rest of that books existence. The same cannot be said for magazines; what happens after five or ten years when all different people are writing and editing a magazine? DO you wipe out all the old review, as they are not really relevant any longer? It seems to me that this kind of thing works better for relatively static works like books, movies, albums, etc. I suppose you could rate each issue of a magazine, but that would get really ridiculous really fast.
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