Slashdot Mirror
Comparison of Internet Book Databases?
An anonymous reader asks: "There have been several attempts at creating a book database like the IMDB. I list several [in the full article] and I would like to know which you like best, and which you use most often. What are the features you find the most useful out of the book databases you use?"
"Here is a list of free Internet book databases:
IBDOF - The Internet Book Database of Fiction
IBList - The Internet Book List
Parchayi.net - Parchayi.net Book Database
SciFan - SciFan
FantasticFiction.co.uk - Fantastic Fiction
And I know of only one commercial one, the FictionDB, which is the largest among all the ones that have been listed.
Does anyone know of any others?"
IBDOF - The Internet Book Database of Fiction
IBList - The Internet Book List
Parchayi.net - Parchayi.net Book Database
SciFan - SciFan
FantasticFiction.co.uk - Fantastic Fiction
And I know of only one commercial one, the FictionDB, which is the largest among all the ones that have been listed.
Does anyone know of any others?"
How about Amazon? They have many many books, including old/out of print- at least listed.
I use a couple not listed...
bn.com and amazon.com
I'd have to say that Amazon.com probably has the largest online book database in the world, with perhaps the exception of loc.gov.
The most useful feature of the Amazon database is the user reviews. I usually check out the reviews on Amazon before I buy a book. Many of the reviewers are quite good, and trolls are usually easy to spot. I don't think it would be easy to replicate what Amazon has to offer. Yes, it's a commercial database, and you can't add titles to it, but those things don't really bother me, given that I have been able to get information on any book I have ever wanted on Amazon.
It would take one heck of a free book database project to beat it.
Working in a bookstore allows me access to book supplier databases such as iPage. While they may not have the scope of the publicly listed databases, they do include books they haven't been published yet.
We have 1133 registered users and We have 3334 registered users
Come again?
ISBNDB make all their data available through a web service as well. That's a killer feature as far as I'm concerned.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
This was sort of asked a while back. Check out http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/22/13 20207
You should also point out that Amazon.com has a Web Services API that (3 years ago when I used it) allows you to run queries and pull information down in nice XML packages. You can even search their international sites.
Personally, I have been using Reader, but mainly because it allows me to easily keep track of what books I've read or am currently reading. I don't think as a database it's as exhaustive as some of the other solutions. But, as others have pointed out, there's Amazon for that.
Hmm that should be Reader2 of course, apparently slashdot doesn't like uppercase characters.
http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/ - Listing over 25,000 free books on the Web
For dead tree books, you can search the LoC online catalog: http://catalog.loc.gov/
Worldcat. http://www.oclc.org/worldcat/default.htm/ . 65 million items. No more and no less than a unified catalog of mayor libraries, in the US and beyond, unified on the basis of sharing open-format records (MARC), that obey clear standards of bibliographic description and classification, developed and proven thru many decades. AARC2, LCSH, etc. Where cataloguers have gone thru the pain of researching who is who, what is what and where is where. And not just books, but serial publications, maps, sound recordings, pictures, computer files, and those weird things called realia. I love library catalogs and the cataloguers that make them. (Library reference zombies, and Library managers, that is another story).
http://www.isfdb.org/ Apart from the very handy website, there is a nice MySQL database dump that is very easy to grab and use yourself. It helped me find some old novels that had read that I couldn't remember the name of, but knew when they were published. A few queries, and there you go.
Not Free SF Reader
http://www.oclcpica.org/
http://books.google.com/
http://www.librarything.com/
http://www.theeuropeanlibrary.org/
Were you looking for something specific?
From LT's FAQ:
"LibraryThing uses Amazon and libraries that provide open access to their collections with the Z39.50 protocol. The protocol is used by a variety of desktop programs, notably bibliographic software like EndNote. LibraryThing appears to be the first mainstream web use."
Amazon pretty much has every book which has ever contained an ISBN number in their database. Via the Amazon API it pretty much becomes the IMDB of books. Combine it with http://www.listal.com/ and you can really start to kick ass.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
Don't forget that there are not just libraries of book metadata online, there are libraries of complete books:
While these libraries are by no means as extensive as something like Amazon, it's nice having the full text of the books themselves.
Of the ones you mention I've used FantasticFiction more than once, perhaps because it came up first on the Google search.
There's the CBDB for comic books.
And The Locus Index for science fiction and fantasy works, featuring short stories (which is no small task).
Alex.
The Library of Congress online catalog has more breadth than most of those, and it's not full of fancruft.
I'm a big fan of Amazon.com when looking for book information, but I'd also like to point out that public libraries often pay for access to book databases for their patrons, many of which can be accessed from home.
My library subscribes to Novelist and Novelist K-8, which can be awesome when looking for fiction.
Many libraries also pay for patron access to the Books in Print database.
Finally, if you're determined enough, you can find some interesting things in WorldCat, the union catalog of OCLC libraries. This is now searchable from Google and other places.
LibraryThing is pretty cool. It's a member-built database, but it links back to Amazon to get a lot of the details.
Software sucks. Open Source sucks less.
Theassayer.org is sort of orthogonal to the ones you've listed: it only lists free books.
Slashdot is great, as long as the $x fanboys don't catch you saying anything negative about $x.
http://www.bl.uk/
Always found it very good
Brocklesby Park Cricket Club
The last time the old promo.net site was updated was in May of 2003.
The current home of Project Gutenberg is http://www.gutenberg.org/
LibraryThing is trying to do something similar to what you describe with its "work" system. Basically all different publications of a particular title are linked to one "work", which allows for recommendations and reviews to be shared among different owners of the same title (even if they own copies by different publishers, dates, etc.). The database is pretty small so far (only a few million books) but it's a pretty nifty concept and should only be more useful as more people add their books.
... and it's been around for the last 30 years or so. And it has something like 60 million records, created by professional librarians. Done already.
I am the creator of the parchayi.net book database. Several new features have been added to Parchayi.net, especially in the bookshelf section - http://www.parchayi.net/bookhelf and I have managed to obtain several large book meta data databases which I'm currently in process of importing.
I do take suggestions - email them to contact@ibookdb.net
I'll give a free pro Datalogic USB barcode scanner (I've a few spare ones I acquired ages ago and haven't used) to anyone who can come up with a simple Windows application that reads barcodes, submits them to http://isbndb.com/account/dev/api/20-structure.htm l, and builds a simple text file with all my books in there. I've got hundreds of books to take to the Charity shop, and I'd like to itemise them all - and I can't code for toffee.
Can anyone help me out?
http://www.eblong.com/zarf/bookscan/#quick suggests it's trivial via Perl for those that can use it... barcode AT infobubble DOT co DOT uk if they can...!
The link you provided was dead for me though, although this worked:
http://www.oclc.org/worldcat/
The whole thing looks rather suspiciously proprietary; in order to get access and be able to search directly, you have to pay -- or be a member of a library that does. Basically what they're doing is getting libraries to contribute their electronic catalogs to the database, and then selling access to the resulting data -- BACK to the libraries that contributed! Not a bad business model, all they have do do is maintain the hardware and database, and watch the information and cash flow in. With every contribution, what they have becomes more valuable.
From http://www.oclc.org/worldcatsets/about/cooperative
Putting data IN to their system, that's free (naturally); getting anything useful out doesn't seem to be quite so easy, or cheap.
At least not directly. It seems that they have partnered with some web sites in a program called Open WorldCat to share their content, including with Google Scholar and Google Books, but there's apparently no direct public access. The closest I could get was by searching Google Scholar for a term, looking for the [BOOK] results, then clicking on the "Library Search" link, which took me to an Open WorldCat page.
The link to the Open WorldCat page doesn't use a human-readable link, either; it looks like a hash of some sort. For example, the Library link from the Google result for P.L. George's "Automatic mesh generation: application to finite element methods" is this:
http://www.worldcatlibraries.org/wcpa/ow/f9f4fc530 c1c64e2a19afeb4da09e526.html
Maybe someone can figure out what hash they're using and provide a way to search them directly; just in case anyone was wondering, doing a Google search for "mesh generation" site:worldcatlibraries.org doesn't return anything.
I like their concept in terms of unifying all the library records, but I really am uncomfortable and frankly put off by their obvious and shameless attempts to monetize what ought to be a public resource. I'm glad it's at least searchable through Google, but their web site makes it clear that they'd much prefer you pony up some great and unspoken (of course there's no price listed, so we can only guess) wad of cash to get at their database.
I suppose that their partnership with the likes of Google and Amazon is a step above totally proprietary databases that are 100% pay-to-play, but I still find the concept of any database that's build up almost entirely from contributions by tax-supported Public Libraries doesn't have a globally accessible direct interface to let people search it. Plus, it's not clear that the information that you can search via Google is even their whole catalog: "Open WorldCat returns only the holdings of OCLC member libraries that subscribe to the WorldCat database on FirstSearch." Assumedly, the database that you pay for is more complete, a
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
It's unfortunate you don't use Linux, because then you'd have access to the excellent Alexandria application, which I think covers everything you'd want to do (and more, probably). It's designed to quickly catalog an entire personal library of books, download information on them, and store that information in a database. I assume one could export information out to a flat text file if you wanted to from there. It supports a variety of barcode scanners (including the CueCat, it's good for something at last!).
I don't know whether it interconnects with isbndb.com in partiuclar, but it does use Amazon, Proxis, Barnes and Noble, the Spanish Ministry of Culture, Amadeus Buch, Internet Bookshop Italia, the US Library of Congress and the British Library; it can also use any other Z39.50 source.
If you really can't boot into Linux for a weekend to do it, perhaps you could use cygwin or something.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
rRhino.com is a similar idea to this, and lets people maintain reading lists of their books, and discover new ones.