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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.
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
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?
> 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"
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...
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
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.
Amazon edits the reviews in ways that some might object to.
Amazon limits reviews to 1000 words. 1000 words isn't really that much for some reviews.
Amazon lets people review books that they clearly haven't read (because they aren't even available yet).
And maybe you aren't entirely comfortable with the fact that when you submit a review to Amazon "you grant Amazon.com and its affiliates a nonexclusive, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, and fully sublicensable right to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from, distribute, and display such content throughout the world in any media."
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
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...
"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?
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!
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.
Amazon doesn't even come close to having everything. If you want everything go to the Advanced Book Exchange online. Thousands of independent booksellers all over the world. That's everything my friend.
"Teachers leave us kids alone
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.
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 --
You do realize that IMDB.com is run by Amazon, don't you?
Everybody dies frustrated and sad and that is beautiful
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.
THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal...
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.
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http://www.lawrenceperson.com/