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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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!
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.
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...
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).
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.
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:
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.
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
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
"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.
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?
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.
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
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!
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.
Check out "The Assayer" for online book information.
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!
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.
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.
try http://catalog.loc.gov
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 --
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.
Cire(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?
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."
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/
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/
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.
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.
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
Yes that list was a problem but I saw your email and you were not exactly polite about being removed. This has all been fixed an now there are forums instead. This is a brand new site and you should cut them some slack!
"It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists." -Ludwig Wittgenstein
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.